October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 33 and 34, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the xGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property in
the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
2
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
3
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
4
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
5
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
6
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 33 and 34, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the xGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property in
the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
7
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
8
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
9
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property in
the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
10
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
11
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
12
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
13
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property in
the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
1,250,000,000
1,000,000,000
750,000,000
500,000,000
250,000,000
May 2022 Jul 2022 Sep 2022 Nov 2022 Jan 2023 Mar 2023
0
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Folks Finance 28.7%
Pact 5.4%
Tinyman 4.9%
GARD 2.4%
Humble 1.9%
Algofi 55.4%
TVL Breakdown by Projects as at March 31, 2023
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
14
TVL in USD TVL in Algo
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property in
the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Sep 30, 2022 Dec 31, 2022 Mar 31, 2023
32.00
30.00
28.00
26.00
10,000,000
7,500,000
5,000,000
2,500,000
May 2022 Jul 2022 Sep 2022 Nov 2022 Jan 2023
Mar 2023
0
NFT Sales in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
Sales in USD Sales in Algo
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
15
Notable Activities
& Achievements
In this section, we highlight some notable events and achievements across
the Foundation over the last six-month period.
AlgoKit
The most important development during this period was the launch
of the Algorand developer toolkit, AlgoKit. It was a collaborative effort among
the Foundation, MakerX, and Algorand Inc., and represents an important
milestone on our path toward making Algorand the most developer-friendly
blockchain.
The launch was supported by new developer educational content in the form
of short videos available via a freshly designed YouTube channel. It was also
supported by the Foundation’s first holistic performance marketing campaign.
- Between March 30, 2023 and April 30, 2023 we drove over 76K clicks
to the AlgoKit download page;
- Best performing channels to date are Google Search, YouTube,
and Facebook.
Access
Access is focused on enabling value to flow into the Algorand ecosystem
through key integrations with exchanges, wallets, and fiat on-ramp partners.
The focus for the past six months has been on the enablement of major
stablecoins (USDC and USDT) on Algorand, as well as closing geographic gaps.
Following the integration of Exodus wallet in Q3 2022, a platform with over
700,000 monthly active users, notable wins during the period include:
- Binance International completing the integration of USDCa, thereby allowing
millions of Binance customers to deposit or withdraw USDC directly onto
the Algorand network;
- Completion of Onramp.money access, which supports our India strategy
by providing a route for purchasing and selling Algo directly, using India’s
real-time payment network, ‘UPI’.
Investments, Grants & Loans
The Foundation’s AlgoGrants program was wound down and closed
at the end of 2022 and the focus since then has been on the strategic relaunch
of Foundation-managed funding via Algorand Ventures.
Algorand Ventures now works alongside all the core verticals to make direct
investments into leading projects, works with accelerator partners to fund very
early stage projects, and co-invests alongside VC funds with a specific mandate
to focus on the continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
Highlights from the last six months of investments include:
- Completed investments into 17 early-stage projects for a total amount
of 350,000 USD via the Algorand Accelerate and AXL Ventures programs;
- Approved direct investments into five projects for a combined allocation
of 500,000 USD and approximately 13M Algo: Lofty, Planetwatch, Paima
Studios, Rand Labs, and PactFi;
- Invested 37.5M Algo into an externally-managed VC fund overseen
by Borderless Capital to ensure continued backing of Algorand projects
for the next three to five years
Information on grants and investments through December 31, 2022,
will be included in the upcoming annual report by Algorand Ventures.
No loans were made during this period. Loans that came to maturity
in this period included:
- Two loans to Algorand Inc. totalling 125M Algo, which were paid in full;
- The 11.5M Algo repayment of a 50M Algo loan to Astronaut. Full repayment
is expected in Q2 2023.
Foundation Holdings
& Reconciliation
This Transparency Report covers the period October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.
At the end of the reporting period, the Foundation had a balance of 2,791M
Algo. This can be verified on-chain via our published addresses on the Algorand
Foundation website.
The breakdown that follows provides an explanation of both Algo and USD
spending during the period, organized by the major categories of Foundation
responsibilities and broken down into three areas:
- Spending allocated towards incentives, historically used to reward
governance participation and increasingly redirected by the community
in more targeted ways;
- Direct spending on the development of the ecosystem via grants, equity
/ token investments, loans, investments in third-party funds, etc.; and
- Funds used by the Foundation in its mission to develop and support
the Algorand ecosystem.
