Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Aptos Roll is a secure instant randomness API. This is done with a bunch of pretty crazy cryptography schemes. Unlike Chainlink VRF, this is on-chain, which makes it faster and cheaper to use. This seems to be similar to the Ethereum randomness function but has appears to have better randomness properties.

Aptos decouples the consensus from execution. This is helpful because a shared secret can be generated then acted upon later in the execution stage. The approach allows a shared secret to be generated by using a weighted distributed key generation (wDKG). The shared secret can only be recovered by 50% or more of the validators, making it impossible to know the state ahead of time.

A seed for randomness is generated using a weighted verifiable random function (wVRF) using a shared secret. To me, we're using a secret sharing scheme to create a secret, disclosing this secret, using this secret as the seed for randomness then using the function to generate random numbers in a deterministic way. Pretty neat!

The blog post goes into the details of the Aptos network actually doing the sharing. Personally, I found it hard to follow because of the many acronyms and cryptography things I don't understand. Regardless, it's super cool and I wanted to make sure to at least have this in my notes.