Algorand (ALGO) - the full guide

1. TL;DR

Algorand is a layer-1 blockchain designed by Silvio Micali, an MIT cryptographer who shared the 2012 Turing Award. The project was founded in 2017, its test network opened in April 2019 and the main network launched in June 2019. The goal was a public ledger that is fast, cheap and does not fork, without the energy cost of mining. ^[49][50][9]

The network's native token is the Algo, ticker ALGO. Exactly 10 billion were created in the genesis block and no more can ever be minted. ALGO pays transaction fees, which start at 0.001 ALGO, satisfies a small minimum balance that keeps the ledger free of empty accounts, and gives its holder a weighted chance to propose and vote on blocks. ^{[11][3][1][4]}

Consensus is Pure Proof of Stake: every online Algo is a lottery ticket in a verifiable random draw that picks block proposers and voting committees for each round. A block that passes the final vote is written once and never rolled back; there is no waiting for confirmations. Independent trackers measured a block time of about 2.8 seconds at the time of writing. ^[4][7][56]

Who runs it changed a lot in 2026. The Algorand Foundation moved from Singapore to Delaware in January, absorbed the protocol development work and intellectual property of Algorand Technologies (the company Micali founded) in March, cut a quarter of its staff, and appointed a new CEO, William Herkelrath, at the end of August. It publishes quarterly transparency reports and still held about 1.04 billion ALGO at the end of June 2026. ^{[25][27][14][28][15]}

Real usage is modest but verifiable: Circle's USDC has been issued on Algorand since late 2020, a Dutch e-money institution issues a regulated euro token (EURD) on it, and the Foundation reported about 522,000 monthly active wallets and 36.8 million transactions in July 2026. Several headline partnerships, including FIFA and the Marshall Islands, ended or never launched. ^{[38][36][54][43][46]}

On regulation, ALGO went from being named a security in the SEC's April 2023 complaint against the Bittrex exchange to being named explicitly as an example of a "digital commodity" in the SEC and CFTC joint interpretive release of March 17, 2026. ^[32][34]

2. Live stats

The figures below update automatically from public market data; everything else on this page was checked at the time of writing.

3. What problem does it try to solve

The founding paper opens with a plain observation: most money already exists only as ledger entries, so the question is who keeps the ledger. Bitcoin showed that strangers can keep a shared ledger without a bank, but it did so with proof-of-work, which burns electricity and settles slowly, and its history can briefly split into competing versions before one wins. The paper's stated aim was a ledger that "requires a negligible amount of computation" and "will not fork with overwhelmingly high probability." ^[9]

Think of a town meeting that has to approve one page of transactions every few seconds. Proof-of-work asks everyone to solve a puzzle, and whoever finishes first writes the page. Algorand instead holds a private lottery weighted by how many coins each resident holds, picks a small committee for that round, lets the committee vote, and moves on. The winners cannot be known in advance, so they cannot be bribed or attacked before they speak. That is the intuition behind the verifiable random function described in chapter 5. ^[4][9]

The second problem Algorand set out to solve is usability for issuers. Many real-world assets need rules: a company share must only be held by verified investors, a stablecoin issuer may be legally required to freeze funds, a loyalty point should not trade on open markets. Algorand built these controls into the base protocol as Algorand Standard Assets, so an issuer gets freeze and clawback powers without writing a smart contract. ^[2]

Why does this matter for an ordinary reader? Because the trade-offs are concrete. A chain that settles in seconds and charges a fraction of a cent is attractive for payments and tokenized funds; a chain where a foundation still holds about a tenth of the supply and historically curated the relay infrastructure raises fair questions about who is really in charge. The rest of this guide checks each claim against primary sources. ^[3][15][52]

4. History, founders, organization and governance

Silvio Micali and the founding

Silvio Micali was born in Palermo in 1954, has taught at MIT since 1983, and shared the 2012 Turing Award with Shafi Goldwasser for foundational work in cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs and probabilistic encryption. He founded Algorand in 2017 on the basis of a 2016 paper written with Jing Chen of Stony Brook University. ^[49][9]

