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.

How the permissionless consensus construction removes the beacon

A 2024 construction by Ball and collaborators combined proofs of work with fine-grained complexity assumptions. Its model also gave every participant access to a beacon that delivered a fresh public random value at regular intervals.

The new paper says it removes that recurring service with d-wise independent distributed samplers. In plain terms, the samplers are designed to keep multiple executions secure at the same time, without requiring the beacon to keep producing new public randomness.