🧩 “Algorand Foundation keeps selling
$ALGO to fund operations.”
True. But let’s put it into perspective.
$ALGO: 38M sold in Q4 2025, 24M in Q1 2026, 10.6M in Q2.
$XLM: Stellar’s Direct Development allocation went from ~11.95B XLM to ~1.94B. SDF explicitly sells XLM on Kraken, Coinbase, Bitstamp and directly to fund its operations and ecosystem work.
$ETH: Ethereum Foundation also sells ETH to fund operations. Its treasury policy explicitly ties ETH sales to its operating expenses and cash runway.
$ADA: Different model. Cardano uses its on-chain treasury. ~96.8M ADA was approved in 2025 for 12 months of core development, plus separate treasury funding for research, governance, marketing and events.
$DOT: Also treasury-funded. Polkadot spent ~19.9M DOT ($133M) in 2024, including $48M on outreach, $32M on development and $19M on business development.
So yes, Algorand sells ALGO to fund operations.
But using native tokens to pay for development, marketing and ecosystem operations is absolutely not unique to Algorand.
The main difference is that Algorand documents these sales much more openly than most, with quarterly reports detailing exactly how much was sold.
Transparency can make the selling look worse, simply because you can actually see it