Protocol Labs Teams Up With The Ethereum Foundation To Develop VDF

Protocol Labs, the owner of Filecoin is officially partnering with the Ethereum Foundation to develop a verifiable delay function (VDF). The company made the announcement which reached our altcoin news, in an official blog post two days ago.

According to the blog post, verifiable delay function or VDFs are a new cryptographic primitive that is able to provide higher support for the systems that rely on the generation of random values. For example, a similar case where this can be explained includes picking out a lottery winner on the blockchain. The VDFs can help stop the miners from interfering with the block hash in order to win the jackpot. One of the researchers in Protocol Labs Dan Boneh explains that VDFs are a new way to ‘’slow things down verifiably.’’

Dan Boneh was the one to introduce the concept of paper in 2018. Since then, Protocol Labs stated that additional research is needed in order to make VDFs more robust since there are still capable malicious actors with specialized hardware to breach the security protocols. The team explained:

 “This is an investment towards building publicly-verifiable randomness and VDFs as novel tools in the arsenals of cryptographers and decentralization projects.”

As previously reported in the latest cryptocurrency news, the blog post added that a successful outcome could be achieved in applied cryptography and distributed system. This means that Protocol Labs aims to boost the use of cryptography beyond the blockchain.

The ethereum foundation and Protocol Labs jointly plan to evaluate and to fund grants to research the feasibility of optimized hardware development for running VDFs. The blog post also outlines that this plan aims to eliminate the ‘’knowable uncertainty around the length of the verifiable delay based on the speed and quality of the hardware being used to generate it.’’

The partnership between the Ethereum foundation and Protocol Labs resulted in a new website so both of the organizations are now available to hear from academic institutions that are willing to get involved. A competition for the fastest VDF construction research is also in the game. Back in February, the eth foundation denied the allegations of spending $15 million on VDF development for its proof-of-stake network transition.