Algorand (ALGO) Price

A cryptographer's blockchain

Algorand was founded by Silvio Micali, a professor at MIT who received the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. The mainnet went live in June 2019, and the Algorand Foundation oversees the ecosystem, with a separate company handling much of the core development.

The project's starting point was the so-called blockchain trilemma: the idea that networks struggle to be secure, scalable and decentralised at once. Algorand's answer was a consensus design in which small committees are chosen at random for each round.

Random committees and instant finality

Under Pure Proof of Stake, any ALGO holder can participate. For each block a verifiable random function privately selects proposers and voting committees in proportion to stake, and only reveals who was chosen once they have acted, making it hard to target them in advance. New blocks are produced in under three seconds. Blocks are final as soon as they are added, so the chain does not fork in normal operation.

Total supply is fixed at 10 billion ALGO, all minted at launch and released over time. Smart contracts run on the Algorand Virtual Machine, and the protocol natively supports tokens through Algorand Standard Assets, which many projects have used for stablecoins and tokenised assets. State proofs allow other systems to verify Algorand's history without relying on a trusted intermediary. A 2025 upgrade introduced rewards for nodes that propose blocks, adding a direct incentive to run a validating node.

How ALGO behaves

ALGO is widely listed and mainly quoted against USDT. Its price tends to track the broader altcoin market, with additional moves on news of institutional partnerships, tokenisation projects and changes to staking incentives. Fast finality and low fees are frequently cited by payment and tokenisation projects that choose the network.

Releases of ALGO from foundation-held reserves have historically been a point of attention for holders.

Frequently asked questions