Spotlight: Razor Network

The Razor Network is a fast, decentralized, blockchain-agnostic oracle solution, which has recently been deployed on the SKALE Network.

As SKALE's leading oracle platform, Razor will have an important role to play for dApps across the SKALEVERSE. Moreover, Razor does not charge any fees to users or dApp developers for its data feeds. Combined with the gasless infrastructure of the SKALE Network, this offers significant advantages over oracle providers on other blockchain networks.

What Are Blockchain Oracles?

Blockchain networks are designed to be self-contained and independent, effectively isolated from the outside world. In order to maintain security, every blockchain has a clear set of rules that validators (miners or stakers) must follow, and every validating node must have an economic stake in the running of the network.

This ensures that there are strong incentives to acting honestly and maintaining the ledger of transactions accurately. The blockchain network's nodes collectively establish consensus between themselves, and outside parties are ignored.

This means that by design, blockchains cannot access external information. This is a problem for Web3 dApps that require real-world data, such as asset prices, random numbers, sporting data and election results, information from weather sensors or IoT data, and so on.

Oracles offer a bridge between these vital sources of data and the self-contained environment of the blockchain. However, in relying on external data, dApps open themselves to vulnerabilities, since they have to trust the oracle that provides them.

Razor: Decentralized Oracles

Razor addresses both the problem of providing external data to dApps and the issue of centralization by means of a decentralized network of oracle nodes.

Razor's nodes collect and aggregate data from various real-world sources, establish consensus between themselves, and then condense the information into a feed that dApps can access.

Learn more about the Razor Network, and read the Razor white paper.

How To Run A Razor Node

The Razor Network is secured by a set of validators that stake RAZOR tokens. Nodes earn further RAZOR tokens—paid for by block rewards, rather than fees levied on users or dApps—for providing accurate data to the network, while nodes that report inaccurate data are penalized.

Razor Network is live on SKALE, allowing dApp developers to request reliable external data from decentralized sources. Users can run a validator node and be rewarded for providing this information, or delegate their RAZOR tokens to a staking node.

Minimum requirements for a validator node:

• 2 million RAZOR tokens
• Hardware: 4GB RAM, 4 Core (ARM64 or AMD64 architecture)

RAZOR holders can alternatively delegate any amount of tokens to a validator and share the rewards, without setting up a node themselves. A list of validators can be found at razorscan.io/staking.

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