Decentralized Randomness Beacon
The League of Entropy is a collaborative project 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. Please visit the project site at drand.love for the most up-to-date information on current operations.
The League of Entropy is a consortium of organizations that are working together to produce a truly random beacon.
This is the first time that a randomness beacon has been run by several organizations in concert. 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. The founding members Cloudflare, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Kudelski Security, Protocol Labs, and the University of Chile created the first unbiased beacon that can be cryptographically verified, an industry first. As more members join the League of Entropy, the guarantees grow stronger as any biasing attempt becomes significantly more difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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 of Entropy currently comprises the following organizations:
It also includes contributions from Nicolas Gailly, Philipp Jovanovic, and Ludovic Barman.
The League is not exclusive. If your organization would like to participate, send us an email to leagueofentropy@googlegroups.com and we'll get back to you.
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