Long Beach (CoinChapter): Professor Alexander Russell, Senior Research Fellow of Input Output, has introduced a concept to help Cardano’s switch to decentralization more secure.
In Cardano’s latest phase, community-driven ADA staking pools will be responsible for 100 percent of block production. As such, the process of keeping the blockchain integral and secure will be up to the community in its entirety.
Beginning next week, the mechanism of randomness used as a basis of consensus will be adjusted slightly. Russell explained that new sources of entropy will be added. He also noted that this is a once-in-the-system’s-lifetime transition.
Russell explained that the Input Output team will inject transactions with metadata determined by several public sources of entropy. This will be done to ensure the advanced randomness of the new system. These sources include, “Hashes of the closing prices of the New York Stock Exchange on April 6, and real-time seismic data from the US Geological Survey, the University of Athens, and the Japan Meteorological Society.”
Seismic data will be gathered for the first 36 hours of the epoch. An entropy addition mechanism will be activated on April 5 during epoch 258. Additionally, more “technical” Cardano users may contribute to the randomness upgrade in the GitHub repository.
This all comes just days prior to a major milestone day for Cardano. On March 31 the blockchain will transition to fully decentralized block production. This will eliminate the control of “federated pools” over its block production process.
Alexander Russell call on Cardano community to help establish transition
Russell also called on the entire Cardano community to help establish this transition. “Additionally, to reflect the decentralized nature of Cardano we are asking the extended community, including stake pool operators and developers, to join us (on chain) for an event we’re calling the Cardano public assertion of randomness.”
“This community exercise will establish the once-in-the-system’s-lifetime random 256-bit transition nonce that will herald the protocol’s official transition to decentralized operation.”
