Decentralized technologies such as blockchain are revolutionizing many industries including finance. Applications such as decentralized lending, stable currencies, prediction markets, and synthetic assets are being researched and built on top of them. Many such applications depend on real-world data, which is not readily available inside the blockchain environment due to their design. Currently, this problem is being solved by something called an “Oracle”, which is an entity that reads real-world data and feeds it to the blockchain. Current Oracle solutions are either centralized or vulnerable to certain attacks. Current oracle solutions may work short term but are not suitable for long term applications, which is essential in decentralized applications.
We propose a fully decentralized oracle network called "Razor network" with built-in governance, so that the network can thwart such attacks and remain functional in a constantly evolving environment. Razor network is resilient to bribbing attacks since it utilizes a high degree of redundancy and offers high economic security for all applications regardless of the fees being paid to the oracle. Razor network also can dispute the results of the oracle, which makes it resistant to many kinds of game theoretical vulnerabilities.
Razor network consists of stakers1 who accept queries from a job queue, perform fetching of information from the real-world, process and aggregate the results and serve them to the requesting application. Stakers are awarded for reporting coherently and penalized for reporting incoherently.
Razor network uses a proof of stake consensus algorithm and uses a native utility token called RAZOR. RAZOR are needed to be locked to participate as a staker in the network. Stakers are awarded fees as well as block rewards for participating in the network. The amount of staked tokens of the staker determine their influence in the network.
The design goals of the Razor network are to ensure the long term sustainability of the oracle and the data feeds it provides, a high degree of decentralization, high economic security in a way that protects both stakers and clients of the oracle from various attacks.
