# Algorand's Quantum Roadmap And Agentic Commerce Strategy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-30

## Transcript

Algorand has always been very unique in its positioning.
We've been around for seven years.
We had no downtime.
And we are ahead of the curve time and time and time again.
We were ahead of the curve in terms of instant finality.
We're ahead of the curve in post-quantum security.
And so if there's one chain that you can trust for its institutional great abilities, it is Algorand.
Algorand made headlines when a paper from Google called out their work on quantum readiness, yet everyone is saying that altcoins are dead.
Are they or are they just being overlooked?
And what do investors need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that altcoins are not...
dead, but calling for alt season over and over will definitely kill the vibes.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Tuesday, July 28th, and we will be releasing this episode on July 30th.
Today, we are joined by Mark Vanleberg.
Mark is the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at the Algorand Foundation, where he leads global marketing and strategic efforts to drive developer adoption and real-world use for the Algorand blockchain.
Mark is a veteran tech executive with over 20 years of experience who previously helped launch and scale the Android brand.
I'm a user of this, so I'm a big fan of his work.
And he worked at Google on their ecosystem there.
Mark is going to share a ton of Algo Alpha with us today.
So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
A reminder, today's podcast is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Securitize.
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Keep an ear out for more information about them later in the episode and support them as they support us.
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And without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show.
Mark, how are you?
Hi, John.
Hi, John.
How are you?
Great, man.
I'm really excited to talk to you.
I just want to start with the most obvious question here.
You pivoted from Android to crypto.
Why Algorand?
Why did you land in this ecosystem specifically?
What drove that for you?
Yeah, I think it was very interesting.
I've been very interested in crypto for a long time, and following the space very, very closely.
And so when the Elgorand opportunity arose, of course, I did my homework as anybody who would join a new job.
And so, you know, I looked at the chain, I looked at the technology, I looked at the people, the foundation I'd be working with.
And also I spent a lot of time thinking about the community, looking at the community, the builders and what's going on.
And so those three elements really impressed me.
Technology is like superb.
I think there's no blockchain in the space that can compete against Algorithm from a pure technology perspective.
The people on the foundation were great to work with.
And then I think the builders and the community, we are not, as you know, we're not the largest community in crypto, but I think we're a very committed group of people.
We have some excellent builders.
And so these three factors made me decide that Algorand was the right step to go.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So our audience is primarily a lot of self-directed crypto investors.
They're pretty savvy.
They know the markets well.
But for maybe some people who aren't very familiar with Algorand, could you give us more detail on what makes Algorand so unique among other layer one smart contract platforms on the market and just a little bit more about what makes it stand out to you in this industry?
Yeah.
So Algorand has been around for seven years.
And one thing to note is that Algorand hasn't had a single second of downtime.
in those seven years.
So we are an incredibly robust and reliable platform.
And so it was founded seven years ago by Professor Silvio Michali, who was a Turing Award winner for his work on cryptography, verifiable random function, zero knowledge proofs.
These are all things that basically were invented or co-invented by him.
So he's a legend in the cryptography industry.
And so he came up with the whole idea behind Algorand.
And so what makes Algorand truly unique is this consensus mechanism that basically solves the traditional trilemma issue that basically said you cannot be secure, scalable, and decentralized at the same time.
And so he basically fixed that problem to come up by coming up with a completely new consensus mechanism.
that basically draws from his experience in verifiable random functions.
Basically, he created a consensus mechanism that creates a lottery system by which participants, taking participants, get selected to propose the new block.
And that mechanism makes it extremely hard for any attacker to try.
and break the consensus mechanism.
And as a result of that, what happened is that Algorithm has created a chain that offers instant finality, which no other chain offers.
The idea that when a transaction gets added to a block, it is instantly final.
It cannot be reversed.
There's never any forks.
And at the same time, being incredibly scalable.
and extremely low cost because running a node is very, very cheap.
You could run it on a Mac mini if you wanted to.
And so that was a very, very unique new approach to how you develop a blockchain and launch a blockchain network.
And even seven years later, that approach continues to be very, very unique.
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I won't spend a ton of time on the technicals of Algorand, but just for our audience to have some context, Silvio Macali, who founded Algorand, is a Turing Award winner, which Mark mentioned.
That's like the Nobel Prize equivalent in mathematics.
And Algorand is a very impressive technical achievement in many ways.
