N※N

Anonymous Collective Claims to Solve Blockchain's "Impossible" Randomness Problem

  //science-technology.news-articles.net/content/2 .. -blockchain-s-impossible-randomness-problem.html
  Published in Science and Technology on Wednesday, September 17th 2025 at 23:32 GMT by Impacts
          ^{🞛 This publication is a summary or evaluation of another publication 🞛 This publication contains editorial commentary or bias from the source}

Anonymous Collective Claims a Breakthrough for Blockchain Randomness
Tech Bullion, 2023

In the world of public ledgers, randomness is a scarce and hard‑to‑achieve commodity. Every block that is produced, every validator that is elected, and every on‑chain lottery that is run depends on a stream of numbers that is both unpredictable and unbiased. Yet the decentralized, trust‑minimized nature of blockchains makes the generation of such numbers a perennial challenge.

Tech Bullion’s recent coverage brings to light a bold claim from an “Anonymous Collective” that they have finally cracked the code. The group – which has chosen to remain nameless – has published a protocol that they say guarantees unpredictable, tamper‑proof, and publicly verifiable randomness without the need for a trusted oracle or a single point of failure. The article, which can be found on the Tech Bullion site, walks readers through the problem, the current state of the art, and the details of the Collective’s solution.

The Hard Problem of Decentralised Randomness

A truly random number generator (RNG) in a blockchain context must satisfy three core properties:

1. Unpredictability – no participant can know the value before it is revealed.
2. Bias‑freedom – no subset of participants can influence the result in a way that favours them.
3. Transparency – anyone on the network can verify that the value was produced honestly.

Traditional approaches such as Randao (a commit‑reveal scheme) or verifiable delay functions (VDFs) hit at least one of these pillars. Randao, for instance, is vulnerable to a “leak‑and‑win” attack where a malicious actor reveals a partial commitment early, then delays the rest of the reveal until the desired outcome is known. VDFs, while unbiasable, require a trusted setup or a costly delay that is unsuitable for high‑frequency protocols.

More recent solutions like Chainlink’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF) use off‑chain oracles, trading on‑chain trustlessness for the reliability of a central entity. In the world of permissionless blockchains, the ideal remains a purely on‑chain, distributed method.

The Anonymous Collective’s Proposal

The Collective’s protocol can be distilled into three stages, all of which run as a single transaction on the chain:

1. Distributed Key Generation (DKG) – A set of participants (a threshold t of n nodes) jointly generate a shared public/private key pair using a threshold signature scheme. No one node knows the full private key, yet any t of them can produce a valid signature.
2. Commit Phase – Each participant submits a commitment to a random value (e.g., a hash of a secret and their public key). These commitments are stored on‑chain but do not reveal the underlying secrets.
3. Reveal Phase – After all commitments are on the ledger, participants publish their secrets. The final randomness is derived by hashing together all the revealed secrets and the DKG public key. Because the secrets are never known until the reveal step, even colluding participants cannot predict or bias the outcome.

What sets the Collective’s method apart is the use of threshold signatures for the final hash output. By requiring a threshold of signers, the protocol guarantees that a single malicious actor can’t forge the randomness, while the threshold also protects against a small coalition of attackers. The result is a verifiable random beacon that is both fast and cost‑efficient compared to VDF‑based solutions.

The protocol also includes a robust fallback: if any participant fails to reveal their secret within a pre‑defined window, the protocol automatically proceeds with the remaining reveals, ensuring liveness even in the presence of misbehaving nodes.

Potential Impact on the Ecosystem

Randomness underpins many facets of blockchain functionality:

• Leader election and consensus – The fairness of Proof‑of‑Stake (PoS) or BFT‑style protocols hinges on random selection of proposers.
• Sharding – Assigning validator sets to shards requires a reliable random assignment to avoid collusion.
• Smart‑contract lotteries, NFT drops, and DeFi incentives – These all demand a provably fair source of randomness to protect users.

If the Collective’s protocol is adopted, it could reduce reliance on external oracles, lower transaction fees, and increase the security of random‑dependent features. Moreover, because the protocol is purely on‑chain and does not require a trusted setup, it would be particularly attractive for permissionless chains that eschew centralized services.

Community Reception and Critiques

Tech Bullion’s article notes that the proposal has sparked a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Proponents highlight the elegance of combining threshold signatures with commit‑reveal, arguing that it addresses the major loopholes of earlier schemes. Critics, however, point out practical challenges:

• Scalability – The DKG process can be expensive on networks with many nodes, and the threshold requirement may not scale to large validator sets.
• Participant incentives – The protocol relies on a set of pre‑selected nodes to generate the randomness. If the participants are not adequately incentivised to remain honest, the system could be vulnerable.
• Implementation complexity – Smart‑contract developers would need to implement and audit a sophisticated cryptographic protocol, which could introduce bugs.

The Collective has responded by providing an open‑source implementation and a detailed white paper on the cryptographic proofs that underpin their design. They also plan to conduct a test‑net deployment on a major public chain to demonstrate real‑world feasibility.

Looking Ahead

The article concludes that while the Anonymous Collective’s proposal is still in the early stages, it represents a significant step toward a truly decentralized source of randomness. The next milestones involve rigorous peer review, security audits, and live deployment on test networks. If those hurdles are overcome, we may see a new standard for random beacon generation that can be integrated into a range of blockchain protocols, from PoS validators to on‑chain gaming and beyond.

For readers interested in the technical details, the Collective’s white paper is freely available on their GitHub repository (https://github.com/anonymous-collective/ran-beacon) and the full discussion can be followed on the Tech Bullion website.