[Proposal] RandChain - a community-driven Decentralised Randomness Beacon

🔥 DAO Proposals
1

Hello MetaCartel community,

We would like to pitch our project. Please see the details below, and let us know if you have any comments.

Title

RandChain: a community-driven Decentralised Randomness Beacon

Description

In this project, we design and implement RandChain, a decentralised randomness beacon (DRB) that is community-driven. Unlike existing DRBs, RandChain

  • is governed by a DAO rather than rich entities,

  • is secured by Cryptography rather than marketing, and

  • is sustainable by Tokenomics rather than continuous fundings.

Manifesto/Vision

Randomness is a critical component of blockchains and the entire Internet, and DRBs are the major source of randomness. We believe that, to secure the randomness, DRBs should be controlled by a large group of ordinary people with constraint devices, rather than a small group of rich entities with industry-level hardware. Thus, we are motivated to DAOise the DRBs, bringing the ownership of randomness back to the blockchain community.

Problem

Existing DRBs suffer from three limitations, making them not suitable for blockchain protocols and smart contract applications.

  • Existing DRBs are centralised: they are usually governed by a small group of large entities.

  • Existing DRBs require users to trust them, as the entities have incentive to collude and manipulate the random outputs for their advantage.

  • Existing DRBs are not sustainable, as nodes in DRBs contribute to the randomness without receiving any reward.

We attribute the limitations to the fact that, existing DRBs are not scalable enough to be operated by the community.

Solution

We propose RandChain, a DRB that is community-driven. Apart from security properties common in DRBs, the RandChain protocol is the first DRB that satisfies both scalability (i.e., the DRB works normally even when a large number of nodes participate) and fairness (i.e., every node controls comparable voting power on the randomness). These two properties allow RandChain to be operated by a large-scale DAO.

To make the DAO sustainable, RandChain will issue its own token $RAND supporting two business models, namely:

  • Earn-as-you-work: If a node mines a random output, then it is rewarded with some $RAND tokens.

  • Pay-as-you-use: Users (e.g., smart contracts) need to pay for a small amount of $RAND to access a random output.

Product

  • Node implementing the RandChain protocol

  • Blockchain explorer

  • Smart contract of the RandChain coordinator (aka oracle)

  • Smart contract of the RandChain DAO

  • Smart contract of the $RAND token

Progress

We have a research paper detailing the design and analysis of the RandChain protocol as well as an academic prototype. The production-level RandChain node and RandChain explorer are under active development. This grant application is motivated by the need of accelerating the development and launch.

Differentiation

  • RandChain is the first DRB that achieves scalability and fairness simultaneously, and thus the first DRB that can support a large-scale DAO.

  • We are the first team that applies DAO and Tokenomics to DRBs.

  • The team includes researchers with proven track records in blockchain and crypto research.

Team

Runchao Han is a PhD student at Monash University working on Blockchain scalability, advised by Jiangshan. He has published technical reports on leading blockchain-related conferences, including ISPASS, AFT and AsiaCCS. He has served as reviewer for various research conferences such as DSN ('20 '21), ICDCS’20, SRDS’20, and AFT’20.

Jiangshan Yu is ARC DECRA Fellow, Associate Professor, and Associate Director (Research) at Monash Blockchain Technology Centre, Monash University, and has been an active researcher in the Blockchain area. He received IBM Academic Award (2020) for his work on blockchain and has served as a program committee member for leading blockchain-related international conferences, including DSN’21, ICDCS (‘20,‘21), ICBC (20’, 21’), FC’21, AFT’20, SRDS ('19,'20).

Grant Request

$5,000 to support the RandChain development, possibly by getting a new developer on board.

Funds

We haven’t received any fund yet. Initially RandChain starts as a research project.

Help

We will be more than happy if any community member is interested in offering help and/or providing comments to the RandChain project. The Github profile is here.

Additional Resources

Please find the pitch deck here.