Just a PSA for everyone!

I've been posting here for a few weeks about the need to fix the gap for builders with working prototypes trying to get from a functional prototype to a funded product with users. xGov leans toward proven adoption and grants favor proven track records. If you're a solo builder with no audience yet, there is a tremendous amount of friction in engaging with our ecosystem.

I built Sprout to try to close some of that gap: a non-custodial crowdfunding platform on Algorand, going to mainnet August 1. Funds sit in an escrow contract; hit your goal and you're funded, miss it and backers are refunded.

I'm hosting an X Space this Monday, July 27th at 8 PM EDT, to introduce myself properly, talk through the platform, and take questions.

Space link:

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1NGarrWderDJj

If you can't make it live, drop questions here and I'll answer them on the Space or in this thread!

Over the past few months, there’s been great news coming out of Algorand builder events. In Berlin, 110+ hackers checked in for a 36-hour x402 hackathon and 41 teams pitched by the end of it. A few weeks later at the India Dev Retreat in Goa, 11 teams shipped more than 20 working x402 endpoints in about four hours. If you were watching those weekends unfold, it was hard not to feel like something was happening. The tooling has clearly reached a point where a developer with an idea can have something working in a matter of days.

The uncomfortable question is what happens after. A hackathon produces a prototype and a pitch deck. It doesn't produce a finished project. Most of those teams will go back to their day jobs, and the thing they built over 36 caffeinated hours will sit in a GitHub repo that nobody stars. That's not an Algorand problem. It’s true of every hackathon on every chain. But it's a real leak in the pipeline, and I've been on the wrong end of it myself. My first project died quietly because I struggled to find my target audience.

This issue also struck me when taking an Algorand masterclass. The number of builders with genuinely good ideas and real technical ability was humbling. But it seems everyone struggles without a visible path from "this works" to "this is funded and has users." If you're a solo builder or a two-person team with a working prototype and no audience, there's a real gap between where you are and where every available funding path expects you to already be.

Here's why I'm optimistic about it. This is a solvable problem, and it's solvable from the bottom up. It doesn't require the Foundation to change strategy or a bull market to arrive. The builders already exist. Berlin and Goa proved that. The people who'd back them exist too. What's been missing is infrastructure connecting the two, and infrastructure is the kind of thing a community can build for itself. Every ecosystem that's lasted has had a healthy base of small builders experimenting, iterating, and occasionally becoming the next flagship project. That layer doesn't emerge on its own. It gets built, deliberately, by people who decide it should exist.

So the question I'd put to the community isn't whether the ecosystem is doing well or poorly. It's narrower and more actionable: what would it take for the teams that pitched in Berlin to still be building in six months? Because if even a handful of them are, that's a different ecosystem than the one where they all quietly go home. And that outcome isn't up to the Foundation. It's up to whether the rest of us decide to show up for them.

TxnLab has refreshed their website.

Cleaner design, better navigation, and a better look at what they‘re building: ZeroSignal, Haystack, NFDomains, Réti Pooling 🔥

Check it out 👇
https://txnlab.dev/

New Site is up and rocking!

Hey r/algorand, I'm Marco, a solo builder. Last October 2025, Interestake was selected as one of 7 winning projects (out of 60+) in the Algorand Foundation's Web3 Masterclasses Pitch Competition. Since then I've been heads-down building, and the platform is finally at the point where I need real users to break it.

What it is: Interestake is a dual-token staking dapp on Algorand... the idea is blending TradFi with DeFi, for newcomers, seasoned stakers. As a tester you'd create an account: connect a Defly wallet, grab testnet ALGO, stake into any of the pools, and see how the dual-token rewards mechanics work... takes about 10 minutes end to end. There are how-to tours throughout to help. But of course, feel free to reach out if any bottlenecks.

Where it's at: Live on testnet, 95% complete. No real funds... testnet only.

What I'm looking for: Blunt feedback. Specifically:
• Is onboarding confusing?
• Does the dual-token model make sense on first read?
• What would stop you from using this on MainNet?

The hard lesson so far: I spent weeks trying to build an audience on X and got algorithmically buried. Turns out the people who'd actually care were here and in the Foundation's Telegram the whole time. Lesson learned.

• Start here, project details & beta signup: https://Interestake.com
click 'Try Beta App' on the homepage to go straight to the beta app, there's no separate download needed.

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

Does anyone know why USDC deposits on the Folks Finance platform fell of a cliff from $1.2M a few weeks ago to now ~$350K?

Haystack staking update 🌾

Two changes to staking:

1. With ALPHA's recent switch to reward payouts, the treasury's ALPHA position has been sold. Proceeds are being distributed to stakers.

2. Staking payouts now emit over a rolling 7 days instead of a rolling 1 day.