MakerX innovations showcased at Algorand Decipher 2024 conference

Last month I had the privilege of joining our Chief Product Offier, Jess Panni, and Lead Engineer, Altynbek Orumbayev, in Barcelona for the Algorand Decipher conference!

We were super proud to see MakerX's name and work up in lights in both Staci’s keynote and John’s keynote 💪. A reflection of the significant innovations MakerX has been partnering with Algorand Foundation to deliver on.

The conference provided an excellent opportunity for MakerX to showcase and launch a range of innovative new AlgoKit capabilities we have worked on alongside Alessandro Cappellato Ferrari (Head of Product, Algorand Foundation) off the back of the release of Algorand Python (the programming language and underlying compiler we built) earlier in the year.

We gave presentations on the features we have diligently been working on and announced the following:

1. Lora the explorer, a revolutionary developer experience to visually understand transactions and concepts within the @Algorand blockchain
2. Algorand Python language and compiler first-class box storage support
3. An exciting innovation in the smart contract testing space with native Python testing allowing for more rigorous and lightning fast testing of Algorand Python contracts
4. The official release of the subscriber library, which makes it easy for developers to reliably build databases of on-chain data through a simple programming interface without needing to deploy complex infrastructure

Also, a big high five to Altynbek who spent a blistering 30 minute presentation non-stop live-coding and presenting (simultaneously) the creation, running, testing, debugging and deploying of a project from scratch using AlgoKit 🔥.

The Decipher conference was a big chance to learn the latest in business, regulatory and cryptographic innovations driven by Algorand Foundation and the wider ecosystem. Things that caught our attention included:

1. Cash-Based Assistance in Humanitarian Crises Advisory Council: which is a collaboration between Algorand Foundation, Worldpay, Mercy Corps, World Food Programme, Circle and others on how to use blockchain technology to improve the disbursement of aid.
2. Liquid Auth: The cryptographers and engineers within Algorand worked together to create a new industry-leading approach to create a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer connection between and end-user and an application that can be used to perform authentication, pass messages and provide cryptographic signatures of data using open standards like FIDO2 and webauthn. This has the potential to not only revolutionise and improve the web3 wallet experience, but also play a critical role in the decentralised identities and verified credentials space, which we have been doing deep work in.
3. 3.8b euro money market on EURD EMT: Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the Algorand ecosystem about Quantoz, who are a regulated company that have minted EURD, which is an E-Money Token (EMT). EMTs are like stablecoins, but are regulated by a central bank (in this case by the Dutch central bank) and mean that the tokens are considered legal tender in the same way that a bank note is. One of the big announcements from Decipher was that Quantoz have partnered with Archax (regulated exchange in UK) and abrdn (an investment firm with £367bn Assets Under Management) to create the first tokenised money market. We are excited about EMTs because they represent programmable real money.