RandAO delivers trustless randomness for systems that can’t afford to be gamed.
Most don’t think of randomness as something that needs to be precise. It’s just there — in a shuffled deck, a tossed die, or the next song in a playlist.
But as more of our lives and creativity move into decentralized digital spaces, randomness becomes foundational. It becomes infrastructure.
RandAO is a protocol built for this new reality. It enables the generation of random values that are decentralized, verifiable, and tamper-proof — without relying on a central authority or secret key.
It’s a quiet but important part of what’s becoming known as the “permanent stack” — technologies like Arweave, AO, and AR.IO that aim to build a more resilient and open internet.
RandAO provides something subtle and essential within this ecosystem: trustless randomness that runs alongside an AR.IO gateway for systems that can’t afford to be gamed.
A Problem Most People Never See — Until It’s Too Late
In centralized systems, randomness is easy — call a function. But onchain, where everything is public and deterministic, true randomness is much harder.
This is the "onchain randomness problem": once a value appears onchain, it can be seen and exploited. If its creation is predictable or manipulable, it undermines the entire system.
Take a blockcehain lottery. If someone can influence the outcome, the whole thing breaks. The same risk applies to NFTs, validator selection in proof-of-stake, or even AI model initialization.
Many solutions exist, but they come with trade-offs. Commit-reveal schemes fail if one party doesn’t follow through. Oracles introduce trust and centralization.
If you need to trust someone to get randomness, it’s not really decentralized.
How RandAO Works — and Why It Matters
RandAO takes a different path — one grounded in cryptographic rigor and the values of the permanent web. The core principle: if just one participant is honest, the result stays secure.
It combines:
A commit-reveal scheme, where providers commit to secret entropy.
A Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) — a cryptographic timer that prevents manipulation based on others’ inputs.
The result is a verifiable, unpredictable, tamper-resistant value — with every step, from commitment to output, stored on Arweave for auditability.
RandAO runs on AO, Arweave’s decentralized compute layer, enabling scalable, parallel execution of randomness without sacrificing speed or decentralization.
Where RandAO gets especially compelling is in its integration with AR.IO — the network layer that makes Arweave’s permanent data accessible, programmable, and human-readable.
The AR.IO Connection: Smart Gateways and Smarter Domains
Here’s where AR.IO fits in — and why this collaboration makes sense.
AR.IO gateways already run with high uptime. They’re network-heavy, not compute-heavy. That means they’re perfect candidates to run RandAO nodes as a lightweight sidecar — adding randomness provision without draining resources.
Setup is simple: Docker-based, modular, and built to run alongside existing gateway setups. No SSL certs, no extra domains. Just an added container that turns uptime into additional rewards.
ArNS Integration
RandAO uses an undername on ArNS — api_randao.ar.io — as a smart domain. All their randomness providers check this domain every hour to automatically sync with the latest process.
If RandAO updates their randomness engine, providers don’t need to do anything. The domain updates the pointer. The nodes self-update.
This is what smart domains look like in practice — programmable, dependable, and built on permanent infrastructure. And it shows how tools like ArNS can quietly power real utility behind the scenes.
Quiet Infrastructure, Real-World Use Cases
The most interesting technologies often solve quiet problems before becoming essential. RandAO may be one of those.
Here’s where trustless randomness matters:
Gaming: Loot drops and shuffles impact real assets. Fairness isn’t optional.
NFT Minting: Most NFTs are generated off-chain, introducing trust gaps. RandAO enables fully on-chain randomness.
Proof-of-Stake: Validator selection depends on randomness. RandAO offers a decentralized alternative.
Artificial Intelligence: Training models requires unpredictable seeds. RandAO helps make decentralized AI more robust.
DAO Governance: When randomness is used to assign roles or resolve ties, verifiability maintains trust.
In all of these cases, RandAO acts as a neutral source of randomness — a quiet but essential service that helps decentralized systems remain fair, secure, and unpredictable.
Get Involved
If you’re already running an AR.IO gateway, becoming a RandAO provider takes just one line of config and a few minutes of setup.
If you’re building something that needs verifiable randomness — a game, a giveaway, a selection tool — RandAO is ready.
AR.IO provides the permanence, uptime, and smart naming layer. RandAO brings the randomness. Together, they make it easier to build systems that are fair by design — not by assumption.
