Satellite orbiting Earth participates in the Ethereum KZG ceremony

The blockchain-powered satellite Cryptosat will be the contributor of the thousands that have already participated in the Ethereum KZG ceremony to do so from outer space.

The Ethereum KZG ceremony, which aims to provide a cryptographic foundation for Ethereum scaling, has already had over 83,000 contributions of randomness from users all over the world. Now it’s receiving a contributor from outer space. 

Cryptosat, a blockchain-powered satellite orbiting Earth, announced its contribution of entropy from space on April 4 at 6 a.m. UTC. The contribution will be deployed from the Crypto2 satellite.

According to the announcement from Cryptosat, the satellite orbits Earth every 90 minutes following a remote course 550 km above ground, which makes it difficult for outside actors to gain access during the KZG contribution.

Yan Michalevsky, the co-founder of Cryptosat, explained to Cointelegraph that the ceremony needs parties that can generate “cryptographic parameters” that don’t leak what is called "toxic waste,” or intermediate computation artifacts that are discarded and inaccessible after being generated.

Michalevsky continued that if leaked, this “toxic waste” could compromise “the integrity of the cryptographic scheme” on which the next version of Ethereum is based.

“This is why generating those parameters in a completely physically isolated environment from which data cannot be extracted has a lot of merit."

Cryptosat has a Verifiable Random Beacon service, which will generate entropy for its contribution. Beacons from this service are signed by the satellite itself and can be verified using the public key of Crypto2, which was also generated in space.

“Apart from using the API to it, we don't access the internals of the satellite or the data that is generated as part of the intermediate steps, and is kept secret on the satellite.”

The commitment of entropy from Cryptostat’s space satellite will be viewable in real-time via a dashboard monitoring the satellite’s trajectory and latest status.

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Cryptosat is one of the thousands to participate in supplying randomness to the KZG ceremony, as requested by the Ethereum Foundation to strengthen security. 

The satellite, Crypto2, was launched into space on Jan. 3 aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. It was the successor to the first satellite launch of Crypto1 back in May. According to Cryptosat, the second satellite has 30x the computing power of the first one.

Previously the company said that blockchain-powered satellites are part of the effort to make outer space a “new battleground in the quest for bulletproof cryptography.”

The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade to the mainnet, for which the entropy by Crypto2 is generated, is scheduled for April 12.

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