On the 22nd of January, 2021, Hrishikesh Huilgolkar, Founder of Razor Network and Divij Sood, the C0mmunication Head at Razor Network, were both live at the Matic Network telegram AMA Session, to provide the Matic community with insights on Razor’s oracle services and how users can leverage them on Matic. The session was moderated by Arun Philips, the Marketing Specialist at Matic Network.
In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into two segments; the first segment, gives full account of the questions asked by the moderator of this AMA session (Arun Philips), while the second segment, gives account of the questions asked by Matic community members.
Hello. Glad to be here for an AMA with the Matic Community.
Thanks for having us here Arun Philips! Really great to interact with the Matic community.
I am Hrishikesh. The founder and CEO of Razor network. I have worked in various positions such as data scientist and product manager before discovering Bitcoin and Ethereum at the end of 2015. I found the technology fascinating and decided to work as a blockchain developer in this field in 2016. I have worked with various companies as a blockchain developer including ConsenSys. I have made open source contributions to projects such as the Ethereum and Raiden network.
Razor Network is a blockchain agnostic decentralized oracle network with a focus on Maximum game-theoretical security, complete decentralization, and being fully permissionless. Razor achieves this while still being fast and practical for Decentralized Finance. Razor network uses a sliding court mechanism where any result of the oracle can be disputed iteratively. This can thwart any attack that can happen on the oracle. We have partnered with Matic Network to solve the scalability challenges and provide fast and secure data on the blockchain.
I’m Divij, working as Communications Head for Razor Network. I have a bachelors in Business Administration with a specialization in Marketing. I’ve been involved in the Blockchain Space for almost 4 years now and have worked with various projects over the years like LCX, DeFi Money Market, PlotX to name a few in roles ranging from Communications to Marketing.
Razor Network has been live on the testnet for a few months. We have also released a our network explorer. We also finished our Private Round last year successfully. This Year we are planning to go live on the Mainnet. Also we are planning to have a public sale very soon. We have also partnered with amazing projects such as OpenDeFi, MantraDAO, Sentinel, etc.
More details will be published on our website soon.
Razor Network is a decentralized oracle providing data to the smart contracts using a network of stakers. Razor network is fast, robust and offers a high degree of economic security due to its full scale decentralization. The continually evolving platform is fully prepared to swiftly and smartly handle any unforeseen incidents.
We have integrated Razor network with the Matic Mumbai testnet. Currently we are reporting prices of ETH, BTC, EUR, MSFT and some other assets. We will be soon expanding the list of data feeds available on Matic.
Razor network is fully decentralized and does not have centralized bottlenecks. Anyone can become a validator in Razor by staking Razor tokens. It does not require permission from us or anyone else. Razor is the only oracle which is both FAST and game theoretically SECURE.
We encourage decentralization in the protocol through the following ways:
A fair and wide distribution of tokens
The protocol is permissionless. We, or anyone else, don’t have the power to decide who is allowed or otherwise, to participate in the network.
Queries are randomly assigned to the stakers, making collusion and bribing difficult.
Secret voting and dispute mechanism makes it secure from bribery attacks.
Razor network is designed from the ground up to provide maximum game-theoretical security without compromising speed. This means it’s impossible to profitably attack the oracle. Apart from that, Razor is fully decentralized, permissionless, and fast.
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It was extremely easy and user friendly experience to build on Matic. Since Matic is Ethereum compatible, we could use same tools and libraries we were used to, coming from Ethereum.
The documentation is thorough and the support from Matic developers was very useful.
In terms of use cases, mainly we are seeing decentralized finance apps such as decentralized exchanges, lending, synthetic assets, etc. Some other use cases such as prediction markets are also interesting and will be supported by Razor.
We are planning to do a public sale very soon. Likely in a few weeks. We will choose a fair method of public sale so we can see wide participation from our community. More details to be announced soon in our social media channels.
Telegram Community
Telegram Announcement Channel
We are planning to release Razor on mainnet soon after the sale.
Users can join out TG and Twitter Communities to stay updated.
Razor Network will not only target applications on the Ethereum and Matic Mainnet, but we have also partnered with multiple L1 and L2 chains to offer a fully decentralized oracle on their platform.
We are also part of the Association of Decentralized oracles, where we are collaborating with other oracle projects to standardize oracle integration. We believe that many projects will prefer to use multiple oracles instead of just one. This partnership will enable projects to easily integrate multiple oracles in their project.
Due to the attractive features of the Razor network, we have already onboarded many partnerships. Many more will be announced in coming weeks. Through our partnerships, we will be reaching out to a large userbase and increase adoption of the network.
