Update: you can find the Part II of this series here In this blog post I am going to talk about some really cool cryptographic research done by Luca De Feo , Simon Masson , Christophe Petit and myself around a relatively new cryptographic construction called Verifiable Delay Functions ( VDF from now on). I know at this point you are thinking that the title of this blog post was yet another clickbait link but I promise that if you bear with me until the end you are not going to be disappointed. If you never heard about VDF fret not I will try to ELI5 this concept. So fasten your seat belt. The history of VDF is actually pretty neat indeed it seems that the concept was growing slowly through the years before finally being formalized. This is somehow evident looking at the links in https://vdfresearch.org/ . VDF were formally introduced by (the legendary) Boneh , Bonneau , Bünz and Fish in a seminal paper less than a year ago (June 2018). The paper con...