So I would encourage our audience to look into that more.
But Mark, I wanted to ask you a bit about some modern updates to the Algorand ecosystem.
A lot of blockchain ecosystems are changing how they approach governance and what they do there.
Algorand announced in March that Algorand Technologies and the Algorand Foundation are going to be merging, and I believe migrating into the United States.
Could you talk to us a little bit about what's driving this change and how this improves the governance and operations of Algorand's protocol and just overall operations?
Yeah, and so Algorand has, from the start, been...
us-based right we were founded by silvio and in boston and so um some of the core engineers and core engineering was in boston and so because of regulatory issues the the foundation was established outside the outside us But of course, as we all know, the regulation is changing quite dramatically.
It's becoming a lot clearer in terms of what can and cannot be done.
And so it basically prompted us to basically move the foundation back into the US.
At the same time, the way the algorithm ecosystem was set up is you had algorithm technologies who was responsible for the protocol development, and then the foundation was responsible for all of the ecosystem.
development like working with developers marketing the builders and stuff like that and so ultimately when you have two organizations that are pulling that are going in the same direction it's always hard to kind of coordinate between the two and so there was really no reason for those two organizations to be completely separate it's much it's much easier to kind of manage all the things that have to do with the with the with the with the ecosystem, including the protocol development, from one single organization.
And so we came to an agreement with Algorand Technologies to take over the protocol development and basically make it part of the foundation.
That gives us one single structure that we can all focus on and push forward to make Algorand successful and continue to drive the growth in Algorand.
So it's a much simpler, much cleaner structure that is now also headquartered in the US.
Okay, cool.
That gives us some detail on that strategy there.
And I think, you know, like I said, a lot of blockchain ecosystems are evolving or changing their strategy for operations.
And I'm really, you know, I was curious to see how that plays out.
And I wish you guys a lot of luck with that strategy.
I want to talk about what you are working on.
You see this everywhere, like every single ecosystem.
When there's a split between labs and like ecosystem, it for some reason always blows up.
And so we've never really had that issue here, but it's still the case that if you put everything under one roof, it is better, it's more efficient, and so it's more productive.
And so it's the cleanest solution to go forward.
Sure.
Yeah.
And like, I think every everybody just like with a different consensus mechanism, every ecosystem is going to have a different approach to governance.
And, you know, everybody's going to figure out what works for them.
So, okay, I want to talk about what you guys have been working on, because like I said, in the intro, Algorand has gotten a lot of attention for its efforts around quantum resistance, your chief technology officer has laid out a roadmap for a native post quantum Algorand by 2027, which is a very ambitious goal.
But I think, you know, one that stands out for a lot of reasons.
Talk to us about this.
roadmap and why is quantum resistance so important to Algorand and to anybody?
Yeah, I mean, if you look at the evolution of like the quantum threats, it is becoming clearer and clearer every single day that the quantum threat has to be taken seriously and that the Q day, the moment upon which quantum computers will break classical cryptography is actually coming closer and closer.
It used to be like it's going to be in the 2030s.
And so What you see now is like that timeline is like shortening and shortening and shortening.
So now the consensus estimate is that by 2030, probably commercial quantum computers will be available that will break classic cryptography.
But when you say commercial available, if you then look at the state actors, they're probably like one to two years ahead of everybody else, which means that if quantum computers become available in 2030.
state actors may have access to that technology by 2028, 2029.
And so this is very, very concerning because as we all know, if the quantum computers break cryptography, it is disastrous from blockchain perspective because we are so reliant on it.
And so that's why we actually, years ago, we already started working on making our chain post-quantum secure.
And so the first thing that we did, we secured the ledger.
And why is that?
Well, you want to make sure that the history of the transactions is safe.
People say blockchains are immutable.
Nowadays, unless you have a quantum secure chain, you have to put an asterisk next to that statement and say, yes, it's immutable as long as there's no quantum computers.
The moment quantum computers arrive, that immutability claim probably is out of the window.
So that's the reason why we focused on this first.
We want to make sure that whenever quantum computers arrive, that our ledger is always secure.
And so we launched this in 2022.
So we launched this almost four years ago.
We launched a thing called State Proofs that is based on Falcon Keys, which are a post-quantum cryptography scheme.
And that basically secures our ledger.
So last month when we announced a new roadmap, we took this one step further and we basically said, well, it's not enough to secure the ledger.
