Ideal Labs is working to develop onchain randomness solutions for substrate based chains and beyond. To date, we have participated in the web3 foundation’s grant program, where we developed a prototype version of a substrate-based randomness beacon. We are currently participants in the decentralized futures program. The work presented here is not covered within our contract with DF.
Verifiable randomness is a critical component for enabling fairness in decentralized protocols. Unfortunately, existing solutions for Substrate-based chains have limitations. We are proposing retroactive funding to support the development and maintenance of a Drand to Substrate bridge, bringing drand's verifiable randomness to Kusama.
We developed a drand bridge pallet, allowing Substrate-based runtimes to consume verifiable randomness from Drand's Quicknet. It can be used as a drop-in replacement anywhere the Randomness trait is used. We also built a node that supports host functions built with the arkworks-extensions library, which is required to efficiently verify drand's pulses. Finally, we developed a chain extension and smart contract environment so that the output of drand can be used within ink! smart contracts, along with a demonstration rock-paper-scissors game.
Key Benefits of this work include:
This post is to ask for feedback and review of our proposal for retroactive funding of our work on:
Retroactive funding will allow us to maintain and enhance this pallet, where we will work to support other beacons (e.g. NIST's beacon) and eliminate current limitations (see proposal). Our goal is for this to be an easy-to-use module for other networks - solochain or parachain - to acquire secure verifiable randomness and timelock encryption capabilities.
Read the full proposal here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wjn8Il3O5A51MU24CUdOhNyoU2YAABrLsWiOckM8Kg4/edit?usp=sharing