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Random Beacons

Last modified: Sep 11th, 2026

Random beacons are public sources of randomness. They can be used for verifiable randomness operations, for example picking the winning lottery numbers in a way that proves there was no funny business.

In one sentence: an organization publishes random numbers at regular intervals, and uses cryptography to make those numbers extremely difficult to manipulate.

Beacons

• NIST Randomness Beacon
  • Centralized, easier to understand, simple API
  • Older, traditional
• drand
  • Cloudflare-led distributed randomness beacon
  • Randomness combined from multiple independent organizations
  • See also League of Entropy
  • Has seen some updates recently (2025?)
  • Some traction/usage
  • Probably the one to use going forward

Resources

• Towards The Perfect Coin Flip: The NIST Randomness Beacon - Hackaday - an old (2014) but still useful article explaining the NIST beacon
• A Reference for Randomness Beacons - NIST’s 86-page reference document explaining their beacon
  • Section 7 covers usage and is likely the one you want to read