"Algorand’s ecosystem helped us succeed”:
In conversation with Michel Dahdah of Rand Labs

Michel Dahdah is the co-founder of Rand Labs, a blockchain development lab focusing on accelerating the global financial revolution. We caught up with him to understand why Algorand was his ecosystem and blockchain of choice.

Michel, tell us a bit about yourself and your background. How did you get into the blockchain space? What was your inspiration, or the thing that started you off on this path?

I’m originally from Venezuela, and most of our team at Rand Labs is from Argentina; although we have members from all over LatAm and Europe. Historically, both of these countries really felt the use case for crypto a lot earlier than many other places globally. Back in 2013, Argentina was in hyperinflation, with the same happening in Venezuela not long after. Whereas much of the world focused on the speculative aspect of crypto, places like Venezuela came to rely on it in a much more practical sense, as a way of escaping the weaknesses of the local currency.

Most of our team were very early adopters of crypto. I started mining Bitcoin in Venezuela in 2016. Electricity was cheap, and it was relatively profitable compared to other places in the world. I learnt a lot about blockchain technology then, and inevitably caught the bug!

I ended up working in Cambridge, near Boston MA, at a startup called Algo Depth. We used data analytics and financial expertise to advise hedge funds on how to improve their portfolio construction. The blockchain space was starting to boom around Boston and that kept dragging my attention to the point where I eventually decided to leave and focus full time on Web3! I founded a company called AlgoLedge (a coincidental name - no relation to Algo Depth), we got funding, and started doing asset-backed lending. People would post collateral as crypto and we would lend dollars, with private equity investments.

That’s already a lot of “Algo”...! How did you get involved with Algorand?

Being in Cambridge, I was already very involved with the Web3 community. I met Silvio (the Algorand founder) back in 2017 at an event in MIT... and I just fell in love with what he was building. There were multiple things that won me over, but in simple terms, it was the consensus algorithm and their overall approach to scaling.

I had already met my future co-founder, Pablo, at a Bitcoin conference back in Colombia in early 2017. We had immediately hit it off, and had been keeping an eye out for ways that we could work together. We both researched more about Algorand, met the team, and that’s when we decided we wanted to build our future with Algorand.

There are two things you can bet with: your time, and your money. We decided to invest our time and resources by founding Rand Labs as a kind of infrastructure builder for Algorand. This was before Algorand’s test network had even launched - by the time that happened, we already had Algo Explorer running as our first product. The Algo Explorer is an advanced blockchain explorer for the Algorand network. Soon after, we launched My Algo - a web wallet.

What's your main focus at Rand Labs these days?

We put our entire effort into what we do. As well as those two main “pillar” products, we focus on simplifying blockchain access for everyone through API usage and infrastructure. Rand Labs removes a lot of the overhead and complexity, helping people adopt it more easily, and spend more time on what they want. We’ve done a lot of things that have helped the wider community, which is important to us.

Our mission as a company is to bring blockchain adoption to everyone, by building leading infrastructure. We always put the Algorand ecosystem first. We prioritize it over any individual needs.

We know that for Rand Labs, for all of us, to succeed, Algorand needs to succeed: they go hand-in-hand.

We’re also focusing on developer experience and tooling a lot more these days. We want to make sure that the technologies we’ve developed are available and accessible, so that more and more people can build on Algorand.

What about Algorand convinced you it was the right choice?

The first thing is the consensus. After the Nakamoto consensus of Bitcoin, there’s never really been anything revolutionary in the industry - until now. Bonded proof of stake, delegated proof of stake… These are not new systems, though people tend to think they are. The Bitcoin consensus, combining economic incentives with a way to generate randomness from machines: that was truly different. What’s so incredible about Algorand is that, for the first time, Silvio and his colleagues and their genius math have been able to accomplish to a very high degree the same use case with VRF. It’s truly revolutionary and unbelievably innovative. I fell in love with it.

We also really liked the philosophical approach of Algorand. They’ve chosen to make short term trade-offs for long term benefit, and those benefits are for the sake of the network and its users. For instance, it would be much easier in some ways to just do an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) copycat that’s compatible with solidity and all the Ethereum tools. But it has massive network effects; every single developer tool exists in Ethereum or EVM compatible chains. Algorand did something different - they sacrificed all those network effects in order to make the network ultra fast and reliable. This way, it doesn’t matter how many users end up building on Algorand, the network information will always propagate in 4 seconds. It makes the design of Algorand unbelievably scalable.

How has Algorand meaningfully helped Rand Labs? What’s been supportive?

Sharing knowledge was the fundamental one. We collaborated closely when learning how to build out our initial tools, and that was invaluable.

The community has also been great - I mean, early adopters of Algorand were also some of our very first users, and a lot of them have gone on to become founders of different amazing verticals in the crypto space. The growth is so positive, and it really makes Algorand unique. People who start out as newcomers, who become involved and are passionate, they bring so much to the community, and can become leaders in so many different areas of the wider ecosystem in just a few years.

The Algorand Foundation has been extremely supportive. They’ve helped us with grants, with technical aspects, with outreach, so much. The developer relations team at Algorand is also amazing - we’ve worked with engineers who have had the opportunity to build on top of every single blockchain as part of integrations work, and they all say the same thing: the developer support at Algorand is incredible. The documentation, the dev rel support, the walkthroug... It’s the best in the industry.

It’s experiences and support like these that make us so invested in building great products and being able to give back to such a genuinely good community.

What advice would you give to people in your shoes five years ago, or someone looking to pick a blockchain, tooling, or ecosystem for their project?

Technology will continue to evolve, but we’re still in the first innings of this technological revolution. Don’t take shortcuts.

Rand Labs is now a company of around 50 people. As builders, we’re trying to generate long term value for our shareholders. That requires having a long term mindset. The key to building and maintaining a competitive edge, to getting 1-2 billion users, is picking what’s best for the job and not falling victim to current gimmicks or developer tribalism. Pick the database that is truly right for the job not the one your friends told you is good because they own the coin. Learn to recognize when you’re making an irrational choice - this is why having a pragmatic approach in this industry is essential.

“Avoid tribalism when picking your ecosystem or chain. Choose the right technology for yourself and your users, that can support you and scale.”

Keep your users in mind. They have never cared whether you have Postgres or MongoDB or SQL powering your application! They care about what’s in front of them: What you solve for them. Be confident you’re building the thing they really need.

And what about to developers who are perhaps a little skeptical about crypto or Web3? As someone in the industry, what are your insights for curious Web2 developers?

What’s happening right now is a once in a lifetime opportunity. A rising tide lifts all boats, and this is probably the biggest wave we will see in our lifetimes - perhaps even longer. If you’re in a position to learn, to possibly take on some risk for risk/reward ventures, there’s nothing better than giving it a go right now. Learn, build on Web3, try out your own idea or join a team.

I’m part Lebanese, so as well as seeing hyperinflation in Argentina and Venezuela, I’ve seen the first hand impact of currencies failing multiple times in my lifetime in countries around the world. It might be hard to accept today, but the world is changing, and the evidence - the first steps - are all around us as we see central banks around the world face the wall. The mighty dollar will eventually weaken, and human change on such a large scale is always hard to watch play out, luckily there is an entire financial system being built in parallel to the traditional one. So at some point we are going to find ourselves in an entirely crypto native world.

Lastly, the future is multi-chain. Developers should know that and plan accordingly. They should research and work with organizations who share their values, can support them, and encourage endless innovation. Algorand has been incredible for us, and I strongly believe they are part of the foundation of the future.