You have to make sure all the components of the Algorand blockchain are quantum secure.
And we want to be completely broadly quantum resilient by the end of next year, 2027.
And so the things that we need to do beyond securing the ledger is we have to make sure accounts are quantum secure.
And we have to make sure our consensus mechanism is quantum secure.
And so those are the two big pillars of that roadmap.
So we did in the first iteration in creating post-quantum accounts with something called Logic 6.
We launched that at the end of last year.
Next month, or over the course of Q3, we will launch native post-quantum accounts.
That's a big step.
And then towards the end of this year and early next year, we will also start upgrading our consensus mechanism, specifically the verifiable random function, which is the heart.
of our consensus mechanism needs to be upgraded to post-quantum.
And so that is ongoing research and with the goal to implement that sometime next year.
I really appreciate you laying that out.
And I think this is something that people kind of lose in this quantum proofing thing is that there are multiple pieces of this and multiple parts of it.
And it's not just a single thing that has to be upgraded.
What is different or unique in your mind about the approach that Algorand has taken to solving this quantum problem and to like, you know, going about accomplishing everything on this roadmap?
What stands out to you about that that's different maybe from some of the way other ecosystems are dealing with this?
First, I think we have been at it for a while.
Right.
And so we, as I said, we launched state proofs a number of years ago.
And so we've built over time, we've built a lot of expertise in thinking through the issue, looking at possible post-quantum cryptography schemes, figuring out which one is the best, adapting it to a blockchain environment and stuff like that.
So we've built a lot of experience in this space.
The second thing that's unique is that our chief scientific officer, Dr.
Chris Piker, is one of the foundational research that led to the creation of these Falcon keys.
And so he's actually taken this Falcon cryptography scheme and then adapted it to a blockchain.
It needs to be deterministic to be on blockchain.
So he basically changed it and modified it and made it work on a blockchain context.
And that is a very, very difficult thing to do.
And so we are lucky to have somebody like Chris Peikert on the team who can actually lead that effort.
And then it was recognized, as you mentioned, it was recognized by Google, who published a research report on post-quantum and called out Algorand as the chain that is actually leading in this effort.
So it was great to see that.
And I think the other thing that we actually highlighted in our roadmap is that I think that the way to do this and to become fully post-quantum is you have to be quantum agile.
And so the idea behind that is we use Falcon, for instance, for state proofs.
But unlike traditional cryptography that has a 20-year record of not being broken, none of these post-quantum schemes, we think they're great, and we think they are post-quantum, and we think they won't be broken.
But there is no 20-year history to prove that this is indeed the case.
And so I think we have to be very careful with this.
And so one of the core principles of our roadmap is we have to be quantum agile and we have to create a mechanism through which we could deploy any post-quantum scheme and implement an algorithm and not be tied and married to one particular scheme in total.
And specifically also related to that is the idea of like hybrid security, right?
Because the other issue is that, okay, Falcon may be post-quantum secure, but who says Falcon can be broken by classical computers?
Again, there's no history.
in that right so so what you have to do is then you have to come up with like a hybrid scheme that takes a classical cryptography scheme and you you you marry it with a falcon scheme so that you are sure that that cryptography solution works both against classical computers and against quantum computers.
And so again, we speak from experience.
We have one of the most experienced cryptographers in our staff, Chris Piker.
And so we've been working through all these issues for multiple years.
And so I think we are pretty far advanced in getting the full chain completely quantum secure in the next year, year and a half.
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Mark, it's really helpful to hear you lay out some of the work that you guys are doing.
And I would encourage our audience to learn more about this as well, because there's a lot of impressive technical things coming out of Algorand.
Tie this back to me.
What is the investment case for quantum readiness?
Why does this work matter to investors?
What is the real world impact of this?
What is the advantage that this gives Algorand in the market?
Tie this back to the investment case for me.
It's very simple.
I was talking to a gardener analyst last week, and the gardener analyst was responsible for all of quantum-related inquiries coming from their enterprise customers.
And he said that every single financial institution is hugely worried about the quantum threat.
And so they should be.
And so our investment thesis is that, hey, if you are a financial institution, if you're a financial service company, and you're thinking about using a blockchain, You have to do it on a blockchain that has a concrete plan for post-quantum security.
Because otherwise, why do you take all that risk?
