Multi-party VRF v2 upgrades

Unbiased, multinode, secure and verifiable randomness on Solana

Over the past two months we’ve been upgrading our VRF oracle on Solana, dealing with edge-cases and supporting the developers building their projects.

What’s new?

• multi-party environment — randomness is fulfilled by multiple nodes and is based on byzantine quorum
• anchor compatibility
• performance and fee optimizations
• npm package, rust API docs
• solana cookbook
• new mainnet and devnet contract:

Just a week after the initial demo at the Austin Hacker House in June, we’ve deployed an upgraded contract and off-chain bot infrastructure to support multi-party (multinode) randomness fulfillment. The smart contract was also upgraded to support developers building with Anchor framework.

This required several upgrades to our Solana VRF SDK. We’ve completely refactored the SDK and added some helper functions to simplify the process of requesting randomness and verification. We’ve provided two integration examples:

1. a cross-program invocation example in the form of a game known as russian roulette
2. off-chain randomness request a.k.a. “rust native”

Ecosystem

Talking with teams about their projects and what they’re building makes us excited about all the dapps which are being built using ORAO VRF. That’s why it’s important to listen to developers which often act as a fresh pair of eyes. Several teams reached out to us in regards to the account creation and through optimization this resulted in lowering the account fees by an order of magnitude — at the time of writing, the total pricing per VRF request is about $0.20. We plan to introduce improvements in that area as well.

We’ve reached out to several ecosystem partners to run a VRF fulfillment node so expect some news on that front soon. We are actively exploring community incentives of running a node and have started experimenting with staked ORAO tokens mid-August.

ORAO VRF Roadmap

• we have identified more optimizations that will bring the fees down by another 30%
• as we talk to more developers from different ecosystems we will implement best practices from other blockchains
• explore community incentives through staked ORAO tokens for VRF fulfillment nodes

For our next article we’ll cover some of the VRF use-cases being built by the teams that have reached out to us. Are you building with ORAO VRF? Tell us about it through our contact page or through email hello at orao.network