University of Edinburgh

A Crypto 2026 paper quietly deletes the randomness beacon permissionless consensus leaned on

A cryptography paper accepted to Crypto 2026 proposes removing the need for a randomness beacon in permissionless consensus protocols. The research, authored by Damiano Abram, Marshall Ball, Juan Garay, and Aggelos Kiayias, replaces the beacon with d-wise independent distributed samplers and relies on assumptions like decisional Diffie-Hellman and learning with errors. While the paper offers a theoretical advancement, it does not provide concrete performance metrics or comparisons to live networks like Bitcoin, and the full manuscript remains embargoed until August 20.