Spend Allocated by the Community
During this period - Q3 2022 (Governance Period 4) and Q4 2022 (Governance
Period 5) - 141M Algo were allocated to general governance rewards by the
community. Governance rewards are distributed following the end of each
governance period and the associated rewards expense is recognized similarly
(e.g. rewards for Governance Period 5, which closed Dec 31, 2022, are
recognized as Q1 2023 expenses). Governance Period 6 ended March 31, 2023,
and therefore rewards related to it will be included in the upcoming
Transparency Report covering Q2 2023.
This year, the Foundation established a Governance Advisory Committee whose
mandate is to put forward a number of measures, first for community comment
and improvement (most importantly through the governance forum), and then
to vote by the community of governors.
During this period, governors voted to allocate rewards on a more targeted
and impactful basis, namely towards incentivizing DeFi participation
and supporting creators. In addition, measures were brought forward
and passed to allow DeFi users (i.e. LP token holders) to participate in voting
and governance rewards.
Going forward, in line with our mandate, the community will play an increasingly
direct role in resource allocation. Toward this end, we have continued to build
the technical framework for the xGov program via ARCs 34 and 35, which will
be an important mechanism for community participation. Initial pilot funding
for this program of 2M Algo for community grants was approved by community
vote in Q4 2022 and the first iteration of the xGov program is expected
to be deployed in Q3 2023.
For a complete analysis of Governance Periods 4 and 5, please see the reports
linked below:
Algorand Community Governance Period 4 Review
Algorand Community Governance Period 5 Review
Moreover, the demarcation of Foundation expenditures on behalf
of the community vs. on pure operations was not well delineated, either
in practice or in terms of reporting. For this report, we did a thorough exercise
of labeling the past six months of expenditures, to properly categorize their
purpose, rather than just their broad cost center (and I have now put in place
the proper schema to do this in real time, at the expenditure level, going forward).
Last, these past practices have led to an unnecessary array and proliferation
of wallets, sometimes clear in their usage/purpose (e.g. the structured-selling
wallets set up in Jan 2023), and sometimes not, leading to community confusion
and consternation. As our next finance department project, we will undertake
an exercise of proper wallet hygiene and consolidation. Algorand Ventures will
also shortly publish its first Annual Report, disclosing all grants given to projects
from inception through to December 31, 2022.
This reformatted Transparency Report should give the community a much
cleaner view of Foundation activities now and going forward, with:
- Wider Scope: All Foundation investments are now captured and disclosed
in the reporting, not just the Algo held in public wallets;
- Consistent Format: There is now a consistent baseline format that will allow
period-by-period comparison;
- Increased Frequency: This inaugural report covers the last six months
(October 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023), but will be published quarterly from here;
- Disclosure of Algo sales: In addition to routing structured sales through
public wallets, aggregate volumes are now explicitly disclosed;
- Loans and Loan Repayments: Deployments and returns, including loans
and loan repayments, are now disclosed;
- Key Activity Indicators: Commentary on notable activities, as well
as an appendix of key activity indicators, have been included.
This is a work-in-progress and I look forward to continued dialogue with
our community on improvement of these reports, as well as on other financial
matters. Please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
with any feedback.
Message
from the CFO
I joined the Foundation in October 2022, starting my career
at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then worked for the past 10+ years
in traditional finance, particularly in the asset-management sector.
My objectives as the first incoming CFO of the Algorand Foundation
are to enhance our financial oversight and governance, to ensure that
we have the treasury to execute on our planned strategies, and to support
the ecosystem.
I am pleased to report that, starting with this edition, the Foundation’s
Transparency Reports will now be coordinated by and produced
out of my office, rather than the Office of the Chief Economist, as was done
before I arrived. As such, they will now cover the financial operations
of the Foundation as a whole, and give much greater line-by-line insight into
our resource allocation over the applicable time period. Importantly,
the new format will be “whole Foundation” and actual expenditure-based, rather
than a mix of backward and forward looking “bucketed allocations,” in order
to give a more accurate understanding of actual resources deployed.
Throughout its history, the Foundation presented estimates of “long-term Algo
dynamics” that overlapped, inconsistently, with its semi-annual transparency
reporting. It also put forward a series of estimated expenditure “buckets”, which
too evolved over time – at times broad-based (one large category of 3BN Algo
for ecosystem support in the beginning) to overly prescriptive up to 18 months
ago (e.g. 200M Algo for education and impact, and 400M for investments, with
multiple additional categories). The nature of community rewards has also
changed over time, from participation-based to governance-based, with
– beginning in January 2022 – governors voting on the level of rewards
per quarter. The Foundation has not paid rewards for participating
in consensus, but that has been an additional subject of discussion.
