Collaborative Verifiable Delay Functions

We propose and define a new primitive, collaborative verifiable delay functions (coVDFs), an extension to VDFs allowing multiple parties to jointly compute a publicly verifiable delay, whilst encapsulating a personal input from each party. These personal inputs can contain information such as a hash of a bid in an auction, or some public identifier of the solving party. We highlight the differences between the single-party and the multi-party settings, and discuss some applications facilitated by the additional properties offered by coVDFs.