The company, Algorand Inc, was based in Boston. In October 2018 it announced 62 million dollars of equity funding from a group of venture, crypto and financial investors, and appointed Steve Kokinos as CEO and W. Sean Ford as COO. The company later operated under the name Algorand Technologies. ^[48][27]

The 2019 launch and the Dutch auction

The public test network opened in April 2019 and the main network in June 2019. On June 19, 2019 the Algorand Foundation, then based in Singapore, ran a Dutch auction of 25 million ALGO with a starting price of 10 dollars and a reserve of 0.10 dollars. The auction cleared at 2.40 dollars, raising about 60 million dollars. ^[50][47][32]

The auction came with an unusual promise: buyers could return their ALGO to the Foundation one year later at 90 percent of the purchase price. In August 2019 the Foundation offered an early exit at 85 percent, and about 20 million ALGO were returned; a second window in June 2020 saw roughly 5 million more returned at 90 percent. The SEC later cited exactly this refund policy as evidence that buyers were relying on the Foundation's efforts (see chapter 10). ^[47][32]

Two organizations, then one

For most of its history Algorand had two centers. The Algorand Foundation Ltd, incorporated in Singapore, described itself as focused on "protocol governance, token dynamics and supporting grassroots, open-source development." Algorand Inc, later Algorand Technologies, was "focused on layer-1 development of the Algorand Protocol and enabling Enterprise adoption." ^[32]

That structure changed in 2026. On January 14 the Foundation announced a return to the United States with headquarters in Delaware and a new board chaired by Bill Barhydt (Abra), with Alex Holmes (former MoneyGram CEO), Michael Mosier (former acting FinCEN director), Rebecca Rettig (Jito Labs) and CEO Staci Warden. It also created an Ecosystem Advisory Council chaired by Pawel Pierscionek of the node operator Nodely, with representatives from Lofty, Folks Finance and Tinyman. ^[25][26]

On March 19, 2026 the Foundation and Algorand Technologies announced that the company's intellectual property, protocol development and marketing assets would be consolidated at the Foundation, which committed at least 15 million dollars to protocol maintenance. The Q1 2026 transparency report confirms the agreement, notes that several Algorand Technologies staff joined the Foundation, and discloses a 25 percent reduction in the Foundation's team in the same quarter. Bruno Martins was named CTO. ^[27][14]

On August 31, 2026 William Herkelrath, previously at Chainlink and the custody firm Curv, replaced Staci Warden as CEO after her almost five years in the role; Rettig and Mosier left the board and Herkelrath and Alex Fowler joined it. The homepage now identifies the organization as "The Algorand Foundation US, Inc.", a Delaware corporation. ^[28][10]

Who decides on protocol changes

The reference implementation, go-algorand, is open source under the AGPL v3 licence and its copyright line now reads "Algorand Foundation Ltd." Protocol upgrades ship as versioned releases; the 2026 unification press release stresses that proposed protocol improvements still require approval from "the vast majority of consensus participants," because nodes must adopt the new version. ^[19][27]

Community governance has gone through two eras. From late 2021 to early 2025 a paid Governance program let holders lock ALGO, vote on measures and receive quarterly rewards; it distributed 687.5 million ALGO in total (526.8 million as direct governance rewards, the rest to DeFi, NFT and xGov pilot allocations) before the March 2025 wrap-up that followed Governance Period 14. It was replaced by staking rewards for validators (chapter 6), non-incentivized community referendums and an xGov platform that funds grants. ^[18][14]

5. The technology, explained simply

A lottery you cannot cheat

Every account that has registered a participation key is "online." For each round, each online node runs a verifiable random function (VRF) with its own secret key and the round's seed. The VRF returns a random number plus a proof that anyone can check. Because the draw is weighted by stake, the documentation describes each Algo as "its own lottery ticket," and splitting coins across many accounts gains nothing. ^[4]

The round has three steps. In block proposal, the accounts whose VRF output qualifies broadcast a candidate block with their proof. In the soft vote, a freshly drawn committee votes for the proposal with the lowest VRF hash, filtering down to one candidate. In the certify vote, another new committee checks the block for overspending or double-spends and votes to certify it. Once a quorum is reached, every node writes the block and the next round begins. If a quorum is not reached before a timeout, the network enters a recovery mode rather than producing two conflicting blocks. ^[4]

Two design details matter for security. Participation keys are separate from the spending key, so a node can take part in consensus without ever holding the keys that move funds. Each round uses an ephemeral key that is deleted afterwards, which the docs call forward security: even if a node is compromised later, past votes cannot be forged. ^[4]

Finality, speed and fees

Because a certified block is written once, Algorand's documentation describes "instant finality": there is no concept of confirmations or probabilistic finality. The 2017 paper phrased it as a history that "will not fork with overwhelmingly high probability." Independent tracker Chainspect showed a one-hour average block time of 2.77 seconds and a theoretical maximum of about 9,400 transactions per second at the time of writing; the Foundation's homepage claims "10,000+ transactions per second" and "0 downtime in 7 years." Treat the Foundation's figures as marketing claims; the chain's actual throughput in normal use is a small fraction of that ceiling. ^{[7][9][56][10]}

The minimum fee is 1,000 microAlgos, that is 0.001 ALGO, per transaction. Fees depend on transaction size in bytes, not on how complex a smart contract is, and only rise above the minimum when the network is congested. A transaction signed with a post-quantum Falcon-1024 key costs at least 0.003 ALGO. One transaction in an atomic group can pay the fees for the others, which lets an application sponsor its users' fees. ^[3]

Accounts, ASAs and smart contracts

An Algorand address is a 58-character string derived from the public key. Every account must keep at least 100,000 microAlgos (0.1 ALGO), and that minimum rises by 0.1 ALGO for each asset the account holds or created and for each application it opts into. A transaction that would push the balance below the minimum fails. Accounts can also be "rekeyed": the address stays the same while control passes to a new key, a multisignature group or a post-quantum key. ^[1][2][6]

Algorand Standard Assets (ASAs) are tokens defined at the protocol level. An issuer can set four optional control addresses: a manager that can reconfigure or destroy the asset, a reserve that holds non-circulating units (informational only, not enforced), a freeze address, and a clawback address that can move units between accounts. Setting a role to empty removes it permanently. Crucially, a receiver must opt in to an asset before it can receive it, which protects users from spam but surprises newcomers; chapter 14 covers the practical consequences. ^[2]

Smart contracts run on the Algorand Virtual Machine (AVM). Developers originally wrote them in TEAL or PyTeal; since early 2024 they can write native Algorand Python, and AlgoKit 3.0 (March 26, 2025) added a beta of Algorand TypeScript, a visual AVM debugger for VS Code and a local network for testing. ^[21]

Post-quantum work

Algorand added state proof keys in March 2022 (go-algorand 3.4.2), using the Falcon signature scheme to let light clients verify chain state in a post-quantum secure way. On June 18, 2026 the Foundation published a roadmap targeting "broad quantum resilience" by the end of 2027: native Falcon-1024 accounts in Q3 2026, Falcon-512 and post-quantum multisignature by year end, a hybrid Ed25519 plus Falcon period for consensus messages, and research toward a post-quantum VRF by early 2027. go-algorand 5.0.0, released August 12, 2026, shipped the native post-quantum accounts. The Foundation itself notes the VRF at the heart of the lottery still relies on elliptic-curve cryptography. ^[4][22][20]

Incident history

We found no primary record of a mainnet halt. The closest incident is a roughly five-hour stall of the test network on July 8, 2022, caused by a caching bug outside the consensus code; the Foundation's post-mortem says mainnet was resilient and a patch (v3.8.1) was released. The MyAlgo web wallet incident of February 2023, in which an on-chain analyst estimated more than 9.2 million dollars was stolen, with the Foundation's CTO putting the number of affected accounts at an estimated 25, was a wallet compromise; the Foundation's CTO stated it was "not the result of an underlying issue with the Algorand protocol or SDK." ^[53][51]

6. The token

Supply

Ten billion ALGO were minted in the genesis block in 2019, and the Foundation describes this as "the fixed and immutable maximum supply." There is no inflation and no mining issuance; every ALGO that enters circulation comes out of the initial allocation. At the time of writing the Foundation's July 2026 report put circulating supply at about 8.97 billion, 89.7 percent of the maximum. ^[12][11][54]

How the 10 billion were allocated

The launch-time plan split the supply as follows: 3 billion to be injected into circulation by the Foundation over five years through auctions and sales, 2.5 billion to early backers and relay node runners, 1.75 billion for participation rewards, 250 million for ecosystem support, 2 billion to Algorand Inc and 500 million to the Algorand Foundation. The 2019 auction raised 60 million dollars, but demand did not support the planned sale pace. ^[12][32]

In November 2020, with about 16 percent of supply circulating, the Foundation published "Long Term Algo Dynamics." It stretched the distribution from 2024 to 2030 and reallocated the 3 billion originally slated for sales into community programs. The revised table reads: community incentives 6.2 billion (2.5 billion participation rewards, 2.5 billion early backers and relay node runners, 1.2 billion contingent incentives); ecosystem support 1.25 billion; and 2.55 billion from the initial allocation (2 billion Algorand Inc, 500 million Foundation, 50 million already spent). ^[12]

Checked against the Foundation's archived plan. ^[12]

What the Foundation holds today

The Foundation's reports give a clear trail. Its balance was 1,135 million ALGO at the end of 2025, 1,079 million at the end of March 2026 and 1,036 million at the end of June 2026. The two biggest outflows in the first half of 2026 were staking rewards (about 20 million ALGO per quarter) and structured selling: 24 million ALGO in Q1 and 10.6 million in Q2, sold from two publicly disclosed wallets under rules that cap daily volume and halt sales after a 10 percent price drop in 24 hours. ^[16][14][15]

What ALGO is for

ALGO pays fees, satisfies the 0.1 ALGO minimum balance for accounts and the 0.1 ALGO increment for each ASA or application opt-in, and is the weight in the consensus lottery. Since January 2025 it also earns block rewards. ^{[3][1][4][17]}

Staking rewards since 2025

For years the only yield came from the Governance program, which paid holders for locking and voting. That ended in early 2025. With the Algorand 4.0 protocol upgrade, the Foundation launched consensus staking rewards on mainnet on January 23, 2025: an account that runs a node, registers a participation key and opts in receives a bonus for every block it proposes, starting at 10 ALGO per block and shrinking by 1 percent every million blocks, plus half of the transaction fees in that block. ^[17][5]

Three properties distinguish this from staking on most other chains. There is no lockup: coins stay liquid in the account. There is no slashing: a node that goes absent or fails a periodic "challenge" is suspended from rewards and marked offline, but keeps its funds. And there is no native delegation: rewards go to accounts that actually run a node and propose blocks, within a balance range set in the protocol parameters; the Foundation's announcement cites 30,000 ALGO or more for "full reward potential," and third-party pools exist for smaller holders. The bonus is funded by the Foundation seeding the protocol's fee sink "for several years" and is, in the documentation's own words, intentionally unsustainable from fees alone. ^[5][17]

The numbers so far: 70.24 million ALGO in validator rewards were issued in 2025, about 20 million per quarter in 2026, and online stake passed 2.07 billion ALGO in July 2026, with the community holding about 81 percent of it and the Foundation about 19 percent. ^[16][15][54]

7. Real adoption

We separate three kinds of evidence: live production usage that can be checked on-chain or in regulator documents, announcements and pilots, and narratives we could not verify.

8. The ISO 20022 connection

ISO 20022 is a messaging standard for financial institutions: a shared dictionary and format for payment instructions used by SWIFT and by many domestic payment systems. It describes how banks talk to each other about a payment. It is not a certification that a blockchain can obtain. Our ISO 20022 explainer covers the standard itself.

What is verifiable about Algorand in this context is narrower than the online lists suggest. The protocol has a note field on every transaction and a flexible asset layer with issuer controls, and regulated institutions do issue assets on it: a Dutch e-money institution issues EURD, and a UK-regulated venue has tokenized a money market fund. If ISO 20022 messages are ever involved, they live in those institutions' banking systems, not in the Algorand protocol. ^[36][37][2]

The honest framing: Algorand's base-layer freeze and clawback controls, instant settlement and sub-cent fees are a reasonable fit for regulated issuers, and the Foundation's 2026 strategy explicitly targets payments and asset tokenization. That is a design compatibility, not a standards designation. ^[2][25]

9. Ecosystem and competitors

Inside the ecosystem

The main consumer wallet is Pera, available on iOS and Android, with Ledger hardware support and a browser extension; it is developed by Pera Wallet LDA and shipped a 7.0 beta in July 2026. DeFi is concentrated in a few protocols named by the Foundation itself: Folks Finance (lending), Tinyman and Pact (exchanges), with total value locked around 64 million dollars in July 2026, down from 69 million the month before. ^[23][54][26]

Infrastructure providers include Nodely, whose founder chairs the Ecosystem Advisory Council and advises the board, and TxnLab. On the developer side the Foundation reported about 606,000 contracts deployed and 217,000 new assets created in July 2026, with the largest single creator responsible for under 4 percent of new assets. ^[26][54]

Competitors

Algorand competes in two arenas. As a fast, cheap layer-1 for payments and tokenized assets it faces Stellar, XRP Ledger, Hedera, Solana and Ethereum layer-2 networks, several of which have far larger stablecoin balances and more institutional issuers in production. Its distinctive technical arguments are the leaderless VRF lottery, true instant finality, no slashing or lockups for stakers, and an early post-quantum program. ^[4][5][22]

Its weaker points in that comparison are liquidity and mindshare: a stablecoin market cap in the tens of millions of dollars is small for a chain that has run for seven years, and the FIFA and Marshall Islands partnerships that once defined its marketing have ended. The 2026 reorganization is in part a response to that gap. ^{[54][43][46][27]}

10. Regulation and legal history

United States: from "security" to "digital commodity"

On April 17, 2023 the SEC sued the Bittrex exchange and its co-founder in the Western District of Washington for operating an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency. The complaint (case 2:23-cv-00580) named six crypto assets it alleged were securities; ALGO was one. Paragraphs 171 to 182 describe the 2019 auction, the refund policy, the Foundation's promotional statements and the two-entity structure, and conclude that ALGO "was offered and sold as an investment contract and therefore a security" under the Howey test. Neither the Foundation nor Algorand Inc was a defendant. ^[31][32]

The Foundation replied on April 19, 2023 that ALGO is not a security under US law and that it "welcomes clear regulatory guidelines"; CEO Staci Warden said it would not respond further because it was not a party. ^[33] ALGO was also listed among the assets the SEC alleged were securities in its June 2023 complaint against Binance and its November 2023 complaint against Kraken. The SEC dismissed both cases with prejudice in 2025 (Kraken on March 27, Binance on May 29), describing the decisions as policy choices and not a view on the merits. ^{[50][60][61][62][63]}

The position reversed in 2026. On March 17, 2026 the SEC, together with guidance from the CFTC, issued Release No. 33-11412, "Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets and Certain Transactions Involving Crypto Assets," effective March 23, 2026. It sorts crypto assets into digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securities, and in a footnote names Algorand (ALGO) explicitly as a digital commodity, saying it is "intrinsically linked to and derive[s] [its] value from the programmatic operation of a crypto system that is functional." The sixteen examples in the main text, which include XRP, XLM, ADA and HBAR, were chosen because each underlies a futures contract on a CFTC-regulated exchange; the footnote adds ALGO even though no such futures contract existed for it. The release is an interpretation, not a statute, and it notes that transactions can still be securities offerings depending on how they are sold. ^[34][35]

European Union

Under MiCA, ALGO is treated as an ordinary crypto-asset rather than an e-money or asset-referenced token, so exchanges listing it must be authorized crypto-asset service providers. We found no MiCA white paper published by the Foundation itself, but ESMA's interim register lists one for ALGO drawn up by the German data provider Crypto Risk Metrics and notified to BaFin (record dated 2026-04-07); it is a third-party disclosure, not an approval. ^[59] The regulated euro token on Algorand, EURD, is issued under a Dutch e-money licence, which is how the EU framework reaches the chain today. ^[36]

Exchange availability

ALGO trades on Kraken, which also offers to check "if Algorand is eligible for staking or opt-in rewards in your region," and on other major venues; the SEC complaint notes it has been listed on US platforms since 2020. Check your exchange's current listing page before relying on availability in your country. ^[40][32]

Other legal and financial events

In September 2022 the Foundation disclosed about 35 million dollars of USDC deposited with the Singapore lender Hodlnaut, which had frozen withdrawals after losses on Terra. The Foundation said this was under 3 percent of its assets and that it was "pursuing all legal remedies." We could not find a published figure for how much was recovered. ^[29][30]

11. Key risks

Foundation dependence. The Foundation holds about 10 percent of supply, funds the staking bonus, employs the core protocol team after the 2026 consolidation, and has replaced its CEO, board composition and country of incorporation within one year. Execution and key-person risk is real. ^[15][27][28]

Relay infrastructure. Participation in consensus is permissionless, but nodes connect through relay nodes, and critics in 2022 noted the relay list was curated by the Foundation. The then-CTO called opening the relay program a priority for 2023. We could not verify the current state of relay permissionlessness at the time of writing; treat it as an open question. ^[8][52]

Supply overhang. Rewards and structured selling move tens of millions of ALGO per quarter from the Foundation into the market, under a plan that runs to 2030. ^[15][12]

Unsustainable rewards design. The protocol documentation states that the block bonus is intentionally unsustainable from fees and depends on Foundation funding "for several years." What happens when that funding ends is undecided. ^[5]

Small economic footprint. Stablecoins on Algorand totaled 44 million dollars and DeFi value locked 64 million dollars in July 2026. Thin liquidity amplifies price moves and limits institutional use. ^[54]

Partnership churn. FIFA announced in 2025 that it was moving away, and we found no record that the Marshall Islands currency was ever issued. Future announcements should be weighed against this record. ^[43][46]

Wallet and operational risk. The MyAlgo incident showed that a wallet compromise can drain accounts even when the protocol is sound. ASA opt-ins, minimum balances and rekeying are powerful but unforgiving (chapter 14). ^[51][6]

Regulatory reversibility. The 2026 SEC and CFTC release is interpretive guidance, not legislation; a future Commission could revise it, and other jurisdictions have not issued equivalent statements. ^[34]

Cryptographic transition. The Foundation itself says the VRF and most signatures still rely on elliptic curves and plans a hybrid migration through 2027; migrations of this scale carry execution risk. ^[22]

Market risk. ALGO has a long history of large price swings; the live chart in chapter 16 shows the recent range. Nothing here changes that volatility.

This page is educational and is not investment advice.

12. Bull case vs bear case

The bull case

Supporters point out that the chain has delivered the core of its 2017 design: seven years of mainnet with no halt found in primary records, finality in a few seconds, sub-cent fees, and a staking design without lockups or slashing under which online stake passed 2 billion ALGO in July 2026. Regulated issuers are live on it: Circle's USDC, Quantoz's EURD e-money token and Archax's tokenized money market fund. A March 2026 SEC and CFTC interpretive release names ALGO as an example of a digital commodity, and the Foundation's US base, consolidated development team and post-quantum roadmap are the kind of institutional positioning tokenization clients look for. If tokenized funds and regulated stablecoins grow, supporters argue, a chain with issuer controls at the base layer is a credible venue. ^{[53][56][5][54][38][36][37][34][25][27][22]}