As per our mandate, however, all funds are devoted to the community
and are spent on behalf of the community, so this forward-looking
estimation-based categorization method has not really served a practical
purpose, either for the Foundation or for the community. That is, these
categories have not served either as hard-coded budget commitments, nor have
they served as transparent expenditure windows. Going forward, Transparency
Reports will give much-needed visibility into how the Foundation has spent
money. Discussions around future budgeting will increasingly fall
to our governance and vertical advisory committees, in particular through
the XGovs process, in line with our evolution towards decentralization.
Balance Sheet Holdings (‘000)
Reconciliation (‘000)
*Investments in Algo are translated using the spot price at the time of the transaction. All balances are shown at cost.
Structured Selling
Through third-party market makers, the Foundation conducts structured selling
on a rules-based approach. During this period, the Foundation sold
approximately 101M Algo.
The Foundation conducts all structured selling out of dedicated publicly
disclosed wallets, and abides by the following guidelines in our structured
selling program:
Daily sales are limited to the lesser of two constraints:
- A fixed daily amount, based on projected medium-term volumes;
- A small percentage of estimated total market volume on a given day.
Sales are automatically halted if:
- There is a 10% price drop within 24hrs;
- The price goes below a fixed threshold.
Sales can be halted by the Foundation at any time, at its discretion.
The dedicated wallets assigned by the Foundation for the program are:
37VPAD3CK7CDHRE4U3J75IE4HLFN5ZWVKJ52YFNBX753NNDN6PUP2N7YKI
44GWRTQGSAYUJJCQ3GFINYKZXMBDVKCF75VMCXKORN7ZJ6BKPNG2RMGH7E
There may be occasions where there are commercial or confidentiality reasons
not to disclose ad hoc negotiated OTC sales in real time. In these cases,
the Foundation would use alternate wallets and disclose on a delayed basis.
There have been no such sales during this period and all sales have been
publicly disclosed as per above.
Ecosystem Support & Communities
The top ecosystem priority for this period was to provide support for existing
projects in our ecosystem. We focused efforts on keeping critical projects
in our ecosystem, helping our projects find traction, and reducing hurdles
for new projects to launch.
We supported the development of key infrastructure projects for builders
in the ecosystem to leverage, including:
- Unity SDK for Gaming
- An on-chain voting tool, which is now being implemented for DAOs
and governance
- NFT mass-minting tool
- MetaMask Snaps integration
We also piloted small activations with Games to drive acquisition and support
user engagement. We saw some early success with an uptick in users and
engagement and will continue to explore how to expand into other verticals.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee. Our committee structure will continue to improve and expand.
Our regional Twitter and Telegram channels in EMEA grew 37% in Q1 2023
compared to Q4 2022, and our APAC channels grew more than 15% over
the same period. In the Americas, we launched two new channels:
a Spanish-language Telegram group and an Instagram page in Brazil.
Our community across all regional social channels is now 30K+ members strong.
To build more channels of communication we have launched vertical-specific
councils: a Gaming Council, NFT Council, DeFi Council, Governance Advisory
Committee, and will continue to grow and expand.
Impact & Inclusion
The primary focus of the Impact and Inclusion vertical in the past six months
has been on key areas where there is already good traction, specifically disaster
relief, and direct payments. In disaster relief, partnerships were solidified with
leading organizations in the sector: the Disaster Services Corporation of Saint
Vincent de Paul and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster
(NVOAD).
During this time, we worked with these partners to produce high-quality content
and launched two important pilots using the Kare Survivor Wallet in Tennessee
and Florida – designed and built by AID:Tech. The Foundation has been working
closely with NVOAD to provide the support and technical resources needed
to roll out and scale this initiative.
India
In Q1 2023, we launched AlgoBharat, our strategic initiative for India with
a mission to onboard and train developers for the Algorand platform, partner
with established institutions, and incubate companies that foster the growth
of the Algorand startup ecosystem:
- In March, we ran our first Algo Hack House, a 3-day event in Hyderabad
attracting over 400 attendees and 45+ teams pitching solutions in our pitch
competition;
- We announced key partnerships with the State of Telangana and T-Hub,
and joined as the technical partner with Self-Employed Women's Association
(SEWA) for Climate Resilience Fund;
- We partnered with the Confederation of Indian Industry to run their first
Blockchain Master Class Series, focusing on supply chain transformation;
- We announced our Faculty Development Programs with two large
universities in India that will take place in June, and ran “Intro to Blockchain”
seminars at fourteen universities across the country.