And so we have the chain that has proven reliability for over seven years with one of the most elegant consensus mechanisms out there.
And now with a concrete roadmap for post-quantum security by next year.
So if there's one chain that you should pick to tokenize assets or to handle massive payment transactions, it is algorithm there is no other option in the market today gotcha that's i mean that's look i mean it's hard to get more bullish than that but yeah look i think Everybody, every blockchain ecosystem, just like you guys have a different approach to governance, everyone's going to have a different approach to consensus.
They're all going to have a different quantum roadmap and the market's going to evaluate that.
So, yeah, I think it's important to remind people that that is valuable in the market.
I want to pivot to something else.
I've seen a lot of activity and talk about in the Algorand ecosystem and just generally, but agentic commerce.
Last week, there was an article published on Algorand's site by another one of your researchers.
It was titled, Why the agentic economy will be built on Algorand.
And I'd love to just hear you elaborate on that and answer that question for us.
Why is the agentic economy going to be built on Algorand?
Yeah.
So, well, I think it's very simple.
I think when you're an agent and you're a rational actor, and so probably as an agent and you want to transact with another agent and you have to decide what the medium of transaction is, you're probably not going to be driven by meme coins or by community sentiment or any of that is.
You're going to look rationally at what the chain is capable of doing.
You're going to look at the reliability history of the chain.
You're going to look at, is there a risk of forking?
Is there a risk that my transaction might get delayed or might get canceled or might fail?
Is there counterparty risk with this chain?
Yes or no.
And so as a rational actor and a rational agent, what is the cost?
Like how much does it cost to send one UCC from one agent to the other, right?
You're going to look at all of those factors.
You're going to compare all the blockchains and you're going to come to the conclusion.
that Algorand is the best solution for you to transact on chain.
Because we have some of the lowest fees out there, we have instant finality, we have atomic, native atomic grouping, and all of the features that agents will require to be able to transact without friction at the high velocity 24 by 7 with a huge, huge kind of reliability record.
And so I think that's why I think the Algorand chain is perfectly built.
for this agentic world and we can be more bullish about it than that.
What does that world look like as we transition from a world where AI is assisting humans to where we see true agentic, like unsupervised AI commerce happening?
And what does that look like in actual practice and how does Algorand outperform or do well in that environment?
Yeah, so I think we are...
We have to be honest about this.
I think we are in the very, very early innings of agentic commerce.
And so currently what you have happened is you basically have the battle of the protocols, called the battle of the protocols.
You have Google coming out with a number of protocols.
I mean, Coinbase has explored too.
Everybody's basically launching protocols to solve portions of the agentic commerce puzzle, but also to try and kind of influence the narrative in their direction.
that's where we are i think there is not a there's no good end-to-end solution yet for agentic commerce at scale i think you see a lot of experimentation and and a lot of attempts to do it but i don't think we are there yet at any sort of scale and so from an from an from algorithm's perspective our strategy is that we look at the protocols that we think have the most traction and we aggressively implement them on Algorand and taking advantage of all the native capabilities that Algorand has to offer.
So X402, we were one of the early partners with Coinbase on X402.
Google's AP2, we were one of the launch partners of AP2 with Google.
And so we are very, very heavily focused on making sure that all the protocols work beautifully on Algorand.
And the second element that we focus on is like, what can we do to help solve some of the agent-take commerce friction points?
And I think one of the biggest friction points right now is trust, right?
Because for agents to do commerce, you have to trust the agents.
And the problem is that nobody's trusting these agents because, you know, these are not deterministic systems.
And so they can do things that you don't expect them to do.
So how do you build the right trust framework?
to make sure these agents can be trusted.
And we're doing a lot of work in that space.
And I can probably talk for another hour specifically on that talk.
I will meet you.
I think it'll be a great podcast in and of itself.
But you answered one of the questions I had, which was around, you know, is this still experimental or is it ready to scale?
You kind of spoke a little bit about that.
But I do want to drill down a little bit more on what Algorand is actually doing.
You know, you said you're implementing what has a lot of traction.
I saw a tweet from Algorand Foundation just this morning that said, AI agents can now pay for things on their own.
No human, no checkout.
no API key.
Walk us through how Algorand is empowering this.
How are you bringing this to market?
What does that actually look like in terms of what's on the chain today?
Yeah.
So the way we do this is using X402.
