SHA256-based VDF

Sharding
3

Thanks for highlighting Solana :slight_smile: We do want to use a VDF for Ethereum 2.0 randomness. Verifying hash chains in parallel does not readily work for us (unless we use a cryptoeconomic VDF) for a few reasons:

  1. Low latency: Verification must be low latency to reduce the randomness lookahead and prevent DoS attacks.
  2. Light clients: Verification of VDF outputs must be doable by light clients with limitted parallelism (e.g. an entry-level DigitalOcean instance).
  3. Full nodes: Full nodes (including validators) should ideally not require “exotic” hardware such as GPUs for verification.

It is possible Solana could benefit from moving to Sloth (or better, Sloth++) instead of SHA256. My favourite VDF is by Benjamin Wesolowski, specifically the instantiation in RSA groups. I am currently looking into the viability of building a commodity ASIC for it to minimise the speed advantage an attacker may get. Filecoin and Chia are two other projects looking into VDF ASICs.

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