Events

Users of drand, League of Entropy members and companies interested in joining the League of Entropy.

drand & LoE Summit

Tokyo International Exchange Center, Plaza Heisei

10:15	Looking back on 3 years of running drand: the largest public distributed random beacon service, Patrick McClurg

11:00	Generating randomness under asynchrony: Possible and Practical!, Lefteris Kokoris Kogias

11:30	Randomness and specifications, Filippo Valsorda

13:30	Alice in Randomland: PVSS, TLPs, VRFs, a glance thru' the looking glass of acronyms and random beacons, Bernardo David

14:00	The Supra DVRF Service explained, Pratyay Mukherjee

14:30	Notes about the NIST Reference for Randomness Beacons, Luis Brandao

14:45	Scalable Asynchronous Randomized Byzantine Agreement, Matej Pavlovic

15:15	Timelock Encryption using random beacons, Yolan Romailler

16:15	Building dee: a simple timelock client, Thibault Meunier	

The Randomness Summit is about all things related to Randomness and how it sometimes fails, or doesn’t in practice. Part of the organizing team is working on a practical randomness system, called drand (which stands for distributed randomness).

With this workshop, we would like to raise awareness about this open source project, but also interact with the academic and industry research communities to expand the applicability of drand and improve its resilience, so that it becomes the de facto randomness service of choice for the Cryptography community. Ultimately, together with the audience we want to identify the limitations of current solutions and explore where the divide between usability limitations vs research breakthroughs lies.

During this workshop, we plan to have a few prominent speakers in the ﬁeld of cryptography talking about their latest work related to Randomness and cryptography at large, but we also plan to have interactive sessions with the audience. Depending on the ﬁnal line-up, we are considering giving a tutorial on the speciﬁcs of drand and other randomness services to open up the discussion around existing, practical systems that build on previous research that came out of venues such as RWC.

Drand (pronounced "dee-rand") is a distributed randomness beacon daemon written in Golang. Servers running drand can be linked with each other to produce collective, publicly verifiable, unbiased, unpredictable random values at fixed intervals using bilinear pairings and threshold cryptography.

Drand is meant to be an Internet infrastructure level service that provides randomness to applications, similar to how NTP provides timing information and Certificate Transparency servers provide certificate revocation information.

The Randomness Summit 2023

The drand community and developer base is expanding rapidly. drand usage is gaining momentum with many applications using drand to draw randomness for their systems. Code walkthroughs are a great way to gain a holistic view of the system, become familiar with nitty gritty details and ask questions in real time.

With those benefits in mind, we have designed and will be running a series of code walkthroughs on the drand codebase. The series consists of eight (8) sessions, taking place every other Tuesday at 1430 UTC, starting on the 20th of June. Each session is scheduled to last approximately 45mins with 30mins for Q&A and pair programming assistance.

Dates and session topics are subject to minor changes. Any modifications will be reflected in this event page.