And so X402, for the people that may not know what it is, is basically a new protocol that was released by Coinbase last year.
And it's based on the HTTP error code 402, which was baked into the HTTP protocol since the...
I guess, I don't know, I can't remember exactly when it was founded a long time ago.
And so, and the idea was that, and it's an error code that says payment required.
And so the idea behind it was that some resources, web-based resources could be premium resources that need to be paid for.
And so the HTTP protocol had this hook.
to allow payments to happen for premium resources, but it was never implemented.
So the error code exists, but there's nothing behind it.
And so Coinbase last year took that error code and built a protocol around it to allow internet-native payments to happen using blockchain rails based on this kind of 402 error code.
And so, as I mentioned, we were one of the first Coinbase partners to implement X402 and have it merged into...
to the Coinbase protocol.
And so this is specifically designed as a protocol that enables kind of micropayments.
The idea is that currently when you're a developer, you have APIs that you sell.
You basically sell subscriptions.
You give people an API key.
And with the API key, you get access to the resources under some constraints and monthly payments or whatever it is.
So the idea is you move that over to a mechanism whereby you don't need an account anymore.
You don't need a subscription anymore.
contact the API and you pay for the API on a pay-as-you-go basis.
And so that's what XFOR2 enables.
And that's really what we focus on.
It's basically enabling micropayments at scale using blockchain RELs.
And so some of the use cases that we see emerging from this currently and the ones that have most traction have to do with paper compute, specifically LLMs.
When you think about this, with LLMs, you pay per token, right?
At the end of the day, you pay per token.
And instead of buying a subscription with an LLM, you can just pay per prompt.
So this is one of the use cases that we see emerging very rapidly and growing very rapidly.
Or pay per data is another one where we see significant traction going forward.
And so while it's still early days, we see this is where the market is going.
It's pay per compute, pay per data, without accounts, without API keys, without subscriptions.
You can just pay as you go.
And that's a core use case of Authenticomark.
Okay, that's very helpful there.
I want to get your thoughts.
You're the chief strategy and marketing officer for the Algorand Foundation.
Is it more important strategically for Algorand to focus on onboarding AI users or human users?
And how do you think about the competition there or the trade-offs on that?
Well, the interesting part about onboarding AI agents on the blockchain is that they don't care about user experience.
And so, as we all know, user experience in the blockchain industry has been...
a difficult point.
People have to get keys, private keys.
They lose their keys and they can't call anyone when the keys are lost.
And so the user experience of blockchains in general and wallets in particular is challenging for regular consumers.
And it's been a really, really big friction point since forever, pretty much.
So the advantage of agents is you don't need any of this or you still need it, but the agents don't care.
you know, about the technical complexity of things because they can work through it.
And so I do think that over time, agents will become the biggest consumers of blockchains over time.
But remember, behind an agent is always a user, right?
Because you need, and it goes back to the trust factor again, you can't just have an agent.
run wild.
An agent needs to be accountable to someone, whether it's a business or a user.
So you always have a user behind it or a business behind it, but the actual usage on chain might very well become dominated by agents.
I gotcha.
Yeah.
So that trust still matters, whether it's a human or an AI agent.
It makes a lot of sense.
Mark, I want to talk a little bit more about growth.
Obviously, we're in a bear market.
All of crypto is in a bear market.
But Algorand, notably, as we discussed this entire conversation, is still building, still shipping things.
You helped scale Android up to billions of users.
And I'd love to hear what lessons from that experience you're applying at Algorand and how you see Algorand getting to billions of users and going from experimentation, speculation towards...
more real adoption and mass adoption, what that looks like for you.
Yeah.
So I think, to me, when I think back of my Android days, I think the growth of Android was largely achieved, I would say, by three factors.
I think one factor is really around the developer ecosystem.
Like at the end of the day, Android does not, nobody really cares about Android as an operating system.
It's an operating system, right?
And so...
It's the apps that run on top of it that really matter and that drive value for users.
And so the ability to really engage with developers and build that developer ecosystem and growing that developer ecosystem is a core responsibility and of core importance.
That's one thing I would say.
The second thing is really Android's kind of open approach to innovation.
And so we are...
Android was open source.
Anybody could download Android.
Anybody could build their own phone.
You didn't need Google's approval to build a phone.
You could just download the Android software and build your own phone and make a phone at whatever price point that you wanted, whatever kind of shape or form or color that you wanted.
