3.5 PubSub Network Integration
drand is able to publish randomness on a libp2p PubSub network using the gossipsub protocol , using what is known as a gossip relay.
Public endpoints
The public League Of Entropy network provides the following 1st-tier gossip relays (all existing gossip relays will form a mesh to distribute randomness around):
/dnsaddr/api.drand.sh/dnsaddr/api2.drand.sh/dnsaddr/api3.drand.sh
The pubsub topic on which randomness is published is based to the drand's chain hash as follows:
/drand/pubsub/v0.0.0/<chain_hash>
for the public network being /drand/pubsub/v0.0.0/8990e7a9aaed2ffed73dbd7092123d6f289930540d7651336225dc172e51b2ce.
Usage
The published messages are encoded protobufs of type PublicRandResponse(RandResponse).
In order to receive randomness using this method you will need to run an application that creates a libp2p host that can connect to a pubsub relay and subscribe to the PubSub topic. We recommend using drand's client libraries or the drand-client tool, which automatically perform verification for this task.
As a side note, IPFS can be used to subscribe to PubSub topics (running with ipfs daemon --enable-pubsub-experiment):
ipfs swarm connect /dnsaddr/api.drand.sh
ipfs pubsub sub /drand/pubsub/v0.0.0/8990e7a9aaed2ffed73dbd7092123d6f289930540d7651336225dc172e51b2ce