On the 10th of February, 2021, Hrishikesh Huilgolkar, Founder of Razor Network and Divij Sood, the Communication Head at Razor Network, were both live at the CryptoDiffer Community Telegram AMA Session, to provide the community with insights on Razor’s progress, upcoming events and developments, and plans for the future.
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 (Maks), while the second segment, gives account of the questions asked by Matic community members.
SEGMENT 1
Maks — Hello, everyone! We are glad to meet here Hrishikesh Huilgolkar, Founder of Razor Network and Divij Sood, the Communication Head at Razor Network.
Hrishikesh —
Hello Nice to meet you all.
Divij —
Hello Everyone, glad to be here.
Maks — Welcome Hrishikesh and Divij. Thank you for taking your time today! Our team has prepared 3 questions to you to start with!
Divij —
Awesome.
Maks — Let’s start from the introduction! Can you introduce yourself to our community?
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.
Divij —
Hello 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 3 years now and have worked with various projects over the years like LCX, PlotX to name a few in roles ranging from Communications to Marketing.
Maks — Perfect, thank you for introductions! Can you briefly tell us what is Razor in 3–5 sentences?
Hrishikesh —
Razor Network is a blockchain agnostic decentralized oracle network with a focus on Maximum game-theoretical security, complete decentralization, and being fully permission-less. 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.
Razor is blockchain agnostic and will be integrated with many blockchains. We have partnered with many blockchains such as Matic Network, SKALE, Algorand, Elrond, Conflux, Persistence, etc. We will be announcing more blockchain integrations soon.
Maks — Thank you for an answer! Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?
Hrishikesh —
Our whitepaper has been released and can be downloaded from Razor official website. Our testnet has been live on razorscan.io. We are planning to bring our oracle live on mainnet next quarter. We have had a hugely successful public sale last week. We thank the community for the participation.
Maks — Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers! It is time to move to the community questions part.
SEGMENT 2
Community Question 1 — Will your set of smart contracts be able to run on multiple blockchains asides any Ethereum compatible blockchain?
Divij —
Razor is blockchain agnostic and will be integrated with many blockchains. We have partnered with many blockchains such as Matic Network, SKALE, Algorand, Elrond, Conflux, Persistence, Moonbeam, Polkadot etc. We will be announcing more blockchain integrations soon.
Community Question 2 — I read where you said that Razor Network is well designed and set up to provide maximum game-theoretical security without compromising speed in the process. What does a game-theoretical security mean? Is this type of security only in theoretical existence or it is practicably achievable?
Hrishikesh —
You can think Game theoretical security as maximum possible security from theoretical perspective. If a mechanism is game theoretically secure that means it will also be practically secure. But the reverse is not necessarily true.
This means it is definitely practical and makes a huge difference in terms of practical security.
Community Question 3 — RAZOR tokens = 1BILLION, Minted tokens = 400M, Allocated tokens = 600M. What is the difference between minted and allocated tokens? What % of RAZOR tokens are allocated for staking, governance, team?Razor Network recently partnered with Algorand and Elrond. What’s the biggest impact that drives Razor Project to make partnerships? How does this benefit both ecosystem?
Divij —
400M RAZOR tokens will be distributed to stakers as block rewards. The block rewards will be higher at genesis to encourage stakers to participate, and will slowly decrease over time. You can read the full Tokenomics here.
Hrishikesh —
400M tokens are MINED. that means they will be awarded to the stakers as block rewards.
Community Question 4 — The oracle problem is one of the major challenges imposing the success of DeFi, as decentralized oracles mitigates the risks of a central point of failure. Chainlink is the absolute LEADER of this market. So , What are competitive advantages between Razor Oracle and ChainLink?
Hrishikesh —
Razor network has the following killer features which set it apart from other oracles:
- Truly decentralized and permissionless.
- Only oracle to offer Fast AND Secure results.
- Flexibility to request results in an automated and manual fashion.
- Game theoretically sound and resistant to collusion, bribing, Sybil and censorship attacks.
- Blockchain agnostic with many partnerships and integrations.
Community Question 5 — Razor Network uses a Proof of Stake Algorithm. Not everyone is familiar with crypto technical terms. Can you please explain in layman’s term what this means and why it’s been used Razor Network?
Divij —
Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins he or she holds. Proof of Stake is a simple and proven consensus algorithm. That’s why it is used by many reputable projects including Ethereum 2.0.
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 disincentivizes bad behavior. A part of the tokens collected as a penalty is distributed to honest stakers, further incentivizing honest behavior.
Community Question 6 — Who can become a data provider for the Razor Network? How do you determine the validity and integrity of data and ensure security?
Hrishikesh —
Anyone can become a staker in Razor. Stakers need to lock their RAZOR tokens and run staker node in order to become a staker.
