The Ethereum KZG ceremony, which aims to provide a cryptographic foundation for scaling Ethereum, has already received more than 83,000 random contributions from users around the world. You are now receiving a contributor from outer space.
Cryptosat, a blockchain-powered satellite orbiting the Earth, announced its entropy contribution from space on April 4 at 6am UTC. The contribution will be deployed from the Crypto2 satellite.
According to Cryptosat’s announcement, the satellite orbits the Earth every 90 minutes following a remote course 550 km above the ground, making it difficult for outside actors to access during KZG’s contribution.
Yan Michalevsky, co-founder of Cryptosat, explained to Cointelegraph that the ceremony needs parties that can generate “cryptographic parameters” that do not leak what is called “toxic waste” or intermediate computational artifacts that are discarded and inaccessible after being generated. .
Michalevsky continued that if leaked, this “toxic waste” could compromise “the integrity of the cryptographic scheme” on which the next version of Ethereum is based.
“That’s why generating those parameters in a completely physically isolated environment from which you can’t extract data has a lot of merit.”
Cryptosat has a Verifiable Random Beacon service, which will generate entropy for your contribution. The beacons of this service are signed by the satellite itself and can be verified using Crypto2’s public key, which was also generated in space.
“Apart from using the API, we do not access the internals of the satellite or the data that is generated as part of the intermediate steps, and it is kept secret on the satellite.”
Cryptostat’s space satellite entropy commitment will be viewable in real time through a dashboard that monitors the satellite’s trajectory and its most recent status.
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Cryptosat is one of thousands involved in providing randomness to the KZG ceremony, as requested by the Ethereum Foundation to strengthen security.
The Crypto2 satellite launched into space on January 3 aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. It was the successor to the first Crypto1 satellite launch in May. According to Cryptosat, the second satellite has 30 times more computing power than the first.
The company previously said that blockchain-powered satellites are part of the effort to make outer space a “new battleground in the search for bulletproof crypto.”
The upgrade from Ethereum Shanghai to the mainnet, for which entropy is generated by Crypto2, is scheduled for April 12.
Magazine: Blockchain Security in Space: SpaceChain, Blockstream, and Cryptosat
