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.
SEGMENT 1
Arun Philips — Welcome Hrishikesh Huilgolkar and Divij Sood, it’s a pleasure to have you guys here!
Divij —
Hello. Glad to be here for an AMA with the Matic Community.
Hrishikesh —
Thanks for having us here Arun Philips! Really great to interact with the Matic community.
Arun Philips — Can you tell us a little about yourselves and Razor Network?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Divij —
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.
Arun Philips — Awesome! You guys have such a brilliant team and relevant expertise. Let’s talk a little bit about the journey of Razor Network, how has it been and what are the major milestones you’ve achieved so far?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Arun Philips — Looks like the calm before the storm! Can you tell us a bit more about Razor Network, and the supported price feeds on Matic?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Arun Philips — Sounds awesome! Can you dive a little deeper into Razor’s solution and what sets you apart from other decentralized oracles?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Divij —
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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Arun Philips — That’s great to see a primary focus on decentralization! Interesting details. Can you tell us a little bit about how your experience was building on Matic and what are the different Oracle Use-Cases you’re seeing from Dapps?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Arun Philips — That’s great to hear! Thanks for sharing some possible use-cases. What are future plans for Razor Network? Can you tell us details about the public sale if you have one planned?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Arun Philips — That’s awesome! I know many are already looking forward to it. Before we move on to community Qs, I think there are many in the community who would love to join the Razor community and stay up to date with all the news. What’s the best way to keep in touch?
Divij —
Users can join out TG and Twitter Communities to stay updated.
Arun Philips — Awesome stuff, thanks for answering my Qs guys! We’ll open up for Qs from the community now.
SEGMENT 2
Community Question 1 — I think one of the problems with blockchain platforms to reach mass adoption is the number of regular users. What’s your plan to attract users to Razor Network ?
Divij —
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.
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 2— Can we say that smart contracts not having access to external data is an important problem for the industry? Can Oracles do this exactly for decentralized applications to work?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 3— How the Oracle network works securely end-to-end without central bottlenecks and How does it support the dispute resolution mechanism? Can we say better for Razor than oracle?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 4— Can you explain the roadmap of Razor network? What is your Long-term Vision ?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 5— Partnerships are vital for the success of any project . So, can you tell us more about Razor network recent partnerships ?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 6— What are the incentives of the Ambassador Program you are preparing to create a team called the Razor Knights and how will Razor Network Ambassadors represent your project in local communities and raise awareness of potential users for new markets?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 7— Community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 8— What are the distinguishing features of Razor Network that cannot be beat by other platforms? Who would you consider as potential competitor in the market?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 9— I have read about Razor Network and use Oracle Network but I have doubts about their decentralization intentions, does Razor Network have a truly decentralized Oracle Network or do they retain some centralized bases?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 10— Does RazorNetwork have a Staking and farm program to use token?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 11 — Trust is very important in business. So, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with Your project? And how will you get the trust of many users that have negative thoughts about Blockchain?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 12— Razor network, is assured by the consensus of PoS. Please explain what is PoS and why is it Razor’s choice? How does it work?
Hrishikesh —
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.
Community Question 13 — Innovation, development, value, from those three things which part do you prioritize the most? And can you explain the reason?
Divij —
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.
Community Question 14 — What are the advantages of combining Matic with Razor Network for users? What is the most unique thing this combination brings to the blockchain community?
Hrishikesh —
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.