Stakers must perform their tasks diligently on the network to earn rewards. If stakers fail to perform their duties diligently, they may face penalties.
Stakers need to perform the following tasks:
- Acquire the required amount of Razor tokens.
- Run the node on their computer.
- Stake their tokens.
- Keep the node online as long as they want to participate in the network.
- If the staker is assigned a dispute/manual round they will have to manually fetch and report data accurately within the specified time (could be up to a few days).
Community Question 7 — Razor partners with Web3API. Can you talk about your long term plans for Razor in partnership with Web3API, what are you planning to achieve?
Divij —
Razor Network’s partnership with Web3API will enable Razor to use Web3API standard instead of creating multiple SDKs for different languages. Razor Network will build Web3API modules for the various functionalities supported by the ecosystem, such as querying jobs, voting, etc. More Information.
Community Question 8 — Most of your RAZOR tokens are under a lockdown. How do you aim to attract long-term buyers and stakers to your ecosystem to prevent dumping?
Hrishikesh —
We will continue to build more strong partnerships and keep building the product with long term goals. Our staking program will also be very attractive with high APY to encourage more staking.
Community Question 9 — Considering that Razor Network is Built with Ethereum technology, so it’s only deployable with Ethereum based projects?
Divij —
No. Razor is blockchain agnostic and will be integrated with many blockchains.
Community Question 10 — Do you think DEFI is still in its infancy despite its rapid growth? How will the Razor oracles help take DEFI projects to the next level for mass adoption?
Divij —
Currently, DeFi has proven to be the best and biggest use case for blockchain. And almost all DeFi apps require some kind of external data. Due to the lack of a fully decentralized and permissionless oracle, projects end up using a centralized or semi-centralized alternative.
This has created a systematic risk in the entire ecosystem. This is why the Razor network is important and it will solve this problem by offering a fully decentralized, permissionless secure, and fast oracle.
Community Question 11 — I could see a very close similarities between your dispute resolution mechanism and that of Kleros, is there any difference between yours and theirs? I would be glad if you could walk us through how it actually works?
Hrishikesh —
Razor’s dispute resolution mechanism is heavily inspired by Kleros and has some similarities. But there are notable differences too.
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 12 — In the world cryptocurrency competition, features are of the utmost importance to attract investors and the community! Can you provide a list of killer features that scare your competitors over your project?
Divij —
The main features of the Razor network are:
- Truly decentralized and permissionless.
- Only oracle to offer Fast AND Secure results.
- Flexibility to request results in an automated and manual fashion.
- Game theoretically sound and resistant to collusion, bribing, Sybil, and censorship attacks.
Community Question 13 — Razor Networ is a decentralized Oracle network only for projects that have stablecoins? or if not, why do they mention that on their website? Could you explain us in more detail?
Hrishikesh —
Any application which requires external data can use Razor.
Some of the potential use cases of Razor are: Synthetic assets, stablecoins, prediction markets, decentralized lending, identity, etc.
Community Question 14 — I once knew your utility token as Schell, so what necessitated the change of name to RAZOR? Asides the name, are there any other changes that were made, probably change in smart contract and stuffs like that?
Hrishikesh —
We made the change to make the token more recognizable. There are no other major changes.
Community Question 15 — How would you rate the current Razor partners’ importance? Do you have a plan for the development of your communities?
Divij —
We have partnered with some very great projects and will be partnering with more also we truly believe it takes a great community to make a protocol truly decentralized.
We have lots of interesting events that happened in the past along with an ambassador program. Also a lot of stuff is in the pipeline that will be announced soon. Keep an eye on our announcement channel or join the group.
Community Question 16 — Good progress and project being a sustainable one is what Investors look out for, How do you intend to keep users more interested in project, what facilities and other blockchain utilities are you creating? Would they be bug bounties or airdrops?
Hrishikesh —
We run many competitions and giveaways regularly for our community. Please follow us for more details.
Community Question 17 — How are you going to market and create demand for your oracle product in this competitive crypto space? How are you different from other projects, especially other early oracles?
Divij —
Razor Network will not only target applications on the Ethereum 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.
Community Question 18 — How is Razor’s network secure against external attacks nowadays when so many networks are targeted by hackers now?
Hrishikesh —
Razor network offers maximum game theoretical security. That means its impossible to profitably attack the oracle. We will also use multiple auditing services to make sure our smart contracts are extremely secure.
Community Question 19 — Razor is a really good project that anyone should knows, so can we know what are you plans to get greater expansion? Do you have regional or local communities?
Divij — Yes. We’ve started building regional communities and volunteers from our community are helping us to run them.
