MainNet Archaeology 1: Algorand's Birthday
My Occam's razor deduction that Algorand MainNet launched June 12th, 2019
D13.co
Recent content on D13.co
Latest posts
Algorand Sustainability Proposal: Backrunning MEV
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…
Algorand Sustainability Proposal: Excess Transaction Fee Rebate
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…
Dear Ora: A signable open letter to Ora miners
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…
Thoughts on "a" musing on the pond: Dynamic supply for Algorand
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,…
Disclosure Tales 02: Downward Facing DAOs
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 In a nutshell: Each DAO instance has a governance token that can be staked and withdrawn.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…
Disclosure Tales 01: Honing Fire
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.…
Set Up Voi Participation Node on Ubuntu 22.04
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…
Implementing an on-chain VRF shuffle for EXA Lootbox Reveals
Discussing challenges and considerations in implementing a fair VRF-backed shuffle for the EXA Lootbox rewards program on Algorand
Redundant Participation Nodes on Algorand
⚠️ Article content under review. Check back later.
MyAlgo hack: Fifth Wave - Addresses & Data
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…
MyAlgo hack: First Wave - Addresses & Data
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…
Preliminary Advisory Report - Algorand 20-02-2023 Thefts
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…
Benchmarking Algorand AMM 1:1 real world swap performance
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…
Setting up an Algorand consensus participation server on Oracle Cloud for free
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…
Algorand Governance Period 4 Whales: Known wallets & Consensus participation statistics
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…
Algorand Governance Voting Power Centralization - Period 4
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…
AlgoFi vault reward performance for Governance period 3
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…
Is It Algorand's Birthday? ...dot com
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" ⚠️ 2026 Update: We picked wrong — turns out MainNet’s birthday…
Algod-Loadb: An aware Algod HTTP Load Balancer
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…
Every AlgoFi Liquidation: Stats & Data
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…
Our very own community space: /r/D13
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
(untitled)
Pretty sure Algorand MainNet launched June 12th, 2019 Algorand MainNet anniversary celebrations have varied along the years. The original celebration date was June 19th, which was seemingly picked to mark the Dutch Auction via which ALGO was first distributed to http://localhost:5173/transaction/7MK6WLKFBPC323ATSEKNEKUTQZ23TCCM75SJNSFAHEM65GYJ5ANQ…