The League of Entropy Launches Production Drand Network, Providing the First Publicly Verifiable Distributed Randomness Beacon

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today a consortium of technology companies and universities launched an upgraded public randomness network. Drand is a distributed randomness beacon that generates verifiable, unpredictable, and unbiasable random numbers as a service available for all. Drand's largest deployment is known as the League of Entropy, and its founding members include Cloudflare, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Kudelski Security, Protocol Labs, and the University of Chile. With the upgraded drand network, the consortium also announced its expanded member list, now also including C4DT, ChainSafe, cLabs, Emerald Onion, Ethereum Foundation, IC3, PTisp, Tierion, and UCL, and a new model of collaborative governance to better protect drand for its users.

The upgrade to drand, which was initially developed by Nicolas Gailly at the DEDIS laboratory and first launched as an experimental research network in 2019, includes many new features and architecture improvements to make it a production-level service. The updates include a three-layered network architecture, deployment and network monitoring tools, a full specification and security model and more.

Filecoin, Protocol Labs' decentralized storage network, is the first production user of drand. Drand's randomness values record the consensus of all clients on the correct history of the Filecoin blockchain and powers the leader elections that decide which miner will publish a new block to the blockchain, which ensures the Filecoin blockchain continues to grow.

The League of Entropy believes that drand can become a fundamental internet service. 

David Dias, P2P Software Engineer and Researcher at Protocol Labs, said, "We're thrilled to make the upgraded drand network available for the world to access. Drand has the potential to transform the internet as we know it by offering an unbiasable and publicly verifiable randomness beacon. We look forward to seeing how drand gets used by mission critical and high value operations, such as new blockchain systems, like Filecoin."

Nick Sullivan, Head of Research at Cloudflare, said, "The League of Entropy is creating the basis for future systems to leverage trustworthy public randomness online, and the new collaborative governance will only improve its ability to do so. We're excited to watch drand help prevent bias and detect manipulation in elections, lotteries, and distributed ledger platforms, and improve the Internet for generations to come."

Ryan Spanier, VP of Innovation at Kudelski Security, said, "We are excited to launch the next iteration of the drand network, and are proud to provide three secure, trusted sources of randomness fully monitored by our Cyber Fusion Center. Issues in randomness generation remain among the most common vulnerabilities uncovered by our cryptography audit teams and we hope that drand will contribute to build a safer digital space."

Randomness is crucial for nearly every sector of modern society – from voting systems and traffic management to financial services and secure communications. In order for public randomness to be practical, it needs to be unpredictable, verifiable, bias-resistant, decentralized, and always available, which drand achieves.

To learn more about drand, visit their new website at https://drand.love/.

About the League of Entropy

The League of Entropy is a consortium of organizations that are working together to produce a truly random beacon. Members currently include C4DT, ChainSafe, cLabs, Cloudflare, Emerald Onion, EPFL, Ethereum Foundation, IC3, Kudelski Security, Protocol Labs, PTisp, Tierion, UCL and the University of Chile.  Every other existing randomness beacon is generated by an individual entity, which means that an adversary would need to take control of only one party to tamper with randomness. This is the first time ever that a randomness beacon is run by several organizations in concert. The League of Entropy has created a global unbiased beacon that can be cryptographically verified, an industry first.

SOURCE The League of Entropy