And so that drove a lot of innovation and drove a lot of choice, whereas on the opposite side of Android, you had...
iPhone and you couldn't pick an iPhone in a thousand colors you just had iPhone that's what you had to go for so so this idea of openness and and and the open approach to innovation I think was a second success factor and I think the third success factor that that people may not realize is really the partnerships because you know Android wouldn't have taken off if Verizon hadn't launched the Droid campaign and spent a gazillion amount of marketing dollars in promoting the Droid phone or wouldn't have taken off if Samsung hadn't launched the Galaxy based on Android and again spent a gazillion dollars in marketing the Galaxy phone.
And so I think those are the three key elements that drove success for Android.
And I think it's very similar in a way.
It's very applicable to a blockchain context as well.
Like developers are key.
You know, we are...
very heavily involved with developers.
We talked about Agentic.
We just launched a big XFRO2 competition.
We have over a thousand developers participating today in building XFRO2 endpoints and running them on algorithms and driving traffic to Agentic Commerce.
So we have very, very, very closely involved with developers everywhere to grow that ecosystem.
Open approach, of course, everything in blockchain is pretty much open source and open.
So we're very much in favor of anything that is open source related.
And so, again, I mentioned trust in agentic commerce.
We are actually pretty close to launching your ad for alpha, pretty close to launching a new protocol that's going to be a completely open protocol that will deal specifically with the issue of trust in agentic commerce.
And we will propose a solution there.
That is free for anybody to adopt and use as they see needed.
So we're looking forward to kind of sharing more details about that.
And now, of course, partnerships.
And partnership, of course, is the third key element that is critical.
I think you just had some breaking news here.
Is there anything else you want to tell us about that protocol?
That went by kind of quickly, but you're saying Algorand is going to launch something new for an open source thing for trust.
Tell me a little bit more about this.
Yeah, so I think the...
So take the example of OpenClaw, right?
OpenClaw, a lot of people are using OpenClaw.
The security architecture of OpenClaw is a big issue.
Like the way it currently works is you give OpenClaw all the keys, all the passwords, and any credentials that you want OpenClaw to have access to in order to do things, right?
And then you hope for the best.
And so you already know there's lots of issues that happened with this, like, you know, OpenClaw, like...
wiped out entire company databases and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars trading on chain and making mistakes.
And so it's a fundamentally flawed security model.
And in crypto, we know how the security models ought to work.
You have to have a wallet.
You store your credentials and your private keys inside your wallet.
And if a transaction needs to happen, the DAP that you're interfacing with will come to your wallet, ask for approval.
The wallet signs off on the approval.
and then executes the transaction.
So in crypto, we actually know how to deal with this issue.
And so the basic protocol that we're about to launch will basically propose a new security architecture where a persistent agent no longer stores any credentials.
Persistent agents should have access to no secrets and no credentials.
These should be stored in an app or a wallet or whatever application that a developer builds.
And then the agent should be instructed to reach out to the wallet and the app for approval.
on any particular transaction that requires sign off.
And so that's kind of the model that we're building a new security architecture, but in a very open protocol way.
So anybody can build plugins to agentic systems.
Anybody can create wallets and applications that support the protocols.
It's completely open.
But it will also do, it will also establish a agent identity that is linked cryptographically to the human or the user identity.
which is the second trust problem, right?
Because the second trust problem is if I go shopping and I use an agent and my agent is talking to an Amazon agent and says, hey, I have a great deal on a Dell computer.
Do you want to buy it?
How do you know that that agent really belongs to Amazon?
Like somebody can spoof it and behave as if they're from Amazon, but you have no proof that this is actually an agent that belongs to Amazon.
You need a chain of provenance that links the agent.
cryptographically to Amazon so that you know for sure that this is the Amazon agent.
Or the reverse, when you're a merchant and you see a shopping agent come to you and shop to you, like how do you know this agent is not malicious and is just trying to rip you off?
You need to know who's the user behind that shopping agent.
Again, it's an issue of identity and cryptographically linking a user to an agent.
And so that's what this protocol will do.
It will establish a new security architecture that people can use.
So the private keys are always and the credentials are always under control.
And it will establish a chain of provenance between a user and agent to make sure that it tackles the trust problem that exists there as well.
It's always fascinating to hear the technical solutions and innovations coming out of this ecosystem.
