Valar's seven-post Medium blog mapped Algorand's staking era, then went quiet

2026-08-20

staking · governance · xgov · discovery · web · algorand · updated

The last post, and the silence

On 27 June 2025, the Medium publication of Valar, Algorand's peer-to-peer staking platform, told its readers how the first election to the network's new xGov Council would work — and, in the same post, disclosed that one of the company's own co-founders was on the ballot. Three weeks later the votes were in and double-checked: Dr. Uroš Hudomalj had won one of 11 seats. The blog never published again.

Between 18 February and that final post, Valar published exactly seven articles. Read as a set, they form a plain-language record of the moment Algorand's incentive system changed — the retirement of rewarded governance, the arrival of protocol-level staking, and the election that bridged the two — written by a team whose business depended on readers understanding it.

A blog built to teach

The publication's About page carries a single line: 'Valar Peer-to-Peer Staking Platform: https://stake.valar.solutions'. The account's follower count sat at seven when the archive was last read — a minuscule readership, which makes its value today largely archival. The company behind it, Valar Solutions GmbH, is the Swiss operator of the staking marketplace that launched on mainnet the same day Algorand 4.0 activated staking rewards, after winning the Grandmaster prize at the 2024 Algorand Global Hackathon as iGoProtect and earning one of 14 places in the first Algorand Incubator cohort from more than 100 applications. The Algorand Foundation announced an undisclosed investment in February 2025; within two weeks it reported 18 million ALGO staked through the platform across 120 accounts, about 6 percent of all accounts then participating in consensus.

The blog, in other words, was the educational arm of a young company with early momentum — and it chose to market by teaching rather than by announcing.

The launch chapter: a primer on the staking era

The first post, 'Staking and Governance on Algorand Blockchain' (18 February 2025), is the founding document of the staking era. It explains what changed on 23 January: block producers began earning 50 percent of a block's collected fees plus a Foundation-supplied bonus that started at 10 ALGO per block and declines by 1 percent every millionth block. Against the online stake of early 2025, the blog calculated a yearly staking rate near 6.8 percent — a figure it rounded to roughly 7 percent a month later — versus 2.8 percent for general governance rewards and an additional 10 percent for governors participating through DeFi.

Eligibility runs from 30,000 to 70 million ALGO per account, a band designed to reward decentralization while keeping a floor under responsible node running; accounts participating in consensus had already more than doubled since the start of the year. The post's core contribution was a quantified snapshot of what it called untapped potential, drawn from a 10 billion total supply with about 8.4 billion in circulation:

The closing move was a funnel: the post pointed holders to stake.valar.solutions, which 'automatically checks if your account has minted gALGO at FolksFinance, and gives you the option to easily stake it.'

The March curriculum: four models, nine risks, one conclusion

March delivered the pedagogical core. 'Blockchain Staking: What It Is and the Options Available' (20 March) opened with a dictionary definition — stake, the noun, is 'something that you risk losing' — and walked through the four ways a holder can participate:

The same post benchmarked annual reward rates across the major proof-of-stake chains:

The companion post, 'Blockchain: Risks with (Not) Staking' (13 March), was the most contrarian of the seven. It catalogued operational, jurisdictional, dilution, liquidity, slashing, smart-contract, minimum-balance and delegation risks, and argued that declining to stake is itself a risk position: you are implicitly delegating to the entire network while your relative influence — and on inflationary chains your absolute share — dilutes. It is here that Algorand's design matters most. Algorand has no slashing, so the realistic downside of a badly run node is missed rewards while it is offline, not seized principal — a property that makes the staking-delegation market structurally less frightening than on other chains.

The final March piece, 'The Potential of Digital Asset Ownership and Staking' (28 March), set the sector at close to three trillion US dollars and compared dollar-cost-averaging returns from 2023 to 2025 — DOT down about 19 percent, SOL up about 226 percent, ALGO and AVAX more modest — against traditional asset classes, where US bonds returned 5 percent and inflation ran near 3 percent. Its argument: staking yield can cushion price volatility. Each of the three posts ended at the same door.

When your block is late

'Where is my block?' (9 April) is the blog's most practical post and its only one with a shipped artifact. Because Algorand's Pure Proof-of-Stake consensus selects a block producer randomly on each round, with odds proportional to stake, rewards arrive on a probability schedule rather than a clock. The worked example: an account with 150,000 ALGO against the online stake of the day can expect roughly one block every 8 hours on average — yet observed intervals ranged from 4 to more than 40 hours, the account has a 35 percent chance of producing nothing in its first 8 hours, and a 1 percent chance of waiting the full 40.

