Drand is a distributed randomness beacon operated by the League of Entropy, publishing verifiable randomness every 3 seconds. We consume it — we never generate it.
Drand — The Randomness Beacon
Drand is a distributed randomness beacon run by the League of Entropy. It publishes verifiable, unpredictable and unbiased randomness every 3 seconds. We consume it via Cloudflare’s public relay — we never generate randomness ourselves.
| Beacon | quicknet |
|---|---|
| Chain hash | 52db9ba70e0cc0f6eaf7803dd07447a1f5477735fd3f661792ba94600c84e971 |
| Genesis time | 2023-08-23 15:09:27 UTC (unix 1692803367) |
| Round period | 3 seconds |
| Scheme | bls-unchained-g1-rfc9380 (BLS12-381 threshold signatures) |
| Group public key | 83cf0f2896adee7eb8b5f01fcad3912212c437e0073e911fb90022d3e760183c8c4b450b6a0a6c3ac6a5776a2d1064510d1fec758c921cc22b0e17e63aaf4bcb5ed66304de9cf809bd274ca73bab4af5a6e9c76a4bc09e76eae8991ef5ece45a |
| Randomness rule | randomness = SHA-256(signature) — checked locally on every draw |
Round Arithmetic
Round numbers are pure arithmetic — anyone can compute which round covers any moment in time:
round(t) = floor((t − genesis_time) / period) + 1 time_of(round) = genesis_time + (round − 1) × period
Public Relays
The same beacon is served by independent relays. Any round can be fetched from any of them and must be identical everywhere:
League of Entropy
A global consortium of independent organisations — including Cloudflare, Protocol Labs, EPFL, the University of Chile and Kudelski Security — collectively generating randomness with threshold cryptography. Because randomness is produced jointly by distributed nodes, no single entity (including us) can predict or manipulate the outcome.