Obsession can be a very frustrating problem for some people. The urge for perfection, excessive doubt, and the constant need for trust… But for Silvio, that’s just the routine way of working. “I’m a mono maniac!” he says, and turns out to be the brainchild of the first-of-its-kind, borderless trading platform.
Who is Silvio Micali, the creator of ALGO?
He was born on October 13, 1954 in the city of Palermo, in the south of Italy. The tendency to become obsessed with a problem that makes Silvio say, “I’m a mono-maniac!” extends to childhood anxieties. Did the world he lived in really exist? Or was it just a game of his mind? That was the first big, theoretical problem he was trying to address. The problem was because these questions were bothering him. At times, he made it difficult to carry on with his daily activities and interact with people who were probably just “imaginary.” So this situation he is experiencing is questioning reality. Was reality objective or subjective? Clearly, looking into the unknown and looking for a provable answer has intrigued Silvio his entire life. This was just the starting point of a career in cryptography and beyond, asking big questions and then trying to answer them. “I follow one thing at a time, but for a long time,” Silvio says, and in his world, a long time usually equals five years. So that’s the amount of time it takes to identify a problem, do research on it, work on the problem, and find a solution. Of course, some problems are solved more quickly than others, but if they seem to last longer, he prefers to explore the same topic even more deeply, or instead of finding problems that need to be solved, he prefers to walk away and find something new to obsess over.
Education and Career Process
In 1974, at the age of 20, he went to the Sapienza University of Rome to complete his undergraduate and graduate studies and studied Mathematics. Here he discovered algorithms and, in the truest sense of the word, moved to California in 1978 to pursue a doctorate in theoretical computer science and began studying at Berkeley. He did his first doctorate on the Byzantine agreement, one of the foundations of distributed computing. Here he took courses in computational number theory and cryptography, which he later fell in love with. As soon as he graduated, he went to Canada to pursue post-doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. He began working in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, the largest research laboratory at MIT and one of the most important information technology research centers in the world. After several decades in cryptography, he got bored and decided to work on economic mechanisms and design a new type of auction. He received the Gobel Prize in 1993, given only to the most outstanding paper writers in the field of theoretical computer science, and again in 2012 for his contributions to the world of computing.
Silvio Micali Met Bitcoin and Created Algorand!
He describes those times when he was introduced to Bitcoin in 2015 as a “perfect storm”. Because he saw blockchain as a monk of cryptography, distributed accounts, and economic mechanisms. He noticed some shortcomings in Bitcoin. Therefore, he decided to put forward his own permissionless blockchain idea on the web. With his colleague Nickolai Zeldavich, he rented thousands of servers from Amazon and ran simulations with up to 500,000 users, from 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 to 100,000. The test results were satisfactory and 11 people, 8 of them from MIT, decided to found Algorand to bring to life the vision they had set out with. Silvio’s house became the work area of the Algorand team for the first 3 months of this process. Algorand aimed to create a reliable infrastructure for the borderless economy. An inclusive and transparent system where everyone, wherever they are, can build prosperity. Algorand, which was under closed testnet participation in 2018, raised $166 million in funding and officially launched its mainnet in late June. It promised a pure PoS that was fast, secure, and truly decentralized, and investors responded with a market capitalization of $24 billion. Thanks to its consensus mechanism, Algorand can process over 1,000 transactions per second, meaning it has a transaction speed and low latency, very close to global payment networks like Mastercard or Visa, which are the gold standard for fast payments. It has the ability to generate a new, basic blockchain and smart contract developed from the ground up with entirely new principles. While the network’s token Algo was initially seen as a threat to Ethereum’s dominance, it fell contrary to expectations when it hit the stock market. Its journey, which started with a value of $ 3.28, fell to 35 cents with a 90% loss in value in a few months. Of course, it was a matter of curiosity why the hype machine of the blockchain fell so low. Algo, which is limited to 10 billion units, gives its block rewards from this supply, and the current circulating supply has exceeded 6 billion units.
Why ALGO?
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum “There is an impossible trilemma in blockchain: scalability, decentralization, and security cannot exist at the same time,” he says. At least one stays outside. Continuing its existence as a borderless transaction platform, Algorand fulfills its blockchain promise by solving the impossible trilogy. It can scale faster than other blockchains, and it does so in just a few seconds by agreeing on “one” block before producing the next block. In 4 seconds, the block is produced, distributed and agreed upon. Only after this process does work begin on the next block. So since a good blockchain has been agreed for this, the fork never happens. It does this by using the pure proof-of-stake system, which provides instant transaction certainty and, unlike Ethereum, allows mining operations to be carried out with less energy. The main goal at this point is to add blocks not only quickly, but also precisely. Algo, which is a powerful system in terms of technology, has more than 500 projects and more than 100 million addresses. At the same time, gold and silver can be traded through this network. “Being static is the opposite of being alive,” he says. “I think our lives are about intelligently adapting to changing circumstances. For this reason, we wanted to be able to meet the needs of our customers, who are members of our society, not only today, but also tomorrow. If we want to achieve this, we need to upgrade in a negotiated way, and that’s what we did in Algorand!” Curiosity is a big part of the personality of every great researcher and genius. In retrospect, it may seem obvious that Silvio was born a researcher and developer. But pursuing a career in theoretical computer science was a distant, difficult process for a young Sicilian man. Thanks to the knowledge and experience he has accumulated in the field of secure protocols, mechanism design, distributed ledgers and cryptography, he has taken his place with ALGO in the crypto money world.
