First published 19 June 2020, a year after the chain opened. Expanded in October 2026 so a participation reward is not described as interest the coin pays by sitting still. Algorand is a proof-of-stake ledger designed by Silvio Micali, a cryptographer with a Turing Award. Mainnet and the first public auction were on 19 June 2019. The auction sold 25 million ALGO. The protocol’s ceiling is 10 billion, and all of them were created at launch. What changes is how many are unlocked. A rise in the circulating number is a release of coins that already existed. It is not a mint, and it is not a halving.
Pure proof of stake, in this design, means the chance of being asked to propose or vote on a block follows how much ALGO is online, and the ask is a lottery the network can check. There is no separate miner. There is also no slash of the coins for being offline, which is the sales line. The security claim is the other half of that line: if most of the online money is honest, a minority cannot rewrite the block. Honesty of a majority of the money is an assumption. It is not a receipt.
Online is not the same as holding
An account that wants to help agree on blocks registers a participation key and stays online. That key is not the key that spends the coins. The point of the split is that a broken node does not hand a thief the spending key. You still have to keep the spending key yourself. A website that asks for it in order to “activate rewards” is not the protocol.
Rewards for taking part have been a programme, changed more than once, including stretches with no participation reward at all. A rate in a screenshot is that programme on that day. It is not a property of ALGO the way a block subsidy is a property of Bitcoin. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account is the neighbouring idea. Here the coins are not locked in order to vote. They can still be spent. Spending them is still a transaction you meant.
Fees are paid in ALGO. The protocol’s own description starts them at 0.001 ALGO and sends them to a fee sink, not to a miner. An account also has to keep a small balance to stay open. The wallet shows the current minimum. It is not a fee you chose, and it is not something a site should offer to unlock.
An Algorand address does not start with 0x. Pasting it into an Ethereum withdraw strands the coins. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to buy ALGO or to take part in consensus.
