Announcing Randamu!

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

TOPLINE: After four years of stewarding the drand project on behalf of LoE, Protocol Labs has decided to spin off our drand team into its own private enterprise, now called Randamu.

BACKGROUND: Protocol Labs is undergoing a slow and steady process of decentralization, expected to culminate by the end of this year. At its conclusion, Protocol Labs will no longer be one company but rather a network of companies known as the Protocol Labs Network (PLN). Today the PLN is already approaching 100 independent companies - each unique, but bound together in common cause to drive breakthroughs in computing that push humanity forward. For more details please visit the Protocol Labs Blog.

What do these changes mean for you, the League of Entropy and the drand codebase?

TLDR; not much change in the near term, but expect new opportunities to collaborate in the coming months.

Both Protocol Labs and Randamu remain steadfast in our commitments to public goods, the League of Entropy, open-source software, and the drand codebase. Protocol Labs plans to continue maintaining their nodes through Randamu. We are humbled and honored by the trust they have placed in us to improve and maintain drand, while continuing to shepherd LoE network operations - we don't expect any of that to change, but to ensure we aren’t relying on any incorrect assumptions, we will put this to a vote in the loe-governance Slack channel.

Moving forward we are updating drand in v2.0 to enable asynchronous ceremonies - no more jumping on the phone at odd hours for periodic key re-sharing. This, plus other improvements should help drand's operation to become more automated in the coming weeks, requiring less of your valuable time and attention.

The Randamu team is excited by the opportunities we have before us as an independent organization. We have a growing list of commercial offerings based on threshold cryptography in our development pipeline, several of which benefit from drand, and some of which you, as an LoE member, may wish to partner with us on. We'll keep you posted here as these plans develop and mature.

Please accept our deepest thanks for your continued trust and partnership.

Warm regards, -- Yolan, Patrick, Laith & Erick (The Randamu Team)