Abstract

Randomness is a basic building block for all sorts of applications. The use cases range from lotteries that fully rely on randomness over games that may have some random elements to probabilistic modeling, simulations and governance applications.

Blockchains are systems in which every node in a decentralized network can validate the state of a replicated database by independently executing transactions and comparing the results. In order to do that, all computations need to be deterministic. The operations performed on blockchains get more sophisticated every year. While Bitcoin only allows token sends, the next generation brought Turing-complete computations on chain (Ethereum), creating complex financial products and the first governance applications. Today we are seeing this idea leveraged more and more as the price for execution drops significantly on Layer 2 solutions and independent blockchains in Cosmos¹. The usage of WebAssembly brings a sandboxing technology to blockchains that was designed to run at near native speed on today's CPUs (CosmWasm, NEAR). Multiple projects are working on rich governance applications and games².

Within these new applications, the access to a secure public source of randomness has been an unsolved growing need. For example, games need randomness to distribute new random items as NFTs in game or lottery platforms need true unbiased randomness to draw the winner. Unfortunately, current applications draw randomness from insecure sources such as block hash and timestamp.

In this document we describe how Nois brings publicly-verifiable, unbiasable and decentralised randomness on chain and distributes it to a multitude of other IBC enabled chains in a very secure, fast, decentralised, cost-efficient, and developer-focused manner.