A Blockchain coding contest powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is granting a $100,000 prize to anyone who can solve a problem and can provide with the quickest speed improvement to it, according to a report.

The problem is as follows:

Given 1024-bit input x, compute the verifiable delay function ‘h=x^(2^t) mod N’ as fast as possible.

t=2^30

N=12406669568412474139879892740481443274469842712573568412813185506497689533

7309138910015071214657674309443149407457493434579063840841220334555160125016

3310409336906745695712173376302391915172057213101976083872398463643608502208

9677296497856968322944926681990341411705803010652807392863301711868982662559

4484331

In a competition powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), coders are being faced with a highly technical head-scratcher, that aspires to“changing the face of blockchain,” and also how hardware designs are made.

The competition, which is launched by the VDF Alliance, intends to solve how to calculate the verifiable delay function (VDF) in minimum time.

In the announcement, a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation, Justin Drake, explains that “VDFs are a low-level building block in cryptography, barely more than a year old. It’s the “V” or ‘verifiable’ in VDF that makes the approach so unique.”

According to Drake, it is distrustful. He says that, “For the first time, it adds this notion of time with which you can build all these cool things.”

“Unbiased proof of randomness” is included in the apparent “cool things” as promised by VDF technology. Virtually, it may allow distrustful, really random number generators on blockchain network. At the moment, these are seen as pseudo-random and can be taken advantage of by people, simply by being able to guess the set of numbers. The same would not be close to possible with true randomness. 

It can enable moving blockchain such as Ethereum, making it energy-intensive and therefore making it an expensive, if the technology is advanced enough.

“The Ethereum ecosystem alone currently uses on the order of 850 megawatts to extend blocks. That’s about $460 million in running costs per year,” said Tim Boeckmann, senior startup business development manager for AWS in the U.K. “With VDFs in Ethereum, there is an opportunity to bring down that cost to less than $0.13 million for the 0.25 megawatts of energy to power the hardware random beacons.”

The competition is being conducted in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation, as well as the alliance members like Supranational, Xilinx, Interchain Foundation, Synopsys and Protocol Labs, and are sponsoring the event with AWS.

The Ethereum Foundation is purportedly working already on solving the VDF issue, and is planning to spend $15 million in search of “true randomness”.

VDFs are supposed to be used for Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system which is highly antincipated, and is called Serenity. Ethereum network will move to the same in the coming years.

The first level of the contest will end in September, and the fastest design project that solves the problem will be awarded prize money.

Successful participants will be prized $3000 for every nanosecond solution or improvement in the initial level of the contest. Drakes stresses that the ones participating will require a series of skills. “You are going to need people who are really good at hardware design, but also people with algorithmic skills,” he said. “My guess is the winning team will have a combination of that expertise.”

For more contest details, and to enter, go here: https://vdfalliance.org/contest