Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Randomness Function) has recently gone live on the Ethereum mainnet, and the no-loss lottery game PoolTogether[1] is the first project to adopt it.
Verifiable randomness is extremely important, and is critical to the development of many applications because it serves as a mechanism for creating unpredictability.
This unpredictability provides protection against malicious entities trying to reverse engineer a system, however it can introduce an element of surprise into applications, determine the outcome of processes, and authenticate the creation of original things.
The challenge for developers is that obtaining a source of RNG that can not be tampered with, or predicted, is an incredibly difficult problem.
Now George Town, Grand Cayman-based smart contract developer Chainlink[2] has been working on the VRF feature. Randomness is a crucial element for decentralized gaming and security use cases.
Random Number Generation (RNG) is critical to the development of many applications – but obtaining a source of RNG that can not be tampered with, or predicted is an incredibly difficult problem.
On-chain RNG is subject to miner attacks and off-chain RNG requires complete trust in the data provider.
Chainlink is an oracle network that sits between blockchains and 'real-world data' such as live prices of assets, events, weather data, or gaming. Its technology generates verifiable, on-chain randomness for smart contracts.
Smart contract developers can use Chainlink VRF as means to build reliable smart contracts for any application that relies on unpredictable outcomes.
With every new request for randomness, Chainlink VRF generates a random number and cryptographic proof of how that number was determined.
The proof is published and verified on-chain before it can be used by any consuming applications. This process ensures that the results cannot be