Cryptography is widely used to establish secure connections such as those used in banking and cryptocurrency transactions. It ensures the security of data transferred across the internet by encoding messages to make them difficult to decode by anybody but the intended recipient. To strengthen its cryptographic foundation, Ethereum decided to run a cryptographic ceremony known as Ethereum KZG. This ceremony involves gathering randomness from different locations all over the world from trustworthy sources and Cryptosat's satellite Crypto2 is one of those contributions.

Cryptosat is the entity which launched Crypto2 into the sky on the 3rd of Jan; successfully executing its mission aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. This was the successor to the Crypto1 satellite, launched back in May, which had 30x the computing power of its predecessor.

Contributions to the KGF ceremony have already been made over 83,000 times from users all over the globe. On the 4th of April there was Crypto2’s turn at 6am UTC. Crypto2 orbits Earth every 90 minutes, 550km above ground, making it difficult for outside actors to access the contribution it makes to the ceremony.

Yan Michalevsky, co-founder of Cryptosat explained to Cointelegraph that the ceremony requires that parties create cryptography parameters that are not vulnerable to ‘toxic waste’. These are intermediate computations artifacts which are inaccessible and discarded after being generated, should they be leaked they could potentially jeopardize the integrity of the cryptographic scheme Ethereum uses.

To secure the cryptographic parameters and eliminate the risk of ‘toxic wastes’, Cryptosat acquired a Verifiable Random Beacon which is set to generate entropy for its contribution. The beacons are signed by Crypto2 itself and the public key used to verify them was also generated in space. There is also a dashboard which tracks the satellite’s path and latest status, allowing people to monitor the commitment of entropy from space in real-time.

The Shanghai Upgrade of Ethereum is expected to take place on April 12th and the entropy for it will be provided by Crypto2 among many other sources. As the blockchain technology advances and more companies are interested in it, space has become a ‘new battleground in the quest for bulletproof cryptography’. Cryptosat is striving to become a leader in the race of using space technology to innovate the blockchain in new and advanced ways.



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