January 30, 2026
Client: Algorand Foundation
Spokesperson/responses attributable to: Marc Vanlerberghe, CMO, Algorand
Reporter contact: Amelia Tomasicchio, Editor in Chief and Co-founder, The Cryptonomist
- What motivated the Algorand Foundation to re-establish its U.S. headquarters, and why Delaware in particular?
| It’s actually just as important to explain why we left in the first place. For a period of time, the regulatory environment in the U.S. made it difficult to operate with the level of clarity and predictability that serious financial infrastructure requires. That uncertainty pushed many organizations, including ours, to operate elsewhere. What’s changed is that we now see a path toward clearer rules and more constructive engagement, which makes long-term planning possible again. Delaware, specifically, is widely accepted as the national standard for mission-driven technology organizations operating at scale. Its legal clarity, well-established governance framework, and the Court of Chancery’s century of expertise in corporate law provide a reliable foundation for our U.S. operations. For us, this move is about building durable infrastructure inside a system institutions already understand and trust. |
- How does the newly constituted board shape Algorand’s strategic priorities for the next phase of growth?
| The composition of the board reflects the reality of where Algorand is today and where it’s headed next. Our strategic focus is financial empowerment and making blockchain the preferred rail for the future of finance. That’s a complex goal, and it demands a wide range of expertise. Michael Mosier brings deep regulatory experience from his time at FinCEN. Rebecca Rettig contributes legal leadership from the digital asset space. Bill Barhydt brings technology and entrepreneurial perspective, while Alex Holmes adds institutional and payments experience from banking and MoneyGram. And of course, Staci brings extensive TradFi experience as CEO. That mix allows us to move forward thoughtfully by balancing innovation with oversight, and ambition with real-world constraints. |
- What key opportunities do you see in the U.S. market for Algorand’s ecosystem, especially compared to other regions?
| The U.S. remains the deepest, most liquid, and most efficient financial system in the world, representing roughly 40% of global equity and fixed income markets. If your goal is to bring finance on-chain in a meaningful way, there really is no better place to be. The U.S. is also a global leader in developer talent and entrepreneurship. That matters enormously. Innovation happens where builders, capital, and institutions intersect. Being present in the U.S. allows Algorand to support that intersection directly. |
- How does Algorand plan to differentiate itself in the increasingly crowded blockchain and crypto space, particularly in the U.S.?
| We’re very clear about what we’re here to do and what we’re not. Algorand is laser-focused on financial empowerment and bringing finance on-chain. That means tokenizing assets, making them composable in DeFi, enabling payments, and increasingly supporting agentic commerce. Other chains are optimized for speculation or memecoins. That’s not our lane. From a technology standpoint, we’ve solved for the core constraints that actually matter at scale: security, scalability, and decentralization. We offer instant finality, atomic transactions, high reliability, and a protocol designed to be quantum-resistant. These aren’t features layered on later; they’re foundational design decisions that are built for real-world financial systems. We’ve also invested heavily in developer usability, with tooling like TypeScript support, wallet infrastructure, and X402. The goal is to make it easier for builders to create serious financial applications without friction. |
- Will the Foundation’s marketing approach shift with this renewed U.S. presence, and if so, how?
| The focus remains on telling a clear story about financial empowerment, but the timing has finally caught up to that story. The “future of finance” has always been blockchain’s core promise, but for a long time, the environment wasn’t ready. With progress on market structure legislation, greater clarity around initiatives like the GENIUS Act, and the maturity of Algorand’s technology, we believe the moment has arrived. Marketing now becomes about connecting those dots and explaining why this technology is ready for real adoption, and why Algorand is particularly well-positioned to lead that shift. |
- How do you envision Algorand’s brand resonating with both institutional players and retail audiences in this new chapter?
| Trust is central to our positioning, and it matters to both audiences. Algorand is highly decentralized, with more than 2,000 nodes. It’s also extremely reliable; the network has never gone down in over six years. It doesn’t fork. It delivers immediate transaction finality. Those are not abstract claims – they’re operational realities. In finance, trust is everything. Institutions need it for governance and risk management. Retail users need it so that things simply work when they use them. Algorand’s infrastructure is designed to support both. |
- With global payments and asset tokenization highlighted as pillars, what specific initiatives or partnerships can we expect in these areas?
| On the global payments side, we focus on providing payments infrastructure where it currently doesn’t exist, where it’s broken, or where there is a lot of friction. A prime example of this is the humanitarian aid payments we facilitate in economically distressed areas while maintaining payment transparency and user privacy. While not putting anything personally identifiable onchain, we are making aid flows transparent, trustworthy, and verifiable through the Aid Trust Portal, an initiative that visually shows every dollar of aid being traced in real time. This year, we plan to continue scaling initiatives like HesabPay in Afghanistan and Syria, deepen our work with Paycode in Africa, and grow the Humanitarian Aid Payments Council into a standing body that shapes the future of humanitarian finance. On the asset tokenization side, we plan to make it easier to tokenize assets and to continue making multichain interoperability possible through expanding on integrations like Wormhole NTT and our partnership with Allbridge. This is a major area of growth for us as we strive to give users and developers seamless access to stablecoin liquidity across multiple blockchains and establish our position as a hub for onchain finance. |
- How does Algorand plan to engage developers and entrepreneurs to accelerate ecosystem adoption in the U.S.?
| In our effort to accelerate ecosystem adoption in the U.S., we plan to leverage agentic commerce, lean on neobanks, and amplify DeFi protocols on our networks through vaults and other yield-bearing strategies. Agentic commerce will allow for autonomous transactions, creating new opportunities for developers to build on Algorand, especially through using our agentic payment toolkit. The bridge between TradFi and DeFi, and a tool for programmatic staking, neobanks are part of our strategy to provide financial services to unbanked populations via smartphone access, heightening adoption globally. Amplifying DeFi protocols is an ongoing effort, furthered by partnerships like the one with Noah to help connect TradFi and DeFi through seamless, compliant payment infrastructure on our blockchain. |
- How will the new board’s expertise in finance, technology, and regulatory policy influence Algorand’s role in shaping U.S. blockchain regulations and standards?
| We’re extremely privileged to have such a senior board that can guide us in this very complex space. Our diverse board brings practical market expertise, regulatory fluency, and real operating experience that helps the Algorand Foundation make better decisions, move faster on partnerships, and scale real-world financial applications responsibly, all of which play into U.S. blockchain conventions. There are other industry players that will have more weight in D.C. than we have. What we want is not different from what many in the industry want. We look forward to working with other players in the crypto space to move regulation in a direction that unlocks innovation and provides clarity, and we imagine a path forward marked by cohesion as we jointly shape blockchain standards and regulations. |
- Looking ahead, what does “financial empowerment” mean for Algorand, and how will marketing communicate that vision effectively to diverse stakeholders?
| Financial empowerment means giving users full control over their financial future. Your money should work for you 24/7 and generate a risk-free return. Payments should be instant, frictionless, and cheap. Everything that users can do with their money, from investing to saving to borrowing to lending to staking, will move onchain and stop happening in walled gardens, allowing for free mixing and matching across blockchains. With this, we hope to drive more mainstream adoption, simplify the developer and builder experiences, and enable a higher volume of transactions while remaining energy efficient, sustainable, and humanitarian-focused. We’re in a unique position to realize this vision, and we have the underlying technology and reliability to make it happen. |
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/02/07/algorands-return-u-s-building-trusted-blockchain-infrastructure-future-finance/
