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Marcus Lindh — Applied Cryptography Researcher, writes on provably-fair systems and on-chain verification.
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marcus-lindh-crypto
- Twitter/X: @marcus_lindh_crypto
- Email (editorial): [email protected]
- Experience: 5+ years applied cryptography research
About
Marcus Lindh is a PhD candidate in applied cryptography at Lund University, where his dissertation work focuses on verifiable randomness in distributed systems — specifically the commit-reveal schemes and VRF constructions that have started leaking out of academic papers and into commercial on-chain gambling protocols. Before starting his doctorate in 2022 he spent two years as a research engineer at Sectra Communications in Linköping, building protocol verification tooling for classified-grade key management. He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science with a specialization in cryptology from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2020), where his master’s thesis covered formal verification of elliptic-curve digital signature implementations.
He fell into the crypto-casino space sideways. In 2023 a colleague forwarded him a “provably fair” dice contract on Polygon that, on first read, looked sound — and on second read, used block.timestamp as an entropy source. He wrote a 4,000-word post-mortem, it got shared around a few Discords, and somewhere along the line he discovered that an entire vertical of the gambling industry was marketing itself on cryptographic guarantees that mostly didn’t hold up to a slow read. The articles started piling up after that. He stayed because the technical questions are genuinely interesting and the audience actually reads the math.
Marcus writes about the parts of crypto-casinos that are testable: seed-commitment schemes, on-chain RNG, ZK-proof systems for hand-history verification, and the practical attack surface between a smart contract and the front-end people actually click on. He does not write reviews, he does not write bonus comparisons, and he will not pretend to know anything about a casino’s customer support. He writes about whether the math checks out. That’s it.
Off the page he runs long-distance and brews his own coffee badly. He answers technical email; he does not answer affiliate inquiries.
Expertise Areas
- Provably fair gambling protocols — commit-reveal schemes, seed-server signatures, client-side verification flows.
- On-chain RNG and VRF systems — Chainlink VRF, drand, threshold-BLS randomness beacons in gambling contexts.
- Zero-knowledge proofs for gaming — Groth16 and PLONK constructions for hidden-state verification (poker, blackjack).
- Cryptographic auditing of casino smart contracts — common pitfalls, MEV-extractable randomness, oracle dependency analysis.
- Formal verification tooling — application of Tamarin and ProVerif to gambling protocol specifications.
- Side-channel and statistical attack surfaces — chi-squared tests on RNG output, low-entropy seed detection.
Notable Publications
| Publication | Article | Year | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| HackerNoon | “Why ‘Provably Fair’ Often Isn’t: A Cryptographer’s Read of Three Major Casino RNGs” | 2025 | hackernoon.com/… |
| HackerNoon | “Chainlink VRF in Casino Contracts: A Reality Check on Latency and Cost” | 2025 | hackernoon.com/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “Commit-Reveal Done Right: A Reference Implementation Walkthrough” | 2024 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “On block.timestamp as Entropy: Don’t” | 2024 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “ZK-SNARKs for Hand-History Verification in On-Chain Poker” | 2025 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
| Tumblr — Onchain Notes (guest) | “Three Ways Casino Contracts Leak Randomness” | 2024 | onchainnotes.tumblr.com/… |
| IACR ePrint (preprint) | “Verifiable Delay Functions in Adversarial Gambling Environments” | 2025 | eprint.iacr.org/… |
| KTH Master’s Thesis | “Formal Verification of secp256k1 Signing in Embedded Contexts” | 2020 | kth.diva-portal.org/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “drand vs Chainlink VRF for Slot Mechanics: A Latency-Cost Tradeoff” | 2025 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
| HackerNoon | “Auditing Smart-Contract Casinos: A 12-Point Checklist” | 2025 | hackernoon.com/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “Why Most Provably-Fair Verifiers Are Theatrical” | 2026 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
| Substack — Crypto Casino Math | “Threshold Signatures for Multi-Operator Casino Pools” | 2026 | cryptocasinomath.substack.com/… |
Recent articles on this site
_The 10 most recent articles by Marcus Lindh on this domain are listed below. (Templated dynamically — Mammon to wire.)_
Editorial inquiries
- Author email:
[email protected] - Editorial disclosure: Marcus’s analysis is independent. He does not accept payment for coverage and does not write paid reviews. Casinos and protocols mentioned in his articles are selected on technical merit. Affiliate links on this site are placed editorially, not by author request.