AMA RECAP — CRYPTOSCREEN INDONESIA with RAZOR NETWORK
On 16 October 2020, Razor Network conducted an AMA in the Cryptoscreen Indonesia Community. Our guest is Razor Network team
Lots of questions as usual from the Community about Razor Network progress. The Razor Network team took part in a very interesting AMA session which included introductions, questions from twitter, and a live AMA session with the Cryptoscreen Indonesia community. If you missed the AMA in person, read this recap for a deeper insight into Razor Network.
Let’s take a look at the most interesting points of our conversation.
Segment 1: Introduction
Samue Yabes: Hello everyone welcome to our Community.
Divij: Hello Everyone. Glad to be here
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Hi Everyone! Excited to chat with you today!
Himanshu Bisht: Hi, Cryptoscreen Indonesia community. Glad to be here
Samue Yabes: Before we start can you guys introduce yourself ?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: 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 in 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, I’m working as Communications Head for Razor Network. I’ve been involved in the Blockchain Space since 2016 primarily working in the Marketing and Communications area for Projects. I’ve worked for LCX, DeFi Money Market and PlotX in the past.
Himanshu Bisht: Himanshu here. Marketing head at Razor network. I am a computer science engineer turned into a marketer. I have 6 years of experience in marketing and sales.I am excited to be a part of this amazing project.
Samue Yabes: very great background. Can you introduce the Razor Network to our community?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Razor Network is a decentralized oracle network with a focus on Maximum security, complete decentralization, and being fully permissionless. Razor achieves this while still being fast and practical for Decentralized Finance. There are no centralized bottlenecks in Razor Network. Razor network uses a novel 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 network utilizes proof of stake consensus algorithm. In order to participate in the network as a validator, you will need to “Stake” your Razor tokens.
Razor is the only oracle that is both fast and extremely secure, which sets it apart from other oracles.
Samue Yabes: What features does the Razor Network offer users?
Divij: Razor network has the following killer features which set it apart from other oracles:
1. Truly decentralized and permissionless
2. Only oracle to offer Fast AND Secure results
3. Flexibility to request results in an automated and manual fashion
4. Game theoretically sound and resistant to collusion, bribing, Sybil
and censorship attacks
5. In-house synthetic asset app “Razor Synthetic Assets” to increase adoption
Samue Yabes: Is there a special amount to stake Razor tokens?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: A specific number of tokens are required to become a staker in Razor Network. The amount has not yet been decided.
Samue Yabes: Product in a project is something important. Can you explain what kind of product the Razor Network has?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Razor Network has built the following products
1. Razor decentralized oracle network https://razor.network
This is our decentralized oracle network. This is our main flagship product.
2. Razor Synthetic Assets — https://deltaone.finance/
Using this application, anyone can create synthetic assets for any asset in the world. Users can use their Razor tokens as a collateral.
3. Razor testnet Explorer — https://razorscan.io/
This can be used to explore our testnet
4. Reality-aware tokens https://medium.com/razor-network/realityaware-tokens-e8a7ee19bcb5
This is a new token standard created by our team. It can be used to create tokens that are aware of real-world data.
Samue Yabes: Razor Network Partners with Skale and Matic Network. What are the expectations with the Partnership? And in the future, are there any major steps that the Razor Network will take?
Divij: We’ve already announced two key partnerships, you can find their details below.
Matic — 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 — https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-partners-with-matic-network-af6521b6771f
Skale — The Razor-Skale infrastructure will provide developers with the necessary tools to build highly scalable, secure, and high-performance DApps with access to real-world data on SKALE platform. You can read more here —
https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-partners-with-skale-to-provide-access-to-real-world-data-8de0450a0306
We are working on more partnerships which should be announced soon.
Segment 2: Questions from the Twitter
Question 1: How to Protect clients from malicious stakers through A proof of stake consensus protocol is used in Razor. Can you explain what kind of malicious case is meant?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: 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:
1. 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.
2. The algorithm rewards honest validators with new tokens. This incentivizes the validators to behave honestly and report valid data.
3. 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
Some examples of malicious behavior by stakers are:
1. Sybil attack — a staker creates a large number of nodes to influence the result of the oracle
2. Reporting incorrect data
3. Bribing attack — attacker bribes staker to report incorrect data
4. Withholding attack — staker deliberately not reporting data for any reason
Razor is secure against all of the above mentioned attacks and many more other attacks.
