Blockchain Merger: Alogrand and Props join Forces

The development on Algorand’s Proof of Stake blockchain continues. Earlier this year, the ambitious blockchain project has announced incorporate a multi-chain architecture, which allows developers to create their own consortium blockchain, which runs parallel to the central mainchain, only months after the protocol update to Algorand 2.0, which brought additional layer 1 features.

Besides their on-chain development, Algorand keeps growing its ecosystem. Now, they have scored another coup, as Props has now announced to migrate from their private blockchain, which was forked off from Ethereum to Algorand. Currently, PropsChain is operated by a small number of validators. With the move to the public blockchain Algorand, Props wants to achieve a larger pool of validators and a vastly improved scalability, according to Props co-founder Adi Sideman.

Lots of potential Partnerships

Props is a brainchild of the popular streaming platform YouNow. Touting itself as a “loyalty program on steroids”, Props serves as a platform for various social network applications to reward their users for participating and bringing value to the network.

Applications that participate in the Props loyalty program include the video chat app Camfrog, the sharing marketplace Listia, and of course YouNow itself. Other services that have expressed interest in joining Props are the video game streaming service XSplit and the video chat app Paltalk.

The youngest addition to the Props ecosystem is Dating.com, which has 15 dating apps under its wings, with 73 million users worldwide. Now, Props’ rich ecosystem will be merged with the Algorand ecosystem. The latter features high-profile blockchain projects, such as Meld, an Australian company which brings together various players in gold supply chains to revolutionize the way gold can be bought, stored, or sold.

Recently, Algorand has partnered with the Republic of the Marshall Islands for their planned Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Other high-class blockchain projects working together with Algorand are the largest stablecoin Tether and the world-leading decentralized exchange IDEX.

Algorand ecosystem members which might be potential partners for Props include the identity-centric projects FlexFinTx, Shyft, and Dust Identity, the content monetization platform RHOVIT, the copyright management platform SAIE, or the cloud rendering network OTOY. It will be interesting to see, how Props is going to utilize the various new connections that will be formed with their transition to the Algorand blockchain.

How will Props benefit from Algorand’s Technology?

Last autumn, Algorand has released its first protocol update. Algorand 2.0 added new technological features to the highly scalable Proof of Stake blockchain, such as standardized assets, smart contracts at layer 1, and atomic transfers.

Lately, Algorand plans the introduction of a multi-chain architecture, similar to other ambitious scalability solutions like Polkadot and Cosmos. Since Props is used to operate on a private blockchain, they might become one of the first adopters of Algorand’s co-chain technology.

Since one of the reasons for Props to migrate to Algorand was that they wanted to increase their number of validators, it is questionable whether they are interested in hosting a consortium co-chain. This will likely depend on finding a good consensus model that attracts validators to their co-chain. Another option could be to develop a hybrid model, where most assets are stored on the Algorand mainchain, utilizing a co-chain for additional scalability.

So far, no technical details about Props’ development plans have been revealed, but it might be worth keeping an eye on.

Conclusion

Originally, Props has emerged as a fork from the Ethereum blockchain. Such forks were somewhat commonplace in the last few years. Now we are seeing a merger of two seperate blockchains, each with their own ecosystem.

Right now, the potential to merge blockchains is not very well researched. However, joining two ecosystems for a mutual benefits makes a lot of economical sense in terms of network effects. By partnering with Algorand, Props can vastly improve its tech stack and gains access to a lot of potential partnerships, while Algorand gains another high-profile ecosystem member.

Time will tell how exactly Props and Algorand will profit from their partnership, but if successful, it will likely not be the last instance of two blockchain ecosystems joining forces.