IEETA research wins Best Application Paper Award at BLOCKCHAIN’26

The paper “Verifiable Randomness for Blockchain-Based Lottery Systems” received the Best Application Paper Award at the 8th International Congress on Blockchain and Applications (BLOCKCHAIN’26, https://edition2026.blockchain-congress.net/), held in Naples, Italy, from 21 to 23 October 2026.

The IEETA researcher André Zúquete presented the work developed in collaboration with Gonçalo Ferreira (MSc student) and Paulo Bartolomeu (DETI and IT), in the scope of the Blockchain.PT project (https://www.ua.pt/en/agendasprr/blockchain). The paper surveys approaches to generating randomness on blockchains and proposes a platform based on the commit-and-reveal scheme. Its design addresses the “last revealer” attack, in which a participant can withhold their contribution to influence or abort the result. The team of researchers implemented and tested a prototype, combining a web front end with a Solidity smart contract, on the Polygon 2.0 Amoy testnet.

The preprint of the paper is available on [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31485).