by Silvio Micali

Algorand is growing. Today, an average of 500,000 transactions per day are posted on our chain. More than 500 companies are busy developing applications on Algorand, taking advantage of our unique layer-1 smart contracts and the other functionalities that enrich our platform. Their applications will soon generate plenty of new transactions. 

This is why, while continuing to add new functionalities to Algorand, we are improving our performance, without sacrificing decentralization, as follows.

OUR PERFORMANCE MEASURES 

1. Block proposal time. This is the time it takes observers to become aware of which block is a candidate to be permanently added to the chain.
2. Block finalization time. This is the time needed to ensure that a new block is permanently added to the chain.
3. Finalized transactions per second (TPS).

OUR 2021 PERFORMANCE

• Block proposal time will remain 0.5 seconds. (Even though our block size will grow from 5,000 to 25,000 transactions.)
• Block finalization time will shrink from 4.5 to 2.5 seconds.
• Our finalized TPS will grow from 1,000 to 46,000. (Thanks to a truthful approach to block pipelining.)

OUR PRINCIPLED EVOLUTION

Algorand’s overarching goal is providing a truly decentralized, public, permissionless network that scales perfectly and eliminates the performance drawbacks of first-generation blockchains. Decentralization and security are fundamental principles in Algorand. They will be respected by this performance improvement and all future enrichments of our platform.