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Add an options guide for randomness in Soroban contracts #2874
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Hi! I'm building Tinkazo, verifiable community draws on Soroban. Its contract checks a drand quicknet round's BLS signature on chain with the BLS12-381 host functions (CAP-0059), so there's no oracle or relay to run, and anyone can finalize a draw once the target round is published.
I'd be glad to write this guide. What I have in mind:
- What a contract can get today and where it falls short: ledger values, and
env.prng(), whose seed is public and can be biased by a validator, plus the blind-rerun risk described in The PRNG docs should emphasize potential risks from blind-rerunning rs-soroban-sdk#1748. - The stronger options and their trade-offs: commit-reveal with a future round, verifying a drand round on demand inside the contract, a drand relay like Drand-Relay, and a VRF like the SCF-funded VRF-Soroban.
- Costs measured on testnet and the trust assumptions of each, with a small example contract.
- A short note on CAP-0089.
I'd add it as a new page under Build → Guides, cross-linked with the PRNG docs update in stellar/rs-soroban-sdk#1748 and the planned commit-reveal example in stellar/soroban-examples#255, so the three fit together. Does that scope work for you?
- What a contract can get today and where it falls short: ledger values, and
@nema1502 Thanks, that scope works. Please open the PR and request a review from me (@kaankacar).
Thanks @kaankacar, glad the scope works! I'll tag you for review when I open the PR. Since Drand-Relay is one of the options, I'd especially appreciate your eyes on that section to make sure I get it right.
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Soroban has no native randomness primitive and the docs don't discuss it. Builders who need it (games, raffles, fair ordering) each invent a workaround. Meanwhile the landscape is moving: CAP-0089 proposes VRF-based protocol randomness with a stellar-core PR implementing ECVRF, a community drand relay exists, and an SCF-funded Soroban VRF project is in flight.
Please add a guide covering:
Surfaced by Frontier Lab's ecosystem crawl.