ORAO VRF at Solana Hacker House, Austin TX
Hot, humid and sunny Austin. For a few months now we were planning to announce our VRF service for Solana and the Hacker House event was spot on. Amazing event planning — from catered food and drinks to equipment which was only missing your laptop (and the travel adapter you left at home). A bunch of people building, a bunch of people helping out, exchanging ideas, offering constructive criticism, direction, pushing lines and lines of code. Everyone was welcome — whether you just had an idea or were already established in the Solana ecosystem.
From day one we met amazing people and started hacking. The VRF frontend demo had only one wallet provider integrated and the frontend code was made back in December 2021 — that meant a large number of dependencies had to be upgraded, which again meant certain parts of code were incompatible such as the react renderer. A couple of hours later and we were done integrating other wallets, such as the Solflare wallet, a team that was also attending Solana’s Hacker House.
We discussed our verifiable randomness (VRF) solution with Solana’s core engineers, went through the inner-workings, spoke to other core developers and booked a slot to present it on demo day.
VRF D-Day (Demo-Day)
The night before was eventful. We checked into a new airbnb in the afternoon and found out the side door was busted — it was obvious there was a recent break-in. Due to some technical difficulties we couldn’t access our VRF slides and had to stash our gear, all while looking for an airbnb and blocking the busted door overnight.
Well, morning came and we were in a different and safe house working on our demo slides.
What’s VRF?
VRF stands for Verifiable Random Function. It’s how you get verifiable randomness on the blockchain. ORAO VRF is an unbiased randomness service whose result can be verified and it’s signed with a cryptographic signature. You can check out our Rust and JS VRF SDK for Solana (there is sample code there too).
VRF can (and sometimes needs to) be used in a broad range of applications: from verifiably rare NFT mints (and their platforms) to GameFi, Metaverse and on-chain selection such as:
- minting NFTs with randomized traits resulting in rare NFTs
- distribution of rewards to users randomly
- generating random loot boxes in games
- lotteries
- generating random maps, planets, estates on metaverse
- selecting winners in non-custodial draws
- randomizing IDO allocations for community members… and much more
Besides the Hacker House (HH) there were a lot of side events as start of Consensus 2022 was right after the HH. More precisely there were over 30 side events, powered by big crypto names such as 1inch and Algorand. It goes without saying that we couldn’t attend all of them as they were held at the same time.
Keep Austin (and Web3) Weird
It was a pleasure to meet all of you face to face, sharing ideas, advice and experiences, hang around with enthusiastic people who understand the blockchain, have will and energy to make it better every day.
With the new website coming along nicely, next stop for us is Solana Hacker House in Belgrade where we plan on presenting upgrades to our VRF service, providing randomness on Solana.
Stay tuned.
