Thank you for raising this — these are fair questions, and I’ll share my perspective as a long-time builder in the ecosystem, though I’d also encourage asking directly on Reddit when the Algorand Foundation holds their next AMA — for example, the July AMA is a good place to see how they’ve addressed similar questions before.
At a basic level, ALGO’s price is driven by supply and demand — how many people want to buy versus how many want to sell. It’s also worth noting that a single large buyer or seller can outweigh many smaller participants on the other side.
Algorand has a total supply of 10 billion ALGO. The Algorand Foundation (AF) was allocated a portion of these tokens to distribute to projects, the market, and other investors. The basic principle for any market asset is that when demand exceeds supply, price rises — and conversely, if more ALGO enters the market than people are willing to buy, the price tends to fall.
From what I’ve observed, AF tends to play the long game: when the price is above some rolling average, they sell into the market, and when the price is down, selling tends to pause, picking back up again once the market recovers a bit. These are two addresses where this kind of structural selling can be tracked: 44GW..GH7E and 37VP..7YKI. Together they’ve put roughly 154M ALGO into the market, enough to fund about 154 billion transactions on the chain in past year. What happens to those funds afterward is a bit of an open question, since AF doesn’t publish its bank accounts and isn’t included in the transparency report — though it’s reasonable to assume most of it goes toward funding operations: employee compensation, event attendance, and marketing.
I understand AF has been working on something referred to as “king safety” aimed at ensuring the Foundation has sufficient resources even after the remaining ALGO allocation is exhausted. My concern is that if the proposal centers mainly on raising network fees, it may not address the underlying issue — if the price were to decline significantly, say 20x, even a 10x fee increase could make things quite difficult for developers and builders, without meaningfully solving the core problem. I’d be cautious about a scenario where that gets framed as a security necessity in a way that shifts the 10B market cap consensus.
That said, I think Algorand remains a genuinely strong protocol — instant finality, quantum security, no forking, low enough fees for micropayments, excellent developer tooling, and zero downtime. That said, one scenario worth thinking through: if the price were to decline substantially, there could be an incentive for an actor to acquire enough ALGO to influence network validation, take a leveraged short position, and then disrupt the network by taking a validator offline. In that case, since the protocol wasn’t designed with an easy path to recover from that kind of stall, it could trigger a severe price drop — potentially 10-50x — while the network figures out how to come back online. Silvio’s original design assumed network participants would step up to protect the system, but realistically, if projects would need to buy ALGO at current price levels in meaningful quantity to defend the network while AF is also selling into the market, that kind of coordinated defense seems unlikely to materialize.
One thing that I believe could help turn price momentum positive is a shift in thinking at the AF leadership level — specifically, moving away from consistently selling into the market. If the amount of ALGO entering circulation from AF were lower than the ALGO collected in fees plus ALGO purchased by market participants and bought back by AF, that would create more favorable price dynamics.
I’d also note that AF recently transitioned from a non-profit to a for-profit structure. This is meaningful because it suggests that mechanisms like funding wallets like Pera through loans may no longer be necessary — instead of lending out ALGO/USDC, they could make direct investments and account for losses transparently. The main open question, in my view, is who actually owns the for-profit AF. There’s been little public documentation on this, and it appears that ALGO token holders aren’t necessarily AF equity holders. If they were, there would presumably be some voting mechanism to change leadership — but currently, I’m not aware of one that exists for ALGO holders.
That said, I do think there are constructive paths forward. For instance, if AF pursued an IPO on a US exchange and operated more like a treasury company, investing in yield-generating assets within the ecosystem, they could grow the treasury’s value and potentially begin buying back ALGO tokens, similar to the approach Michael Saylor has taken with Bitcoin at MicroStrategy. That could be a sustainable model. It would also be important for AF’s accounting to be net positive without relying on token sales. As a rough example, if AF’s operating costs are $1M/month, that would call for roughly $240M in productive investments to cover costs through a 5% yield, rather than through further token sales. Increasing fee collection alone, even 10x, likely wouldn’t be sufficient to close that gap on its own — though if the ALGO price were to rise substantially, say to $10, the picture would look quite different. But the first and most important step, in my view, is reducing sustained sell pressure from the largest holder.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the Algorand Foundation — just a builder who’s been working in the Algorand ecosystem for over 6 years. Some of the projects I’ve contributed to include the first concentrated liquidity AMM (Biatec DEX), the Aramid bridge, the first open-source wallet (Biatec Wallet), Biatec MCP tools, the tokenized gold project (ASA.Gold), the Vote Coin project, the ARC56 Registry, and the Algo Safe smart contract wallet, among others.