Question 2: 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?
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.
Apart from that, we have the following differentiating factors:
1. Truly decentralized and permissionless
2. Only oracle to offer Fast AND Secure results
3. Flexibility to request results in an automated and manual fashion
4. Game theoretically sound and resistant to collusion, bribing, Sybil
Question 3: Razor Network connects smart contracts with data in a fast and secure way. Using what kind of system / technology to make it fast and how secure is the data?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Razor network has partnerships with multiple Layer 2 scalability solutions. So far we have announced partnerships with Matic network and SKALE. We have more partnerships in the pipeline which we will announce soon.
By deploying on such fast scalability solutions, we are able to achieve fast response times.
The data reported by the Razor network is extremely secure. This is because Razor has maximum game-theoretical security. Which means it’s impossible to attack the Razor network in a profitable way. This makes Razor one of the most secure oracle networks available. Multiple methods have been used to make oracle secure and truly decentralized.
Question 4: What oracles will Razor Network use to get accurate data? How does Razor Network prevent oracles from providing false information? What advantages of Razor Network oracles have over Cosmos, Oracle, or Polkadot?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Most of the oracles use the Schellingcoin mechanism. The mechanism is flawed and is vulnerable to various attacks. Razor uses a modified Schellingcoin algorithm with a sliding court mechanism. This includes an iterative dispute resolution mechanism which makes it robust against all kinds of game theoretical attacks.
Here is how the dispute mechanism works:
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.
Razor network is an oracle network that can be deployed on top of any chain. It does not compete with Cosmos and Polkadot. Rather, it can be deployed on top of those chains.
Question 5: Your project uses the Oracle chain and can be used on the ethereum network, but now the Binance smartchain is on the rise. Are there any plans from razor to expand using BSC in the future? And is razor had any own dex ?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: We will continue to partner with all major chains and deploy our solution there. Binance chain is definitely one of the impressive ones with strong ecosystem support. We will explore this suggestion.
We currently don’t have a plan to build our own dex at this stage but we have built a synthetic asset application called “deltaOne” or “Razor Synthetic Assets”.
Using deltaOne anyone can create a synthetic asset for any asset in the world. deltaOne uses Razor oracle for decentralized, fast and secure pricefeeds. We are really excited about this product.
Segment 3: Free/Live Questions
Telegram User: 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 RZR 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 pseudorandomly assigned to the validators, making collusion and bribing difficult Commit reveal scheme for revealing the “votes” and dispute mechanism makes it secure from bribing attacks.
Telegram User: Which Razor bridges are currently live on the Razor Network’s ecosystem and which tokens can be pegged in each of these networks?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Razor network is currently in testnet. We have built bridges to SKALE and Matic testnets. You can request pricefeed of any token on those networks. Once we go live, we will deploy our bridges to their Mainnets.
Telegram User: Your metamorphosis is a laudable one, how have you been able to survive this longest bear market and continue building and developing cos many projects have died out in this time period?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: I have been extremely passionate about solving the oracle problem. The problem is very challenging one and we designed and developed many different mechanisms to build a truly decentralized, most secure and fast oracle.
True passion to solve this problem and bring DeFi to the next step kept us motivated to focus on the problem and build an ultimate solution to finally solve this problem.
Telegram User: Many Decentalized Networks have dependencies on centralized parties, & that a weak link. Are Razor Network fully Decentralized? What are Razor Network’s main problem facing in achieving that?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: 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 RZR tokens. It does not require permission from us or anyone else.
We encourage decentralization in the protocol through the following ways:
1.A fair and wide distribution of tokens
2.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.
3.Queries are pseudorandomly assigned to the validators, making collusion and bribing difficult
4.Commit reveal scheme for revealing the “votes” and dispute mechanism makes it secure from bribing attacks.
Telegram User: Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps..) and what is your goals in this year ?
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: 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.
This year we plan to build a incentivised testnet.
Samue Yabes: Thank you for answering questions from our community. Before ending the AMA, do you have anything to say to our Community? Before us open Chat again.
Hrishikesh | Razor.network: Thank You for having us for the AMA, we had a really great session and enjoyed answering all your questions. If you have any more questions feel free to join our community.
For more information and future AMA, join our Social Media channels:
► Cryptoscreen Indonesia
► Cryptoscreen Announcement
► Cryptoscreen Twitter
► Razor Network Community
► Razor Network Announcement
► Razor Network Twitter