Vietnamese Community
Chinese Community
Russian Community
French Community
Japanese Community
Community Question 20 — When it comеs to forging nеw partnеrships, what is Oraclе Razor focused on? What arе you looking for in your partners like?Hеllo, Razor tеam. How doеs Razor solvе thе issue of Razor dеcеntralization and resilience to thе Sybil attack, can you tеll us morе?
Hrishikesh —
We are always building strong partnerships on multiple fronts. We are focusing on partnering with multiple blockchains to make our oracle available on their blockchains, applications which need external data, liquidity mining and DEX apps, wallets, etc.
Community Question 21 — Razor Network announced a partnership with Matic. How does this collaboration contribute to Razor Network strategic goal?
Divij —
Matic Developers will now be able to access verified data seamlessly through Razor’s Decentralized Oracle Services. This integration will add increased utility to the ever-growing developer ecosystem on Matic and allow application developers on Matic to use Razor Oracle. You can read more here.
Community Question 22 — How do you plan to encourage/motivate validators on Razor Network to behave honestly, Will there be incentives for reporting valid data? In case of Dishonest/incoherent validators, will there be penalties for any malicious act to further prevent such behaviors?
Hrishikesh —
Truth-by-consensus algorithm is another name for the Schellingcoin oracle mechanism. This is the mechanism used by Razor network with some modifications. The essence of this algorithm is that whatever the majority of stakers vote to be true is considered to be truth and the minority is considered malicious and penalized. Honest validators earn RAZOR tokens as reward.
Community Question 23 — DeFi applications need accurate and reliable data. How can the Razor Network guarantee the correctness and accuracy of data? What are the penalties for validators who perform malicious acts?
Divij —
The validators who fail to maintain the following conditions may be penalized:
- Make sure the node is online.
- Report data coherently (honestly).
- Keep data secret during the COMMIT phase of the epoch.
- If it is proven that the validator is acting in a malicious way, some of their stake will be reduced and rewarded to other honest stakers. In this manner, they are penalized.
Community Question 24 — Chainlink updates the Dai contract only once every 24 hours, and how will Razor Network update the contract to provide up-to-date data without manipulation?
Hrishikesh —
Currently updates every 10 minutes. On other chains, the updates can be as small as 1–2 minutes thanks to higher scalability properties.
Community Question 25 — Now a lot of Many fake i projects promising insanely high APR, but ended up pull liquidity or minting, how does your project respond to this case? Explain the reasons why we should invest in your project because we know you’re a team without a name?
Hrishikesh —
We are not an anonymous team. All our teammates names are available on razor.network. We also have most prestigious investors and partners.
Community Question 26 — How soon till you launch your mainnet? What should we expect in the next 5 years?
Divij —
We are targeting the incentivised testnet this Quarter with Mainnet release soon after that in early Q2. In Q4 we will release the second version with dispute resolution and manual queries features.
Community Question 27 — Will integrating the Razor Network with Moonbeam help make your oracle available to all apps on Polkadot? How do you assess the future contribution of the Razor Network to the Polkadot ecosystem?
Hrishikesh —
Yes that’s correct. Razor aims to be the primary oracle for polkadot ecosystem. Read more details here
Community Question 28 — The “oracles” that many projects use are centralized, completely different from the decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain technology. What are Razor Network solutions for these projects ? How different from CENTRALIZED with DECENTRALIZED oracle?
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.
Hrishikesh —
That’s correct. The centralized oracles have a single point of failure. That means if the centralized oracle has a technical issue or is compromised, the oracle is compromised.
Whereas Razor is a decentralized oracle. That means there is no single point of failure. Razor consists for large number of stakers around the world and carefully designed game theoretical mechanism makes sure the stakers act in a honest way.
Community Question 29 — Reading about the last partnerships established by Razor Network, I could see that some days ago you established a partnership with a very interesting project: Meter, which offers a DeFi infrastructure with an embedded metastable currency. I would like to know: is this relationship purely unidirectional? I mean, Razor as an oracle provides data to Meter but you as a project do not use in any way the technology Meter offers? how do both projects work together?
Divij —
Razor Network’s partnership with Meter will provide reliable and secure off-chain data to DeFi apps built on Meter’s platform. This would ensure that the real-world data feeds that are used by the DApps are as trustworthy as Meter’s platform itself. Read More here.
Community Question 30 — Stakers must perform certain activities that are mandatory on their platform?
###Divij —
Stakers must perform their tasks diligently on the network to earn rewards. If stakers fail to perform their duties diligently, they may face penalties.
Stakers need to perform the following tasks:
- Acquire the required amount of Razor tokens.
Run the node on their computer. - Stake their tokens.
- Keep the node online as long as they want to participate in the network.
- If the staker is assigned a dispute/manual round they will have to manually fetch and report data accurately within the specified time (could be up to a few days).
For more Information and Resources about Razor Network, visit: