Running an Algorand consensus participation node requires a bit of patience and a bit of hardware. Unfortunately, consensus participation currently isn't rewarded by the network - only by our conscience! Most cloud providers do not accept conscience bucks, so we will do what we can with free offerings. The Oracle Cloud has an "always free" tier which includes good-enough virtual servers for our purposes. Traditionally this is where I state my affiliations and paid promotions, but there are none in this case....

As a follow-up on our report on Voting Power Centralization in Governance Period 4 we decided to look into known addresses from the governor whale list, as well as their consensus participation status. In case you missed it and can't be bothered to check, we defined "whale wallets" as single-entity governors that have committed at least 1 million ALGO and are still eligible. We excluded the top governor - Folks Finance - as their vote is decided by Folks protocol users....

Overview We analyzed the top eligible wallets enrolled for Algorand Governance Period 4 as of August 21, 2022. The data shows a very "whale" heavy distribution of voting power and rewards, where the top 37 individual "whale" wallets control the vote and reap 50% of rewards, and wallets with over 1 million ALGO commitment control 86% of the vote and rewards. Data Sources To get our raw data, we used two different data sources and correlated them to confirm correctness:...

TL;DR: Maximizing our vaulted ALGO with borrowed ALGO yielded more than 2x in governance rewards profit. For the third Governance season we tried the AlgoFi vault for Governance: AlgoFi counts vaulted Algo as collateral that you can borrow against. Borrowing Algo against your vaulted algo has two advantages: You can add the borrowed algo to the vault, thus increasing your collateral and ability to borrow more Algo. You are not exposed to liquidation danger due to price fluctuations between your collateral and borrow value, as they are the same picture price....

To celebrate Algorand MainNet's third birthday on the 11th of June 2022, we set up a mini-project consisting of a countdown timer to the big day: is it algorands birthday dot com and a midi project that will be revealed there on Algorand's big day. We picked June 11 from Block Zero's timestamp on MainNet: "2019-06-11T00:00:00Z" At midnight the countdown will transition to a web2.0 celebration extravaganza. CSS3 is definitely invited, and even 3D may make a cameo....

So you want to do High Availability Algorand stuff. But algod, your trusty portal to and from the Algorand blockchain, can betray you in a number of ways: It can go down for upgrades. algod must be up to date to keep syncing. It is recommended to set up a cron job to attempt to update algod every day. This will usually include some downtime ~we\ think~ It can go down for not upgrading....

As we're launching our first Algorand product soon, we wanted to have a space where people can reach out and talk to us. We were a bit surprised to find that /r/D13 was available as a subreddit! We promptly claimed it and are in the process of filling it out with some content. If you want to ask us anything, feel free to drop by and post. Visit our subreddit: /r/D13

Following a positive response to a reddit post I made about the need for an AlgoFi borrow utilization & liquidation notification service, Hellen and I started looking into AlgoFi blockchain data relating to lending & liquidations. We prepared a nice spreadsheet with every single liquidation, as well as some nice stats. What's a liquidation? When you take a loan out on AlgoFi, if your collateral's value drops to be worth less than your maximum allowed borrow value*, your account can be liquidated....