Thank you to the NanoNews Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Razor Network on October 06, 2020. This guest star Razor Network Builders. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 84th AMA recap
We are glad to meet here:
Hrishikesh, Ceo Founder Of Razor Network
Himanshu, Marketing Head Of Razor Network
Divj, Comunication Head Of Razor Network
For taking your time out from busy schedule for the AMA
Introduction Session
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Razor Network?
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 3 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.
Himanshu: My name is Himanshu Bisht. I am a computer science engineer turned into an entrepreneur and marketer.With 6 years of experience in marketing and sales, now I am the head of marketing at Razor Network.
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is 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. Razor network uses a sliding court mechanism where any result of the oracle can be disputed iteratively. This makes the oracle extremely secure and makes it impossible to attack the oracle successfully.
Razor network utilizes proof of stake consensus algorithms. In order to participate in the network as a validator, you will need to “Stake” your Razor tokens.
Twitter Session
Q1.You have just announced a new partnership with Persistence. What do you both aim to achieve together? How does this partnership benefit both projects?
We recently announced our partnership with Persistence. You can find the details below
⚒Persistence is bridging the gap between DeFi and traditional finance by allowing users to borrow crypto funds using real-world assets as collateral. Users can tokenize real-world assets using NFTs to bring them on-chain into DeFi, and provide liquidity to diversified real-world asset-backed Stablecoin liquidity pools.
⚔️With this partnership, Persistence’s validator Audit.One will join as a validator in Razor’s decentralized oracle network. Audit.One provides multiple sentry nodes distributed across various cloud providers, which mitigates the risks of DOS attacks.
👥Meanwhile, Persistence’s global community will be introduced to Razor’s completely decentralized oracle network. Razor provides maximum game-theoretical security without compromising on speed or reliability, which will allow Persistence’s developers access verified real-world data in a seamless manner.
📄Read more : https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-inks-partnership-with-persistence-9b4efaa03428
Q2.The Oracle market is hard one, so can you tell me what are the competitive advantages of Razor over others Oracles like Chainlink?
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, and censorship attacks
5. In-house synthetic asset app “Razor Synthetic Assets” to increase adoption
Q3. How to Protect clients from malicious stakers through A proof of stake consensus protocol is used in Razor?
The protocol has several mechanisms in place to improve the security of the platform and face various attacks.
The Commit – reveal mechanism
When validators report a data point, they report it in a secret way, during the commit state of the epoch. They create a “hash” of the data point along with a secret and report that hash. Hence no one other than the validator themselves knows their own vote. This makes the reporting process discreet and avoids anyone’s votes being influenced by other validators’ votes.
In the reveal state of the epoch, all validators reveal the secret along with their vote. The hash of this must match the hash reported by the validator in the commit state, otherwise, it will not be accepted by the smart contract.
If anyone prematurely reveals their secret during the “commit” state, anyone can report it to the smart contract and slash their entire stake. Hence validators are heavily disincentivized to share their secrets. Due to this mechanism, it becomes difficult to prove to the briber that you have voted in one way or the other.
Dispute Resolution mechanism
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.
Q4.I have read your whitepaper: can you clarify a bit about how disputes are resolved in the Razor environment? is it like Kleros? Either the entire network should be involved or what mechanism is to proceed?
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.
Q5. Tell us about #Razor Network plans for 2020, what are you currently working on, and are you going to Big project this year?
Razor Network has already been live on the testnet for the past months, we also have released a few products like Razor Synthetic Assets, Razor Scan, Reality Aware Tokens as mentioned above.
Next Year we are planning to go live on the Mainnet as well as launching Dispute Rounds, Reality Aware Tokens and DeltaOne V1.
More details will be published on our website soon – https://razor.network
You can follow our official Twitter for more updates: https://twitter.com/razor_network
Live AMA
Q1.I read that Razor Network use Oracle Network but I have doubts about their decentralization intentions, does Razor Network have a fully decentralized Oracle Network or do they retain some centralized bases?
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.
Q2.What is Razor fairness and transparency? What technology of Razor helps ensure fairness and transparency for users?
Economic security is important for proof of stake. Several design decisions have been made to encourage higher economic security. Just one of them is self-adjusting staking APY. The APY increases automatically if the staking participation is low, attracting higher staker participation.
We are in talks with leading security auditors and will be getting a thorough audit once we have finished the development of the first version of the oracle.
Governance is currently in active research and we may use a DAO or novel Oracle-based governance in the future.
Q3.Razor Network is blockchain agnostic. Since it has this peculiarity, what advantages do you offer for the different blockchains?
As we know Ethereum blockchain has been very successful in attracting developers and to start the DeFi revolution. However, the scalability challenges of ethereum are becoming clear. This shows a need for Layer 2 and other scalability solutions.
Razor network is blockchain agnostic and can be deployed to any ethereum compatible blockchain. Different blockchains have different properties regarding privacy, scalability, security, etc. This gives us freedom to use any blockchain which has suitable properties and allows us to serve applications on multiple platforms.
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.
The mechanism will work in the same way in all platforms.
Q4. I was very curious to hear you mention that you have a system of strict sanctions for misconduct. So, can you tell us what you mean by misconduct, and what you mean by strict sanctions?
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.
The validators who fail to maintain the following conditions may be penalized.
1. 1Make sure the node is online
2. Report data coherently (honestly)
3. Keep data secret during COMMIT phase of the epoch.
Q5.Every successful project has some behind the scenes story, So what is the story behind Razor success? What is Razor mean?
In early 2019, the Team was exploring real-world applications of blockchain. At that time DeFi was in very early stages but was slowly proving to be a promising use-case.
But as Hrishikesh did more research, he quickly realized space was limited due to the centralized nature of the oracles used. This will always be a limiting factor of DeFi unless the oracle problem is solved.
Oracle problem is a very well known and notoriously difficult problem. I loved the challenging nature of the problem and started designing and analyzing different mechanisms for a fully decentralized and secure oracle.
Over the period of a year, he continued to research and development of Razor to make it the most robust, secure, and fast oracle network.
Q6.Can you give us 1-3 killer features about your project to convince me and other big investors to invest in $your project for the Long-term?
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 and censorship attacks
5. In-house synthetic asset app “Razor Synthetic Assets” to increase adoption
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.
Telegram Community – https://t.me/razornetwork
Telegram Announcement Channel – https://t.me/razor_announcement
Our twitter: https://twitter.com/razor_network
Thank you for inviting us for this AMA.
You can join our official group on Telegram for more queries.
We have a running giveaway on our Twitter channel. You can become a part of it and engage with Razor: https://twitter.com/razor_network/status/1324330775446056960
💻Don’t forget to Join And Follow social media from Razor Network
✅Telegram Group:
https://t.me/razornetwork
✅Telegram announcements:
https://t.me/razor_announcement
✅Twitter:
https://twitter.com/razor_network
✅Medium:
https://medium.com/razor-network
✅Github:
https://github.com/razor-network
✅Website:
https://razor.network/
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