Algorand has launched a multi-million dollar program to foster its blockchain ecosystem

The Algorand Foundation is building a borderless, frictionless economy around its public blockchain. To spur ecosystem growth, the foundation announced the launch of a 250-Million Algo Tokens (ALGO) Grants Program this week. The program has a long term, global focus and will provide funding to projects building apps that support infrastructure, end-user applications, and research innovation on the Algorand blockchain.

There are four categories that grants will be targeted towards, including research, development tools for the Algorand blockchain, use cases for decentralized applications (dApps) built on top of the Algorand blockchain, and education and community initiatives.

The potential use cases include DeFi, payments, asset exchanges, social media integrations, supply chain initiatives, copyright authentication, and asset tokenization.

Fangfang Chen, Head of Operations at the Algorand Foundation stated, “We believe that a public, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain with an open-source approach is fundamental to delivering on the vision of a borderless economy. As part of its vision of enabling a broad and active blockchain development community, the Algorand Foundation is committed to supporting that community as they explore the opportunities for innovation that exist within the Algorand blockchain ecosystem.”

The program will attempt to jumpstart development on the Algorand blockchain by providing funding from a budget of 250 million ALGO (valued at approximately $50 million USD today).

The first three projects to successfully apply and receive grants via the program are:

• Bloq – a multi-blockchain infrastructure provider, delivering Algorand nodes and APIs alongside other major networks.
• PureStake AlgoSigner – an open-source browser plug-in that enables developers to add Algorand transaction capabilities into their applications while allowing users to keep control of their keys.
• Reach – a development platform designed to remove the complexity of building dApps on the Algorand blockchain and to enable the future creation of DAOs, Decentralised Exchanges and many other DeFi Applications on Algorand.

The Algorand Foundation will evaluate the projects itself, to begin with. The Foundation plans to introduce an open grant program, to allow its community to vote on which projects should receive grants.

In support of participants in the grant program, a developer relations portal has been updated with tutorials, solutions, and resources for developers building on Algorand.

A borderless economy

The Algorand Foundation has a vision of a borderless, frictionless economy that supports the next generation of financial products. The Foundation, in partnership with Algorand Inc, has built the Algorand blockchain protocol — which was designed by Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Micali. Micali and his team opted to build Algorand on a proof-of-stake blockchain to ensure the ecosystem has eco-friendly optics.

Algorand has had some early wins in spurring the adoption of digital asset use cases. In December, Algorand announced a project with the International Blockchain Monetary Reserve. They have the ambitious goal of bringing decentralized finance to the unbanked in countries with poor financial infrastructure.

For many, the call to serve the unbanked will sound only too familiar — the ICO boom of 2017 saw dozens of token projects supposedly aiming to offer financial services to the unbanked, few of which are operational today.

As the recent trips of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey to Africa show, interest in serving the unbanked with blockchain-based solutions hasn’t waned. Although regulatory barriers and infrastructural issues make the prospect challenging, the sheer number of unbanked people in developing regions makes them fertile ground for cryptocurrency adoption.

In an example of the kind of exotic token offerings that are possible, the Algorand Foundation helped make the World Chess hybrid IPO possible. World Chess, which holds the broadcasting rights to the World Chess Championship, undertook a hybrid IPO that included a security token offering and a London Stock Exchange listing.

Conducted via Securitize on the Algorand blockchain, the Hybrid IPO utilized a new Algorand feature making it possible to tokenize and issue any type of asset, in this case, stock.

“Issuing and managing compliant digital securities requires innovative technology,” said Shay Finkelstein, CTO at Securitize. “Algorand is delivering that innovation with this new set of features that brings an impressive amount of opportunity to decentralized finance. Algorand’s performance combined with the new 2.0 release of their core protocol shows great potential for compliant, cost-effective securities trading infrastructure and will enable Securitize to provide an efficient version of our compliance layer for our customers.”

Projects interested in receiving funding can apply here: https://algorand.foundation. ALGO can be traded on Binance.