[lukevalenta]

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the Cloudflare blog and maintainer of Cloudflare's drand nodes.

You're correct -- after the initial distributed key generation, the values produced by the drand network are deterministic (this is one of the properties that allows for timelock encryption). The security properties of drand rely on a threshold of nodes remaining uncompromised, but mixing in fresh randomness isn't necessary. (Although you could imagine having some drand chains that incorporate fresh randomness for properties like post-compromise security.)

> isn't the following quote from the Cloudflare blog misleading? >> > Each organization contributes its own unique source of randomness into the joint pool of entropy used to seed the drand network

If this is misleading it wasn't intentional! We used the word "seed" since the randomness from LavaRand is only mixed in when the network is initialized, but perhaps that could have been phrased better. Or perhaps we should have split it into separate blogs talking about LavaRand and drand since they're only tangentially related :).

[krackers]

Thank you for the reply, that clarifies things! As a crypto-novice perhaps explicitly using the term "initialize" might be better at indicating this is a one-time thing rather than a "continuous" process of injecting entropy.