Most applications require access to external data. This is one of the most important problems in the industry. This problem is called the oracle problem. Many projects have tried to solve this problem previously but there are always compromises done. Razor comes very close to solving this problem definitively by offering FAST and SECURE results across multiple blockchains.
An attacker can bribe the majority of the stake in a trustless way and can compromise the results of the oracle. To prevent this, Razor Network has an in-built dispute resolution mechanism.
Any result of the oracle can be disputed by paying the “Dispute bond”, which can be paid collectively. The disputers win a reward of 50% of the dispute bond if they successfully dispute a round.
If the bond is successfully paid within the dispute period, the query enters a dispute round. In the dispute round, the stakes are higher, the amount of penalty for voting incoherently is higher and the queries are answered manually by the validators. The results of the dispute round can be further disputed. The amount of participating stake, and the dispute bond amount is doubled every round. If the disputer wins the dispute, their dispute bond is refunded, else it is confiscated and rewarded to coherent validators.
Due to this mechanism, even if an attacker compromises the oracle, the result will likely be disputed by an honest actor. The attacker will have to pay double the bribe to compromise the dispute round. Even if they are successful in doing that, that round will again likely be disputed and so on. This can go on till the whole network participates in the dispute round. If that round also fails to resolve the dispute, the network forks in two networks, and the market decides the honest fork.
We are planning a public sale in a few weeks. We are targeting the first version of the mainnet release in Q1 this year. In Q3 we will release the second version with dispute resolution and support for prediction markets. In the long term we want to be a single solution for oracle problems on multiple blockchains and want to solve the oracle problem definitively.
We’re glad to have partnered with a lot of interesting projects including Matic, you can read more about our Partnership with Matic here .
Some of our other partners include — SKALE, Persistence, OpenDeFi, MantraDAO, Conflux, XDC, Sentinel. We will be announcing more partnerships in the coming weeks.
Razor knights will spread awareness about Razor network in different online and local communities. They get opportunity to interact with the team directly and learn about upcoming events in advance. The top ambassadors are also awarded in tokens for their hard work.
Indeed. We value our community a lot and have been running a lot of programs to engage with them including an Ambassadors Program as Hrishikesh mentioned above. We plan to engage more with our community and expand to other local regions in th ecoming months.
Razor network is blockchain agnostic, truly decentralized oracle network. Razor network does not have centralized bottlenecks.
Razor network provides maximum game theoretical security through the novel sliding court mechanism. This provides extremely robust and secure results that cannot be successfully attacked. Razor also includes many innovations to maximize economic security of the data. In this way Razor solves the oracle problem by providing FAST and SECURE data.
Decentralization is an important goal of the network. This is because centralization puts a high amount of power in a small group of entities, which makes a lot of attacks feasible and jeopardizes the trustworthiness of the protocol.
Razor network is fully decentralized and does not have centralized bottlenecks. Anyone can become a validator in Razor by staking Razor tokens. It does not require permission from us or anyone else.
We encourage decentralization in the protocol
through the following ways:
A fair and wide distribution of tokens.
The protocol is permissionless. We, or anyone else, don’t have the power to decide who is allowed or otherwise, to participate in the network.
Queries are randomly assigned to the stakers, making collusion and bribing difficult.
Secret voting and dispute mechanism makes it secure from bribery attacks.
Razor network is a proof of stake network. Validators can stake their RAZOR token in order to participate in the network and earn rewards.
We will also have liquidity mining program. Please follow us on social media for the announcement.
We completed our Private Round last year and were trusted by prominent investors in the blockchain world, including NGC Ventures, Alameda Research, Borderless Capital, IOSG Ventures, etc. Apart from this some industry thought leaders also joined the rounds.
Proof of Stake is a simple and proven consensus algorithm. That’s why it is used by many reputable projects including MATIC. Proof of stake is the core consensus mechanism of Razor Network. Proof of stake allows Razor to achieve the following goals:
Proof of stake provides Sybil attack resistance. This is because becoming a validator requires staking tokens and doing that without owning tokens is not possible.
The algorithm rewards honest validators with new tokens. This incentivizes the validators to behave honestly and report valid data.
Dishonest/incoherent validators are penalized and their stake is reduced. This disincentives bad behavior. A part of the tokens collected as a penalty is distributed to honest stakers, further incentivizing honest behavior.
We have just begun our marketing activities which includes organizing AMAs with different communities like Matic to educate users about Razor Network. In the coming weeks you’ll be seeing more marketing activities being rolled out.
Razor is extremely secure oracle. Matic is a fast scalability layer. The combination provides an extremely fast and secure oracle and blockchain platform for the applications. With this combination the kind of applications that can be potentially built is vastly increased.
