The Algorand Foundation has announced a new grants program worth $50 million.
A decentralized finance-focused blockchain platform, Algorand has earmarked a total of 250 million ALGO tokens for the multi-year initiative, designed “to provide funding to projects building apps to support infrastructure, end-user application, and research innovation on its blockchain.”
In addition, on April 14 the Algorand Foundation also announced a new developers portal, featuring tutorials, articles, and use-case solutions featuring code samples and explanations.
Three beneficiaries of the fund have already been announced, who will share six million ALGO (about $1.2 million) between them.
Multi-blockchain infrastructure provider Bloq delivers Algorand nodes and APIs, while PureStake is an open-source browser plug-in allowing developers to add the capacity for Algorand transactions into their applications. Lastly, the development platform Reach is “designed to remove the complexity of building DApps on the Algorand blockchain and to enable the future creation of DAOs, decentralized exchanges and many other DeFi applications on Algorand.”
The criteria
Projects that are selected to receive a grant are chosen based on the positive impact they could have on the Algorand community and on the ecosystem. Other factors include the quality of the application, the technical or academic strength of the proposal, and the concept’s opportunity for growth going forward.
Bloq, PureStake, and Reach are going to undergo an evaluation after receiving the funding. The Algorand Foundation says it plans to introduce an open grant program in the not-too-distant future—enabling the broader community to vote on which projects should receive grants.
“The grant program from the Algorand Foundation is one of the most focused programs out there, and we believe it will be instrumental in accelerating the adoption of Algorand’s platform,” Reach founder Chris Swenor said.
PureStake CEO Derek Yoo added that “easy and pragmatic developer tools are critical to further expanding the accessibility of the Algorand network.”
Cool tool
The Algorand blockchain is the brainchild of Silvio Micali, a Turing-award winning cryptographer and MIT professor who is also one of the minds behind zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptography method gaining a following in privacy-focused cryptocurrency circles. He is No. 81 on the Modern Consensus 100 most influential people in crypto 2020 list.
As reported by Modern Consensus, Algorand recently won plaudits for its energy-efficient blockchain protocol.
In January, French start-up PlanetWatch chose the firm as a partner to put global air quality test results on the blockchain.
Algorand was chosen because of how its platform requires “minimal processing power” to achieve consensus—a serious issue considering that some studies indicate that Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as Switzerland.
