Corestar Receives Interchain Foundation Grant To Build Random Beacon on Tendermint
For further information, please contact Corestar Chief Technology Officer, Vasiliy Shapovalov — vasiliy.shapovalov@corestar.io
Corestar, a technology company that operates within the blockchain gaming industry, has announced they have received a grant from the Interchain Foundation, which is focused on the interoperable blockchain technology of the Cosmos Network, to build a Tendermint variant with a built-in random beacon. The Interchain Foundation is an entity that seeks to help the Cosmos ecosystem flourish.
A lot of current applications require a reliable source of randomness, and until recently, many have had to rely on local random number generators. But there are many instances of participants that want to obtain a publicly verifiable randomness source that cannot be easily biased. This is especially important for decentralized systems, as even a single centralized node goes against the idea of a decentralized approach.
A random beacon can be used to improve many different areas, most notably blockchain applications, gaming, or gambling; advanced cryptographic protocols; cryptographic sortition of validators; cryptographic sortition of custodians for asset transfers.
The mission to create a public random beacons has been a hot topic recently, with solutions being created by the US Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the League of Entropy. The League of Entropy are a consortium of organisations, including Cloudflare, UChile, and Kudelski Security, who are working together to create a global, unbiased beacon to be used in election auditing and lotteries.
The Corestar random beacon can become a major tool in a growing toolbox for the Cosmos ecosystem. The Interchain Grant will allow Corestar to implement some important features to make it more usable for unaffiliated developers.
In June, Corestar released the the open-source code for their Tendermint/CosmosSDK hack with distributed PRNG suitable for applications. The open-sourced code can be viewed on the Corestar Github repository.
Corestar’s solution works by adding expanding a pre commit step into Tendermint consensus: validators send not only precommits but also partial BLS threshold signatures. This allows every new block to come out with a freshly generated random number. The idea was first proposed by the DFinity team and since then implemented by DEDIS for League of Entropy and by Keep for their incentivized random beacon.
“The Interchain Foundation grant will allow Corestar to work on a number of areas to improve our solution. We’re implementing proof of stake and improving distributed key generation in the Arcade, making it compatible with the cosmos-sdk and generally improving code quality and reliability.” Said Vasiliy Shapovalov, Corestar’s Chief Technology Officer.
Corestar will release further updates in due course. They invite all interested parties to collaborate on the Arcade development and to use it for projects in Cosmos ecosystem.
For further information, please contact Corestar Chief Technology Officer, Vasiliy Shapovalov — vasiliy.shapovalov@corestar.io
