Drand: Publicly Verifiable Randomness Explained

drand is an opensource project allowing anybody to run a “randomness beacon”. Its goal? Providing a trustable, verifiable source of public randomness that would enable full transparency in online lotteries, leader election or blockchain smart contracts. This talk is about what distributed randomness is, what it means for developers, and users, and why you’d want to use it. I will also present to you the current ecosystem around drand, and what it enables you to do differently and why it is desirable in a distributed, decentralized web to have public, verifiable randomness. Don’t worry though: we will first go through an easy overview of how it works without diving too much into the gory cryptographic details. In addition, I’ll demo how drand works in practice, and explain you how you can easily use it in your applications since drand nodes can be queried by anybody.