APP-60D48CVU-QHPFQP — drand: improving the gossipsub (libp2p) distribution network and relays services

1.1 Project Name: drand: improving the gossipsub (libp2p) distribution network and relays services Karma Profile: 0xe6c6be5258c7924dcc749738fe922eca2436b3060786d15c502ab0e75356c6d4 1.2 Project Github: https://github.com/drand 1.3 Project Website: https://www.drand.love/ 1.4 Team Lead/Point of Contact: Yolan Romailler, drand tech lead, Slack/Emails 1.5 Category: Core Infrastructure Contributing to Core Infrastructure?: All Filecoin SPs are relying on drand randomness in order to perform leader election, the pubsub network is currently the lowest latency distribution method we have for SPs. 1.6 Open Source Status: Fully Open Source 2.1 Project Summary: The current state of the Gossipsub relays and Libp2p network used by most Lotus SPs to consume drand beacons with very low latency is overly centralized and has been a source of concern for community members in the past. The current drand distribution network works as follows: - There are 3 libp2p relays ran by the drand team, one the US, one in Europe and one in Asia. - There are 3 http relays ran by the drand team, one the US, one in Europe and one in Asia. - Cloudflare is running a HTTP relay on their own CDN network, providing drand beacons globally through it. One goal of the drand team is to find new League members, encourage existing ones to run relays and improve the state of the current distribution network, this grant proposal is about doing all of these. Upon request this grant is now only about keeping high SLAs for the gossip relay network. 2.2 Who does this work support?: Network Infrastructure, Application Builders 2.3 Total Funding Requested (USD): 61000

Objective 1: Indirect Objective 2: Indirect Objective 3: Indirect 3.1 Impact pathway: Timely maintenance of the drand stack allows to ensure smooth operation of the League of Entropy mainnet, as well as timely production and delivery of drand beacons to SPs. By providing all SPs across the world with access to drand randomness, we allow them to run timely Lead