Blockchains may finally break their hidden reliance on a ticking randomness clock to keep networks secure

A paper accepted for Crypto 2026 in Santa Barbara says it resolves a theoretical gap in permissionless consensus by replacing a public beacon that supplied participants with fresh random values at regular intervals.

The problem is how parties can reach Byzantine agreement without knowing in advance who is participating, except for an upper bound on the number of participants, and without relying on a public-key infrastructure. Bitcoin helped motivate this line of research, but the public records do not present the new work as a Bitcoin upgrade or a change for any live network.

The University of Edinburgh research record lists Damiano Abram, Marshall Ball, Juan Garay, and Aggelos Kiayias as authors of “Permissionless consensus from a common random string.” Crypto 2026 runs from Aug. 17 through Aug. 20.

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