Posts on D13.co

Algorand Sustainability Proposal: Backrunning MEV

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 23:56:00 +0200

This is presented as a personal opinion piece. Views presented here are mine except where explicitly attributed.

Preface

In conversations about sustainability and fees on Algorand, most of the focus so far has been on:

raising the minimum fees, or
changing the supply model to inflate/deflate dynamically with usage

and to a lesser extent:

priority fee ordering - higher fee gets earlier placement in block

I propose an alternative protocol change in the broader “priority fee” market. This is a personal proposal, presented here as my recommendation to the community for discussion.

Algorand Sustainability Proposal: Excess Transaction Fee Rebate

Thu, 15 May 2025 11:07:37 +0300

This is presented as a personal opinion piece. Views presented here are mine except when explicitly attributed.

Algorand fee sustainability has recently come back into the community spotlight.

In this debate, there is considerable traction behind the notion that increasing the minimum transaction fee will negatively impact adoption: high volume applications may reduce their on-chain volume (or stop altogether) and certain use cases - micropayments or microinteractions - may no longer be viable on Algorand.

Dear Ora: A signable open letter to Ora miners

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:02:10 +0100

TL;DR at bottom

Preface

Let me preface this by stating my own opinion about, and relationship with, Ora.

I like Ora. I use Ora. I can even claim to being a kind of Godfather to it, having “given” it asset ID 1284444444.

In light of the first Ora halving, I took a look at Ora statistics and mining practices. My objective here is to make a recommendation on Ora mining practices to reduce Ora’s negative externalities on Algorand infrastructure, while at the same time appreciating the positive externalities.

Thoughts on "a" musing on the pond: Dynamic supply for Algorand

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:13:37 +0000

The “Musings on the pond” article lays out a thought-provoking proposal for a deep intervention in Algorand’s economics. If you have not read it, it is well worth putting it at the top of your reading list and getting to it soon - even now, in fact: if you have the time, go read that first.

Among the proposed interventions is a set of changes to the minimum transaction fee, block rewards and fee burns that would alter the fixed nature of the total supply of Algorand. The present article discusses these changes.

Disclosure Tales 02: Downward Facing DAOs

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:06:38 +0000

I discovered and disclosed a vulnerability in the Updog and FAME DAO contracts. Then I hacked them. This story is not boring.

Background: The DAOs

Updog offered a fully featured DAO platform. In a nutshell:

Each DAO instance has a governance token that can be staked and withdrawn.
The DAO contracts could control assets and ALGO. Payments of both types could be executed trustlessly after a proposal passed with enough votes.
Voting power is proportional to the staked amount of governance tokens in the DAO.

Disclosure Tales 01: Honing Fire

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:06:38 +0000

I discovered and disclosed a vulnerability in the Hone NFT shuffle contracts. They responded well. This story is almost boring.

The backstory

I was curious about the mechanics of the Hone NFT shuffle, as it utilizes VRF, in which I have a keen interest. Reading TEAL is a bit like reading assembly, but with enough determination and a bit of practice you can figure out what a contract is doing.

Occasionally you can also spot a combination of transactions or parameters that breaks the assumptions of the contract developer. The dopamine rush from finding and verifying a vulnerability in a smart contract is probably equivalent to snorting 1,000 ground-up sudoku puzzles.

Set Up Voi Participation Node on Ubuntu 22.04

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 08:19:15 +0500

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.

⚠️

Do not follow this guide if you are running an existing Algorand node on the same server, at it will likely overwrite your Algorand installation.

🪙 You will need to have some $VOI balance to complete this guide.

You will need $VOI because:

Implementing an on-chain VRF shuffle for EXA Lootbox Reveals

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 18:58:00 +0300

Discussing challenges and considerations in implementing a fair VRF-backed shuffle for the EXA Lootbox rewards program on Algorand

Redundant Participation Nodes on Algorand

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 08:59:59 +0300

⚠️

Article content under review. Check back later.

MyAlgo hack: Fifth Wave - Addresses & Data

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 21:26:38 +0000

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). ASAs were drained from 4,166 accounts into the following malicious account:

MyAlgo hack: First Wave - Addresses & Data

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:26:38 +0000

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:

16,964,466.38 ALGO
3,440,465.51 USDC
1,515,710.00 OPUL
800,000.00 gALGO
1,237,828.90 COSG
40,252,507.58 goMINT
230.37 goETH
15.85 goBTC
2,713,794.69 BANK

The approximate value at the time was $9.4MM.

The impacted addresses are:

Preliminary Advisory Report - Algorand 20-02-2023 Thefts

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 21:26:38 +0000

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. This case quickly grew with multiple confirmations and more discoveries daily.

Benchmarking Algorand AMM 1:1 real world swap performance

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 02:18:38 +0000

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. Algorand therefore handled 30005 AMM swaps in ~15 sec, or about 2000 swaps/s. If we discount the last ~500 swaps in the 806 block we instead get 29500/11 sec = 2680 swaps. If someone smarter than me has data on block times we could do better calculations, in case blocks were delayed or so. "
"all transactions were made from https://allo.info/address/SWAPVMWRFIIY2L5V2JEWXIE7TLSOCUJP4BJYMAM65VBMRXHHE24GBMMPYM which called the app 1000469889 which does 85 swaps in inner transactions (255/3)"

On Algorand, inner transactions are transactions initiated by a smart contract. As such, they don't need to come with a signature attached - the outer transaction call's signature suffices.

Setting up an Algorand consensus participation server on Oracle Cloud for free

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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. ~~I am a happy Oracle free tier user and that's it.~~ No money has exchanged hands for the production of this article. There is one minor gotcha which I will treat as a cliff-hanger for now.

Algorand Governance Period 4 Whales: Known wallets & Consensus participation statistics

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 21:26:38 +0000

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.

Algorand Governance Voting Power Centralization - Period 4

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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:

AlgoFi vault reward performance for Governance period 3

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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.

Your risk in this scheme is essentially confined to smart contract risk: AlgoFi vault contracts failing either catastrophically (entire vaulted amount lost) or partially (inability to vote and/or claim rewards). This was palatable to our risk tolerance considering AlgoFi's reputation and audits, so we tested it out on a few accounts.

Is It Algorand's Birthday? ...dot com

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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.

Algod-Loadb: An aware Algod HTTP Load Balancer

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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. We had a (non-production) algod which got stuck on a particular block. After looking into it, it was a couple of versions old, and after a pre-agreed-upon round, it just stopped syncing. Updating was quickish - the update script worked great, but it did require some time to migrate/rebuid some index files to the latest version.
It can get stuck, or be left behind, because software is hard, complicated and unpredictable in fascinating ways.

We are building a bunch of stuff on Algorand, and one of them definitely requires H/A - the AlgoFi Borrow Utilization Monitoring Service. This puppy will keep track of every AlgoFi account's utilization percentage, as well as the AlgoFi oracle lending prices, in order to calculate borrow utilization and notify users when theirs exceeds whatever threshold they have specified. We want this done at every single block, 24/7/365, guaranteed.

Every AlgoFi Liquidation: Stats & Data

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Our very own community space: /r/D13

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 02:18:38 +0000

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