What is the Algorand blockchain, and how does it work?

cointelegraph.com:

Algorand is a blockchain network created in 2017 by Silvio Micali, an MIT professor who won the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. Algorand is a decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol that anyone can use to develop applications and transfer value. The Algorand protocol is powered by a novel consensus algorithm that enables fast, secure and scalable transactions.

Algorand addresses the common issues that most older blockchains have, specifically concerning scalability and consensus. The blockchain uses Pure proof-of-stake (PPoS), a consensus protocol that selects validators at random according to the weight of their stake in ALGO coins.

The Algorand protocol is designed to solve three of the biggest problems most blockchains face: security, scalability and decentralization. Dubbed as the “blockchain trilemma,” the Algorand network claims to address the following three major issues.

The Algorand protocol is secure against malicious attacks, making it ideal for transacting, holding high-value assets and building secure enterprise applications. It maintains security on both network and consensus protocol levels and protects individual users’ accounts.

The Algorand protocol can handle a large number of transactions per second, making it a more scalable solution than Bitcoin or Ethereum. Algorand’s consensus protocol does away with the need for computational power used in Bitcoin to solve cryptographic problems.

Instead, the protocol’s computation cost per user is only used to generate and verify signatures, as well as operations requiring simple counting. According to Algorand, it can “scale to millions of users and sustain a high transaction rate without incurring significant cost to participating users.”

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