Algorand Foundation Ecosystem Development: Progress Report
Period: January 1st - September 30th, 2020
The Foundation is focused on the growth of a vibrant, decentralized ecosystem where token holders participate in consensus and in the development of use cases and applications. The following will provide a year-to-date progress across the Foundation’s programs and initiatives as it relates to ecosystem development. 67.5M Algos have been allocated towards these efforts between Jan and Sept of 2020.
1. Core Protocol Research and Development
In 2020, the Foundation continues to work closely with Algorand Inc. to advance capabilities of the Algorand platform. The first 9 months of 2020 was focused around enabling partners to build via custom transactions and contracts along with complementary improvements on performance, infrastructure and development experience. This includes Stateful Smart Contracts, SDK development, Indexer / API v2, Rekeying and Fast catchup, as well as product marketing and support for projects developing on the platform.
Other areas in collaboration with Algorand Inc. include liquidity provisions and economic research, focusing on Algo dynamics and Algorand Standard Assets (ASA) adoption at exchanges that support the Algo; event hosting and thought leadership, where the team conducted over 50 events (in person, virtual, private, public); legal guidance in areas of securities law, trademark law and Intellectual Property; and solutions / partnership focusing on finding, educating, and enabling businesses to successfully leverage Algorand’s blockchain and ecosystem.
Total: 30.0M Algos
2. Ecosystem Development Support
The Foundation is committed to making the Algorand platform an attractive place to build and create value for the community. We facilitate, enable and support developers and partners to bring exciting, independent value to the Algorand ecosystem, be it cutting edge technical and economic research, infrastructure building, innovative applications or use cases. There are 3 primary channels for ecosystem support:
AlgoGrant and Partnership
The multi-year AlgoGrant program offers various funding level opportunities across application development, tools & infrastructure, research, and education & community. Since launching in April 2020, close to 40 grants have been awarded, and the pipeline for new proposals remains very strong. Additionally, the Foundation has formed strategic partnerships to widen access to Algorand network and enable mainstream adoptions. Notable grant projects and partnerships include Circle USDC, PlanetWatch, Chainalysis, China BSN and Prysm Group. See the full list of awardees here.
Development Awards and upcoming Bounty Program
The Development Awards Program is designed to support working tools and applications built on Algorand. Development areas include applications, utilities, monitoring, tooling, deployment and libraries, where the applications are judged on creativity, utility and code conciseness. 15 awards have been given thus far in 2020, with notable achievements including FlexFinTx and Goalseeker.
The Foundation is also in the process of piloting a Grow Algorand Bounty Program, where applicants can complete available development tasks and create content that will benefit the broader developer community.
Accelerator Programs
The Asia focused accelerator program was launched in June 2020 to incubate early stage startups to build on the Algorand platform. The 12-week program looks to guide startups on strategy formulation, execution and marketing. The Foundation and its partners LongHash Ventures and Borderless Capital are in the final stages of selecting 10 projects (out of a 150+ applications) for program participation. The Foundation is also in the process of launching a similar program in Europe in partnership with Eterna Capital and Borderless Capital.
Total: 30.3M Algos
3. Community Engagement and Adoption
One of the Foundation’s core missions is building a vibrant community and increasing participation, and this effort continues to accelerate in the last 6 months. The core of our community program, our Algorand Ambassadors program, has now grown to over 440 Ambassadors in over 63 countries around the world. The Ambassador Rewards program, introduced in January, continues to inspire the creation and sharing of informative, education content on the Algorand protocol ecosystem. This content includes webinars, infographics, meet-ups, in depth education blogs and videos. To date approximately 1M Algo has been distributed to our worldwide Ambassador community through the Rewards program.
A core component of our Community Engagement program is developer engagement and education. Our new developer portal was launched in April 2020 now contains a comprehensive suite of resources, including more than 81 tutorials, 13 solutions and 28 articles. We continue to work with our Development Ambassador community to develop and add new tutorials & solutions to the portal, while organizing workshops to help developers to learn to build on Algorand. Moving forward the Foundation will continue our community outreach efforts, to launch new educational programs with developer communities across geographies and in collaboration with academic and research institutions to further innovation and adoption of the Algorand ecosystem.
In addition to the positive impact of our Ambassadors, the Foundation has also launched an on-going awareness campaign in May, focussed on promoting the Algorand project to a wider audience, using the Twitter social media platform. As a result of this program and the efforts of our Ambassador community, the Algorand ecosystem now has over 100,000 social media followers across a range of social platforms in multiple languages such as English, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
With the continued impact of Covid 19, the Foundation shifted its focus to social media engagement, online education, and in person events where possible. To date, Foundation has held 31 AMAs, 15 community webinars, 6 meetups and participated in 6 major conferences, including Singapore Blockchain Week and the Crypto Asia Summit. All of these activities have been amplified by our Ambassador community and social media followers. This is now enabling the Algorand community to communicate directly with a large and active group that will continue to grow and mature as the Algorand ecosystem grows.
Total: 7.2M Algos
Summary of Ecosystem Investment
The below table summarizes the resources the Foundation has deployed post mainnet launch on June 19th 2019, and during the first 3 quarters of 2020 in support of Algorand Ecosystem building. We are very pleased to see the growing interest and contribution of our community to the network and will continue to enable the organic growth of our ecosystem.
*The Algorand Foundation worked closely with Algorand Inc. during the first 6 months post mainnet launch. Details of this can be found in the Algorand Foundation Transparency Report October 2020. Development efforts occurring before mainnet launch are not included in the above figure.
In Closing,
As the Algorand ecosystem continues to grow, the Foundation is committed to supporting that growth in partnership with the Algorand community. We invite anybody interested in the future development of the Algorand ecosystem, whether that be technical, economic or research focussed, to join our community. Please visit our community website to find out how you can contribute to the development of the Algorand ecosystem. For news and updates on the Algorand ecosystem, please follow us on twitter.