Drand, the distributed randomness beacon that aims to serve as a foundational randomness service for the Internet, surpassed 1M rounds on July 7, 2021! The drand mainnet was launched in July 2020 and received a significant update on August 10, 2020. This update included a number of key features, such as its 3-layer network architecture, client implementations in Go, and Javascript, round to timestamp guarantees, deployment monitoring, and many other improvements (opens new window).
We have two reasons to celebrate today:
- Drand is celebrating its first anniversary since the launch of a significant upgrade to the mainnet on August 10, 2020, that enabled it to be used as a production-grade network! Drand has served as critical off-chain infrastructure for Filecoin (opens new window) (the world’s largest decentralized storage network) since its mainnet launch in Oct 2020 and several other projects in Web3 and beyond.
- Drand has been running smoothly without disruptions since its launch in July 2020 and recently completed 1M rounds - a significant milestone for this distributed randomness service for Web3 and the Internet at large! We would like to congratulate the League of Entropy (opens new window) members for achieving this milestone, and thank them for operating a reliable randomness service for the Internet (the League of Entropy (opens new window) is a collection of independent randomness beacon providers who work together to produce collective, publicly verifiable, unbiased, and unpredictable random values at fixed intervals).
There are also several reasons that you should be excited about the future of drand, which include:
- An exciting roadmap of new capabilities planned such as:
- Time-lock-encryption for mitigating threats related to Maximal Extractable Value (also referred to as MEV on Ethereum or front running, in DeFi and traditional financial exchanges),
- Availability of a higher frequency randomness beacon, running in parallel to the current 30-second beacon. This update will enable drand to be leveraged by a broader set of use cases across Web2 and Web3.
- Expanding the global distribution network operated by a growing number of Drand partners as part of the League of Entropy.
- New collaborations with projects in Web3 and DeFi that aim to enable applications across multiple ecosystems to leverage drand as a reliable and trustworthy source of randomness in a convenient, and effective manner.
- The drand team has a new Project Lead, who will focus on driving future development and growth of drand in collaboration with the League of Entropy.
- Drand is hiring! The team is looking for top talent to join our efforts to establish drand as the default random value generator for the Internet. Open positions include Senior Software Engineer in Distributed Systems, and Infrastructure Engineer. Take a look at our open roles (opens new window).
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that relies on drand as an off-chain source of randomness, and has benefited greatly from having a reliable, performant, and trustworthy randomness service that itself is decentralized. Using drand has reduced the complexity involved in building, and operating large scale Layer 1 blockchain protocols such as Filecoin. - Molly Mackinlay, Filecoin & IPFS Project Lead at Protocol Labs (opens new window)
Stay tuned for more exciting updates!
Onwards to 2M rounds, and beyond!
The League of Entropy evaluates, votes on, and onboards new members quarterly. If you want to be a part of the first production-grade distributed randomness beacon and help provide publicly verifiable randomness as a service, contact us at leagueofentropy@googlegroups.com. We are looking for enthusiastic teams with experience running secure production services who are interested in operating a drand node (opens new window).