The bear case

Skeptics reply that after seven years the measurable economy on Algorand is small: about 44 million dollars of stablecoins and 64 million dollars of DeFi value locked in July 2026, far below competing chains. Its best-known partnerships did not last: FIFA announced a move of its collectibles to its own chain in 2025, and we found no record that the Marshall Islands currency was ever issued. The Foundation, which funds development, rewards and marketing, holds about a tenth of supply, sells tens of millions of ALGO into the market each quarter, cut a quarter of its staff and changed its CEO in 2026, and pays a staking bonus that the protocol documentation calls intentionally unsustainable from fees. The relay layer was curated by the Foundation as of 2022, and its current openness is unverified. ^{[54][43][46][15][27][28][5][52]}

Both cases rest on verifiable facts; they differ on whether a technically strong, regulator-recognized chain will attract enough issuers and liquidity to build a network effect. The reader decides.

What both sides can monitor

Several things can be checked over time. One is stablecoin supply and DeFi value locked, which the Foundation reports monthly and anyone can recount on-chain. Another is the Foundation's quarterly transparency reports, which show its balance, structured selling and staking-reward outflows. A third is what replaces Foundation funding of the staking bonus. A fourth is whether the relay layer is opened to anyone. Finally, the hybrid post-quantum migration has a stated 2027 horizon. ^{[54][15][5][52][22]}

13. Scorecard

Scores follow the rubric used for every coin on this site; the rationale for each category is shown in the card.

14. How to buy and store

Before the exchange and wallet list, four Algorand-specific pitfalls that cause most lost funds or confusion.

1. The minimum balance. At the time of writing every Algorand account must hold at least 100,000 microAlgos, that is 0.1 ALGO, and the minimum rises by another 0.1 ALGO for each asset you opt into or create and for each application you opt into. Any transaction that would drop your balance below that figure fails. If you send exactly 0.1 ALGO to a new wallet it will exist, but it cannot pay a fee or opt into anything; send a little more. These values are protocol parameters and can change with an upgrade, so check the accounts page of the developer documentation before relying on them. ^[1][2]

2. Opt in before you receive any token that is not ALGO. USDC, EURD and every other Algorand Standard Asset requires the receiving account to opt in first, which locks 0.1 ALGO. If you withdraw USDC from an exchange to a wallet that has not opted in, the transfer fails or the exchange may refuse it. Pera's own guide notes that your wallet must be opted into USDC (asset ID 31566704) before receiving it. Opting out of an asset later releases the 0.1 ALGO. Also check the issuer's roles: many regulated assets carry freeze and clawback addresses, which is expected for a stablecoin but worth knowing. ^[2][24][38]

3. Send ALGO only on the Algorand network. ALGO exists on the Algorand ledger. If a withdrawal screen asks you to choose a network, choose Algorand and never send ALGO to an Ethereum, BNB Chain or Solana address. The same applies to USDC on Algorand: it is a separate asset from USDC on other chains, and moving it across chains requires an exchange or Circle's tooling, not a plain transfer. Pera also warns not to use its Asset Inbox feature when sending to an exchange, and to always copy the deposit address from the exchange's own deposit screen, because some exchanges credit deposits only to specific addresses. Network selection errors are usually irreversible. ^[24][38]

4. Rekeying and closing accounts. Algorand lets you rekey an account so that a different key (for example a Ledger) controls the same address; the Foundation's CTO recommended exactly this after the MyAlgo incident. But the protocol does not check that you control the new key, closing an account to zero wipes the rekey, and the "close remainder to" option on a rekeyed account hands control back to the original key. Use these features only when you understand them. ^[6][51]

Two more habits: Algorand addresses are 58 characters long, so verify the first and last several characters before sending, and prefer a hardware wallet through Pera's Ledger integration for amounts you would not want to lose. Some exchanges may display a memo or note field for ALGO deposits; if yours does, copy it exactly, since the exchange uses it to identify your account. ^[1][23][24]

15. Sources

16. Live chart

The chart below is live market data and is not part of the verified content above.