Marketing
The top marketing priorities for this period included: driving developer
acquisition for Algorand, embarking upon a holistic brand refresh, driving
awareness for ecosystem projects and Algorand technology, and streamlining
internal processes to optimize efficiency. These processes are ongoing.
As we build the marketing team and supporting processes (with several senior
hires in Q1 this year), our social media interactions have increased by 15%,
and content shares have increased by 29%, compared to the previous period.
Marketing also supported Algorand ecosystem projects in a variety of ways
during the period, from social amplifications and event sponsorships to content,
communications support, and paid advertising. Some examples include:
- Supporting ecosystem projects’ PR announcements, including TravelX’s
partnership with Flybondi; FlexID’s partnership with Sri Lanka’s National
Savings Bank; the launch of Ctrl Alt’s first tokenized real estate property
in the UK; the launch of the Algorand SDK for Unity; and more
- Supporting launches from Quantum Temple, EXA Market, and others with
targeted social amplifications.
During this period, marketing also undertook a comprehensive assessment
of marketing partnerships and terminated or significantly refocused most
of them. Notably, we terminated the sponsorship contract with SailGP,
and reduced our partnership with ClimateRide by approximately 80%.
One partnership to note during the period was with Metaboundless, a web3
platform that connects creators and their fans, developed by XTZ Esports Tech
Ltd, which we undertook to amplify awareness for Algorand in the MENA region
leading up to Decipher. The launch featured a “Concert of the Future” metaverse
experience with three of the region’s biggest musical superstars (Saad
Lamjarred, Ragheb Alama, and Michel Fadel) who also promoted it to their
18.7M collective Instagram followers. The promotional effort garnered over
27M media impressions and more than 20M people in social reach.
Events
The communities teams hosted 40+ community events globally (via meetups
and online) during the period and drew in over 6K attendees in total.
Notable large events for the period included:
Decipher
- 2,566 attendees registered for the event, including more than 100 active
Algorand developers;
- The conference garnered 525M media impressions, including coverage
on Blockworks, Entrepreneur ME, Cointelegraph, Computer News Middle
East, BeInCrypto, and more;
- The conference was rated 4-5 stars by over 90% of attendees, as reported
in the post-event survey.
EthDenver
- While we did not have the same presence at EthDenver as we did in 2022,
we took over high visibility billboards on the road to the airport.
This garnered 1.7M+ impressions.
- Our Twitter awareness campaign garnered 1.1M+ impressions,
and our campaign to drive developer traffic to Discord garnered 1.3M+
impressions, 14K+ engagements, and 2K+ clicks;
- We partnered with Encode on the Pit Hacker House, which attracted over
200 people.
Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS)
- The second annual “A Night in Paris with Algorand” cocktail party gathered
the Algorand community to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Silvio
Micali’s Turing Award and highlight the Algorand ecosystem. Registered
attendees numbered over 1.6K. The communities team also hosted a side
event with 400+ attendees;
- We also supported other ecosystem projects during PBWS with
amplifications on social media; for example, our efforts promoting Quantum
Temple’s “Paths to Algo” launch generated 150K+ impressions.
Relay Nodes
The Foundation executed a deep analysis of the network’s relay nodes
and terminated or renegotiated the commercial terms of contracts for 100+
relay nodes. This will create savings of more than 35% which will feed into
the P&L as existing agreements come to an end.
Appendix:
Key Activity Indicators
TVL in Algo & USD for the Past 12 Months
No. of Open Wallets (Millions)
Disclaimers
The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should
not be construed as financial, legal, or investment advice. It is the responsibility
of any person who accesses the information herein to observe all applicable laws
and regulations of their relevant jurisdiction. By proceeding to obtain
the information, you are representing and warranting that all the applicable laws
and regulations of your jurisdiction allow you to access such information.
Algorand Foundation and our affiliates make no representations or warranties
of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability
of the information contained herein. Algorand Foundation and our affiliates assume
no liability for any losses or damages that may result from reliance
on the information contained in this report.
This report may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks
and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those
expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this report
represent the judgment of Algorand Foundation and our affiliates as of the date
of the report. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise
any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or future events.
You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained
in this report.
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