The post came out of the 2025 Algorand Developer Retreat in Girona, Spain — the gathering that produced roughly 500,000 lines of code across nearly 40 open-source repositories — and it shipped a companion utility, block-anxiety, a small Python tool that takes an account address and reports the time since its last produced block and how probable that wait was. First committed in April 2025 by the account AlexanderMarinsek and last touched in May, the repository holds four stars, and its README links straight back to the blog post.

The governance finale: GP14 to GP15

Two posts bracketed the governance transition. 'Algorand Governance Period 14' (25 February) explained the five measures that would define the new xGov Council — whether members must publicly identify themselves after Know-Your-Customer checks, whether they could submit and vote on their own proposals, and whether they should be compensated, at a suggested cap of 10,000 ALGO per member per year. GP14 was the final rewarded period, and the post stressed that governance was being rebuilt around staking: anyone who kept custody of their ALGO — 'as for example with Valar peer-to-peer staking' — would remain eligible under the new model.

'Algorand Governance Period 15: xGov Council Election' (27 June) was the farewell. It explained the first unrewarded, ad-hoc period: a one-week commitment phase followed immediately by one week of voting, with governors casting YES, NO or ABSTAIN on each candidate. It also flagged a subtle eligibility split. Peer-to-peer stakers could vote because their ALGO never left their wallets; liquid staking tokens were supported; LP positions pairing at least 10,000 ALGO qualified. Users of Réti pooling could not vote that period. The rule came from the Algorand Foundation, and the post linked to the official announcement — but the framing also served as an argument for self-custody, the exact property Valar's own model preserves. In the same post, the blog disclosed that Hudomalj, a co-founder of Valar, was among the 22 candidates on the ballot.

The election its author previewed

The results landed on 17 July 2025. Hudomalj was elected to the first xGov Council, one of 11 members chosen to serve a 12-month term from 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026 at 5,000 ALGO compensation, as the community had voted in GP14. In January 2026 the Foundation went further, naming him one of three Community Representatives on the newly formed Ecosystem Advisory Council — a seat reserved for the top three vote-getters from that same election, alongside Simon Belingar of Cosmic Champs and Patrick Bennett of TxnLab.

The blog itself published nothing after 27 June. Its archive remains live — the company's own site still links to it as its Articles section — and its readership never grew past the seven followers. The silence does not mean the project stalled. The platform's live counter — its own accounting, and a decline from the 97.28 million ALGO third-party coverage reported in July 2026 — reads 83.37 million ALGO staked at a 4.99 percent yearly rate, roughly 4 percent of the network's online stake: material, not dominant. The network's online stake has grown by about a third since the blog's snapshot, as the gap between governance-only and staking ALGO that the first post quantified has narrowed:

Chart: ALGO online stake: Feb 2025 (blog's data) vs Aug 2026 (live)

A fair reading keeps the caveats attached. The blog was marketing as much as education — every explainer resolved to the same platform — and its governance coverage carried a personal stake it disclosed plainly rather than hid. The platform behind it carries the usual caveats of young staking infrastructure: its contracts are open-source and shipped with an extensive test suite, but no third-party security review is referenced in the public record, and each arrangement is ultimately a trust decision in the node runner who holds the participation key.

None of that changes what the archive is: a first-person narrative of the network's 2025 incentive transition, ending exactly where its author's own governance career began. As a funnel it was niche; as a historical record it is, so far, unmatched.

Source

• Valar – Medium
• Valar Solutions
• Valar Peer-to-Peer Staking Platform
• block-anxiety
• xGov Council 2025 — Official Election Results (Algorand Forum)
• Introducing the Algorand Ecosystem Advisory Council (Algorand Foundation)
• Peer-to-peer staking on Algorand: A guide to Valar
• xGov Council Election 2025 - Governance Discussions / xGov Council - Algorand
• Governance Rewards: It's a wrap! Reflecting, and what comes next.
• [[xGov][Beta] xGov User Guide Introduction - #7 by Adri - Governance and xGov Guides - Algorand](https://algorand.co/resources/xgov-guide)

Source: https://valar-staking.medium.com