Algorand history: cryptography first, price later
A professor with a Turing Award
Silvio Micali, an MIT professor, won the Turing Award in 2012 for his work in cryptography. In 2017 he founded Algorand. His design, pure proof of stake, picks the validators for each block at random from all token holders, weighted by stake. No one knows in advance who will be chosen, which makes it hard to attack them.
June 2019: a sale and a peak
The main network launched in June 2019. At the same time Algorand sold 25 million ALGO in a Dutch auction on CoinList at a single price of 2.40 dollars, raising over 60 million dollars, according to CoinDesk. ALGO set its all-time high of 3.56 dollars on 20 June 2019, by CoinGecko data, and lost 94% of its value in the first three months, as Decrypt reported.
FIFA and the 2021 rally
In May 2022 FIFA named Algorand its official blockchain platform, with sponsorship of the Qatar World Cup and the 2023 Women’s World Cup. On 1 November 2021, during that year’s rally, ALGO closed at 1.83 dollars on Binance, about half its launch-week high.
Ten billion tokens
The supply is capped at 10 billion ALGO, and about 9.08 billion are in circulation. In July 2026 ALGO fell to its lowest recorded price, 0.0757 dollars.