So I'm looking forward to hearing more about that.
That sounds really exciting.
We're getting close to time here, but I got a lot more questions for you.
The biggest one I'd like to ask is around competition.
There are a lot of other layer one smart contract platforms that have got a lot of market share, much bigger market caps than Algorand.
How do you think about going about recapturing some of that market share, growing and displacing some of these competitors?
How do you view that and how do you think about that?
Yeah.
So as I mentioned before, like Algorand has always been very unique in its positioning.
We've been around for seven years.
We had no downtime.
We have some of the most, probably the most elegant consensus mechanism out there that delivers really institutional grade quality.
And we are ahead of the curve time and time and time again.
We were ahead of the curve in terms of instant finality.
We're ahead of the curve in post-quantum security.
And so if there's one chain that you can trust.
for its institutional great abilities, it is Algorand.
And so not only on the basic blockchain elements have we innovated faster than anybody else, also the layers on top of it.
Like for instance, when you think about tokenization, the first stock ever tokenized on chain.
was on Algorand.
Exodus was the first stock that was fully tokenized on Algorand.
The largest real estate tokenization platform in the industry is running on Algorand.
It's called Lofty.
When you think about payments, we were, again, one of the first, like cross-border payments.
We have a lot of cross-border payments that are happening on Algorand.
Actually, we are the dominant e-payment system in, for instance, in Afghanistan.
Bekman may not care about Afghanistan, but there's over a million people that are basically using our blockchain for traditional regular payments.
in a country where the banking system is not working very well.
And so we're taking that.
We have partnerships with United Nations, with UNHCR, UNDP.
We're taking this infrastructure.
We're taking it to Syria, which is a much bigger opportunity.
So we are leading in this cross-border payment ecosystem.
And then, as I mentioned, we're also leading in Argentic.
We were one of the very first movers on Argentic as it relates to crypto.
As I mentioned, we are a launch partner with Google and AP2.
We're about to launch this new protocol.
So I think we have been consistently out of the curve in our seven years of existence and we will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible.
Great pitch.
I want to ask about the Algorand token, because you've talked a lot about these technical innovations.
You've talked a lot about some of the development work that's going on with the protocol.
Algorand right now, as of time of recording, is trading around $0.08 with a little bit under a billion-dollar market cap.
And I'm curious just how you think about the Algorand token as it fits into this ecosystem.
How does all this development work and activity drive value back to that token?
Well, obviously, you know, It's always a mystery to think about what drives the price of a token, so I'm not going to even attempt to give an answer to that.
But what I can say is that, of course, the algo is very important to us.
because it's a native token of the chain.
All fees on the chain are paid in ALGO.
The stakers are being paid in ALGO and the ALGO token is quite important to the overall kind of security of the network.
And so as we keep growing the ecosystem, as we bring on board more developers, as we bring on board more transactions, as the Gentic takes off, all of that hopefully will have a positive impact on how the ALGO gets traded.
But of course, this is completely out of my control.
Well, obviously, the algo will do what the algo will do, as is the same for any altcoin in the industry.
But I think that the potential, if I look at the Algorand ecosystem and the Algorand technology and the potential that we have as an ecosystem, I think it's tremendous potential.
And as I said, we're ahead of the curve on many, many of these components.
And so as blockchains become more widely used, I think that we will be a very, very strong player in that space.
Mark, Silvio, the founder of Algorand, is known as the father of modern cryptography.
And a lot of what we have in this industry wouldn't have been possible without a lot of the leaders from the Algorand ecosystem.
So I really appreciate you coming on The Milk Road Show to share what's going on with you guys recently and share a lot of these improvements and innovations you guys are still doing in the midst of a bear market.
So thank you so much for being here on The Milk Road Show.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
So you can find me online on x at Mark VL.
You can follow me there.
And Algorand Foundation is available at algorand.com or algorand.co.
And so you can also follow the Algorand Foundation on Twitter at Algo Foundation.
And so we're on Reddit.
We're on LinkedIn, obviously, as well.
So we have many, many ways for you to stay in touch with us.
Mark Vandlerberg.
Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer for the Algorand Foundation.
Thank you so much for being on The Milk Road Show.
Thank you, John.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
I know I did.
There's a lot of the things in this conversation I want to look into more for myself.
But until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
And we will see you all in the next episode of The Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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