Algorand has big plans on privacy, speed and 'co-chains', founder Silvio Micali says

Algorand has an ambitious series of upgrades planned, including for privacy, founder Silvio Micali has told Australian Blockchain Week.

“We are assembling a great team and we already have some plans” on privacy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor told about 150 audience members gathered at a co-working space in Sydney’s Central Station on Tuesday morning, plus more watching remotely.

“We want a layer of privacy and it’s going to be first-class … that’s why we’ve developed it together with regulators,” he said, without giving details.

“On the one side, you want to have complete privacy; on the other side, you want to have an ironclad guarantee that nothing wrong is going to happen under the curtain of privacy.”

Micali said he was a “big believer in privacy”, adding that privacy was one reason Algorand was so fast.

Co-chains and bridges

Algorand is also working on permissioned co-chains, so developers can build ecosystems independent of the main Algo blockchain. Among other things they could be used for is central bank digital currencies.

A trustless decentralised bridge between blockchains is also forthcoming, Micali said.

“I really think the future is not going to be one chain that wins them all, but it’s going to a dozen, 20 — maybe we don’t need thousands — but a fair number of chains, because each of us is good or better than others at certain things.

“And so we are going to have multiple chains, and Algorand is going to be one of them.”

Lastly, Algorand is working to improve its performance, “which is already great”, Micali said. The first upgrade will speed up the network by a factor of 10 and the second will improve it even more.

“The reason we want to do this is, we see our blockchain, which is almost designed to be a transaction blockchain, is going to be adopted more and more. So we want to be able to handle not only the traffic of today, but the traffic of tomorrow, and later, all the days following tomorrow.”

‘A fantastic gift’

Micali concluded by telling the audience that the rise of high-performance blockchains will help Australia — “such a beautiful country… but geographically so far away” — connect more deeply with the rest of the world, linking it by transactions that take only 4.4 seconds.

“I really think the base of ability to have a common truth, is really a first … and the ability not only to communicate, but to know that what you hear is the same thing that everybody else hears, is common knowledge, really is a fantastic gift.

“And the ability of transacting with security with people you barely know and maybe have never met in person, is really a powerful, powerful incentive to interact more.”

Micali said blockchain was a triumph “in some sense” of the human spirit and human technology.

“We humans became more human when we formed our first tool, and our tools are going to make more humans and put them in charge of safe and frequent interactions.

“I think that’s what the world needs right now.”

ALGO tokens were trading on Tuesday at US80.7c, up 8.6 per cent from yesterday and up 15.4 per cent in the past week. It’s the No. 29 crypto on Coinmarketcap with a capitalisation of US$5.3 billion.

Australian Blockchain Week can be watched remotely here.