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This article will guide you through setting up a Voi participation node on the latest Ubuntu LTS (22.04). It assumes you start with a local or remote (server/cloud) installation. Version 20.04 should also work, but is not tested extensively. This guide is only suitable for x86 architecture machines as it relies on the Algorand repository, which does not publish packages for other architectures such as ARM64. If you already have an Algorand node running, check back later for an upcoming article on co-hosting nodes....

Following a brief partnership during CupStakes - where EXA.market was our official secondary marketplace - they commissioned me to implement the smart contracts that would power their rewards program. As a new marketplace in the Algorand ecosystem, EXA wanted to incentivize users to trade on their platform. Users were rewarded with “Lootbox” NFTs for using the platform. After the lootboxes were distributed, we revealed that there were two more kinds of lootbox users could get....

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The MyAlgo attacks have so far been clustered around five distinct waves, roughly corresponding to these dates: First Wave: February 20, 2023 Second Wave: March 5, 2023 Third Wave: March 6, 2023 Fourth Wave: March 17, 2023 Fifth Wave: March 31, 2023 This article presents data from the fifth wave - March 31 - as well as subsequent movements of stolen funds. Summary The attack was automated and ran for 14 hours - from 2023-03-31 10:15 (GMT) until 2023-04-01 00:25 (GMT)....

The MyAlgo attacks have so far been clustered around three distinct waves, roughly corresponding to these dates: First Wave: February 20, 2023 Second Wave: March 5, 2023 Third Wave: March 6, 2023 This article presents data from the initial wave - February 20 - as well as subsequent movements of stolen funds during March 5th. Wallets attacked on March 5th are not included. Aggregates and Addresses In the first wave, 24 addresses were impacted for the following aggregate losses:...

Summary: There is a non-zero chance of a MyAlgo wallet software compromise leading to the theft of at least $7.2m worth of assets on the Algorand blockchain. We recommend rekeying MyAlgo accounts to fresh private keys, or simply moving funds where possible. This precautionary remediation of further risk should not have usability impact and, if done carefully, may have a significant security benefit.\ We have been day 1 responders to these attacks: reporting the potential compromises, organizing affected users, systematically collecting as much information as possible in order to find a possible common vector, suggesting actions to be taken, preparing transaction trail documents for authorities....

TL; DR: We tested Algorand with end-user-identical AMM swaps: 8,070 in a 3 second block. Our friends at Vestige.fi recently performed a benchmark of AMM swap performance on Algorand MainNet. While the results were great (2881 peak swaps per second), some naysayers missed the forest for the trees with complaints about the methodology being synthetic. The methodology by the Vestige team was: "We sent 353 groups of 85 swaps totaling 90368 transactions / 30005 AMM swaps....

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:...