APP-IOBZZ1YB-FYXPBA — drand: the distributed randomness beacon

Project Name: drand: the distributed randomness beacon Theme/Category: Infrastructure & Core Dependencies Description of your project: The League of Entropy is providing free, verifiable, public randomness as a public good for anybody on the internet to use. Filecoin Storage Providers are relying on that verifiable randomness to perform leader election, meaning for each Filecoin block, all the SPs in the network are querying the public randomness produced by the League of Entropy. The open source project `drand` is the software that the League of Entropy relies on to provide that public good service. We also provide HTTP relays to provide HTTP endpoints for users to rely on to access drand randomness, as well as gossipsub relays as a fallback mechanism, both of which are used in all Filecoin implementations to perform leader election. Providing decentralized, low latency, high SLA access to random beacons every 3 seconds across the world is a costly endeavour and doing it as a public good requires significant funding throughout the year. Website URL for your project : https://www.drand.love/ Team Lead/Point of Contact Name: Yolan Github Handle: Anomalroil Slack handle: Anomalroil Problem Statement: Providing HTTP relays with very high SLAs, stewarding the League of Entropy and maintaining the different open source componenet comprising the drand project requires regular work by qualified engineers, however since the entire project is being run out of good will by the members of the League of Entropy, there isn't any revenue stream to finance the ongoing maintainence of the drand software and the various infrastructure components provided by the drand core maintainers. This round of ProPGF is meant to fund the ongoing maintenance and operation of the drand software and its public APIs, to ensure the liveness of the League of Entropy (which is directly linked to the liveness of the Filecoin network, as a catastrophic failure of the former would cause a catastrophic failure of the latter). Target Users / Beneficiaries: The drand core maintainers through their entity, "Randamu, Inc.". Expected Outputs: - Quaterly resharing ceremonies to maintain a healthy League of Entropy network. - Dashboards related to the operations of public relays. - Quarterly updates of the entire software stack, going through thorough end-to-end testing, starting from an internal devnet all the way to a public testnet before being released on the League's mainnet. - High SLA public HTTP relays and gossipsub relays operated by the team. - On-going maintenance and operation of Filecoin's dedicated "timelock" agents to upload drand randomness onchain when it is required to unlock timelocked data. Work Plan & Milestones: {"title":"Q1 Resharing ceremony and maintenance","description":"This milestone is about the ongoing maintenance and stewardship of the League or Entropy and its software stack, including drand, HTTP relays, gossipsub relays, on-call rotation and the operation of very high SLA infrastructure running all of these during the first quarter of 2026. It includes supporting the members of the League of Entropy with all of their drand-related concerns, as well as onboarding new joiners and offboarding leavers during a Resharing ceremony planned in the second half of the quarter.","dueDate":"2026-03-01","fundingRequested":"$30,000 USD","completionCriteria":"99.9999% up time of our services.","milestoneUID":"0x1267b460e61b01bb9d744dc92ad1c6f867b1c9d540f9d9b80822bdbb7f231d8c"}, {"title":"Q2 Resharing Ceremony and maintenance","description":"This milestone is about the ongoing maintenance and stewardship of the League or Entropy and its software stack, including drand, HTTP relays, gossipsub relays, on-call rotation and the operation of very high SLA infrastructure running all of these during the second quarter of 2026. It includes supporting the members of the League of Entropy with all of their drand-related concerns, as well as onboarding new joiners and offboarding leavers during a Resharing ceremony planned in the middle of the quarter.","dueDate":"2026-05-01","fundingRequested":"$30,000 USD","completionCriteria":"99.9999% up time of our services.","milestoneUID":"0x70a5d3f65a589de28f9e0663ef0354bfc9abdf674468b020f434ade55faf51df"}, {"title":"Q3 Resharing Ceremony and maintenance","description":"This milestone is about the ongoing maintenance and stewardship of the League or Entropy and its software stack, including drand, HTTP relays, gossipsub relays, on-call rotation and the operation of very high SLA infrastructure running all of these during the third quarter of 2026. It includes supporting the members of the League of Entropy with all of their drand-related concerns, as well as onboarding new joiners and offboarding leavers during a Resharing ceremony planned in the second half of the quarter.","dueDate":"2026-08-01","fundingRequested":"$30,000 USD","completionCriteria":"99.9999% up time of our services.","milestoneUID":"0x00ef5427951406dbd2d8a929032bfc9770c81803a8a4396d2b981dfcbb3308d8"}, {"title":"Q4 Resharing Ceremony and maintenance","description":"This milestone is about the ongoing maintenance and stewardship of the League or Entropy and its software stack, including drand, HTTP relays, gossipsub relays, on-call rotation and the operation of very high SLA infrastructure running all of these during the last quarter of 2026. It includes supporting the members of the League of Entropy with all of their drand-related concerns, as well as onboarding new joiners and offboarding leavers during a Resharing ceremony planned in the middle of the quarter.","dueDate":"2026-11-01","fundingRequested":"$30,000 USD","completionCriteria":"99.9999% up time of our services.","milestoneUID":"0xdf0d36cbbaa019d49c82c3dfc096c3947cb7393fa132efbfe1c4ad20a6a7710d"} Total Funding Request: $120,000 USD Minimum Viable Amount: $120,000 USD Measurement & Indicators: Other Other (Metric): - League of Entropy succesfuly ceremonies - High SLA of drand public endpoints - Protocol Security - Liveness 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 Leader Elections for each block which is a crucial component of Filecoin's consensus mechanism. Success Metrics (2–3 SMART Metrics): - Liveness of the League of Entropy mainnet - Number of requests served by our public endpoints - Timely update of the software stack Sustainability & Future Funding: As a public good, the ongoing maintenance of the League of Entropy and its software stack will have to continue relying on follow-on grants and potential ecosystem partnerships. Team Information: | Name | Role | Relevant experience | |---------|--------|------------------------------| |Yolan Romailler | Tech Lead & Core Engineer | Yolan has been working as a core engineer on drand since 2022 and prior to that was operating a drand node in the League of Entropy since its inception in 2019. | |Patrick McClurg | Fullstack Engineer | Patrick has been working as a core engineer on drand since 2022 and was the one behind the new asychronous ceremony capabilities which greatly helped reduce the burden of running ceremonies for the League of Entropy, allowing it to grow further. | |Nemitari Ajienka | Solidity Engineer | Nemitari is the one who designed and implemented the Filecoin on-chain blocklock and vrf smart contracts in 2025. | Key Risks / Dependencies: A lack of funding for drand maintenance would ultimately cause the League of Entropy to disfunction, preventing it from providing timely verifiable randomness. We have not identified any other risks, as the bus factor of the team is high enough to ensure continued maintenance otherwise. Supporting links: - https://docs.drand.love/blog/ - https://github.com/drand/drand - https://github.com/drand/kyber - https://github.com/drand/http-relay - https://github.com/drand/tlock/ Ecosystem Dependencies & Verifiers: Lotus, uses our Go libraries as well as relies on our HTTP relays to access drand randomness and perform leader election Forest, relies on our HTTP relays to access drand randomness and perform leader election Venus, uses our Go libraries as well as relies on our HTTP relays to access drand randomness and perform leader election