League of Entropy
Decentralized Randomness Beacon
The League of Entropy is a collaborative project between the founding members Cloudflare, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Kudelski Security, Protocol Labs, and University of Chile to provide a verifiable, decentralized randomness beacon. A decentralized randomness beacon combines randomness from multiple independent high entropy sources to generate a truly unbiased random number for anyone that may need a public source of randomness.
Current Status (as of May 11, 2020)
The League of Entropy is currently offline as the project maintainers perform updates to improve the reliability and robustness of the network. The changes are expected to be deployed in mid-June. Follow along here.
What is the League of Entropy?
The League of Entropy is a consortium of organizations that are working together to produce a truly random beacon.
This is the first time ever that a randomness beacon is run by several organizations in concert: École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Cloudflare, UChile, Kudelski Security, and Protocol Labs.
Every other existing randomness beacon is generated by an individual entity. This means that an adversary needs to only take control of one party to tamper with randomness. Cloudflare, along with other organizations and security experts, is creating a global unbiased beacon that can be cryptographically verified, an industry first.
Why does randomness matter?
Everything from computer security and quantum mechanics to lottery number generation requires some form of randomness. Random numbers are core to the functioning of many complex systems and processes, including electoral auditing and cryptography. Using multiple independent and verifiable randomness sources is key to ensuring an unbiased and robust random number.
There are many real-world use cases of why randomness matters. Here are three use cases.
Election Auditing
Most states require post-election auditing that are conducted by generating a list of random precincts or ballots to verify that elections were conducted in a fair manner. A truly random number sourced from multiple independent entities allows for a more trustworthy system.
Lotteries
The multi-billion dollar lottery industry relies on random numbers to declare winners. Exploitation of past randomness beacons warrants the need for a more robust system. A decentralized mechanism increases the surface area of trust and strengthens the integrity of the random number generation.
Distributed Ledger Platforms
In many cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based distributed computing platforms there is often a need for random selection at the application layer. One solution to prevent bias for such random selection is to use a distributed randomness beacon that has collaborative validators generate the random value, a system like drand.
The League
The League of Entropy currently comprises the following organizations:
- Cloudflare
- École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
- University of Chile
- Kudelski Security
- Protocol Labs
It also includes contributions from Nicolas Gailly, Philipp Jovanovic, and Ludovic Barman.
"The League" is not exclusive. The more entities join, the stronger the League becomes, as each new member makes any biasing attempt significantly harder.
JOIN US: Send an email with an overview of your entropy generation to: leagueofentropy@googlegroups.com and we'll get back to you.