ORAO AMA with the Elrond community
Today we did an AMA with the Elrond community, following our recent partnership announcement. So we figured we should collect the questions and answers in one place for those who missed it. There are some excellent questions in this AMA, so it’s well worth a read.
The participants were Nikola (Nik) Strahija, our CEO, and Tobias Lönnell, our content and community manager. Without further ado:
Moderator: 🤝We are excited to start the AMA with ORAO.
Tobias: Hello, everyone! Excited to be here.
Nik: Hello everyone!
Moderator: Let’s start with a short introduction, tell us how did you guys discover blockchain and what motivated you to start working on Orao ?
Nik: Hi I’m Nikola (Nik) Strahija, CEO of ORAO. My background is full stack dev, compsec and I come from Croatia ❤️ First time I heard about blockchain was in 2010, which seems a long time ago… in a galaxy far away. It was Bitcoin, somebody shared the whitepaper with me, which I didnt read. Since 2017 I was dealing with a LOT of crypto trading data and saw a lot of entities using inaccurate data. Since then I saw different oracles coming to the market but they weren’t solving a lot of problems. That’s why I started talking to different people about what is known as ORAO today.
Tobias: I studied economics and political science, and got into crypto in 2017. Have been working in the space since 2018. It’s been really cool to watch the space evolve, and the politics of it all. Even cooler of course to be part of a project like ORAO and working to help build the future.
Moderator: My first question is for the community mainly, can you please explain what Orao does and what benefits it will have for the average user?
Nik: ORAO provides various datatypes and opens a whole new ecosystem of dapps. The data is rated as it comes in — if it’s bad/inaccurate then it never gets delivered — we have data stream rating and data provider rating. With current oracle solutions you find out the data was bad after the contract has executed. The third main advantage is computation capabilities. Think of it as outlier detection for prices, keyword extrapolation for articles or historical data matching — it cuts costs and development time for end users. On top of that, we’re multi-chain through native (such as the one we’re building for Elrond) gateways and polkadot.
Moderator: Sounds great. How does rating the data as it comes in compromise the speed at which it is delivered in comparison to data that is rated after the fact?
Nik: We code most of the modules in rust, which is super fast and the Elrond team will confirm that. There is a little bit of latency and more latency will be added with neural nets (for protocols where it makes sense). The final latency with every possible rating calculation, neural nets, chipmunks and magic is really minimal, under a second.
Community: How is Orao different from the other oracles in the crypto space?
Nik: It has many advantages over current oracles. We’re going to open a whole new ecosystem of dapps. Currently a dapp can try to get sports data but it will end up having to build its own oracle system. You build the app on another blockchain — we’ll have you covered (multi chain). Worried about data accuracy? Use a data provider with a high reputation score and a data stream with high rating.
Community: Can you explain how predefined data protocols work and how are they beneficial compared to traditional data feeds and sources for oracles?
Tobias: Sure. Every oracle has to send the data they are selling in a specific format, so that the data buyer (Usually a smart contract) can parse the data with no chance of misunderstanding. Because transaction size costs money, you generally want a protocol that sends data which is as brief and simple and possible. For price feeds this works great, and so price feeds were the first products that oracles provided. However, with the explosive growth of DeFi in the last few years, the demand is growing for richer data, and for non-financial data. ORAO solves the issue by making it easy to create many different data protocols. Sure, you can have simple price feeds. Or you can have weather data. Or the obituary for a celebrity. Or the outcome of an election. Our Predefined Data Protocols open the door to a general data marketplace, where oracles can offer any kind of data, with more or less rich information, depending on the needs of any particular data buyer.
Community: What is the utility of the ORAO token besides staking for data providers ?
Nik: Data providers and data buyers will both need to lock their tokens in order to use the system. ORAO will be used for payment however we will accept other currencies as well.
Community: What happens in the case of the Machine Learning Algorithm making a bad call and punishes an honest actor in the Orao network?
Nik: Remember Fukushima?
Community: Why not accepting other tokens to be staked instead of ORAO?
Tobias: ORAO is an ambitious project. A lot of original code has gone into it, and a lot more is being worked on. Beyond paying for developers, there are a lot of other costs associated with bringing a successful project to fruition. Beyond fundraising, creating our own token also allows us to set aside an allocation for validator rewards, which creates economic incentives to help grow the network.
Community: So expanding on this, what other use cases with the token play in the ecosystem and will you have a governance system in place?
Tobias: There is no on-chain governance. Obviously we constantly look for feedback and want to improve the network, but no, there is no voting planned. However, you have to stake the token to be a data provider or data buyer. Staking is also required to be a validator, for which you will be able to earn rewards. Becoming a validator will not require coding knowledge or experience.
Community: Can you expand on the machine learning algorithm a bit, what benefits does a Machine learning algorithm for bad behavior detection have, compared to traditional reputational systems ?
Nik: ML is only going to be used where it makes sense. if a data protocol contains data that has to be classified then and it revolves around real estate pricing then this classified data can be checked with let’s say… linear regression. The repurational systems we’ve seen so far are based on only “authoritative” data sources and ratings after the block has been mined and contract has executed. “Authoritative” data sources convert all fiat markets for a specific crypto to USD and then average it out. If you want the price of crypto in USD it should be calculated from USD markets only.
Community: What customizability do you offer in terms of data selection, can a customer select the data they want and pay per unit or they need to have a subscription ?
Nik: A data buyer can select from pre-defined groups, let’s say travel and then a subgroup, let’s say airline routes. The buyer will be presented with a list of oracles and their descriptions. So if the dapp needs data for airline routes going out of Bucharest — he’ll select the oracle that has the best parameters — rating, provider reputation and price. There is a minimal amount of time that the data provider can set for the oracle, 30 days, 7 days etc. This data will be fed to the data buyers dapp which will allow you to purchase airfare.
Community: What happens in the case where there are many predefined data protocols and a node is not capable to deliver data for them all ?
Tobias: A crappy old laptop with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics will be able to run a validator node. Hardware requirements are very low.
Nik: It can be headless.
Moderator: Amazing! That is very interesting and aligns with the Elrond vision!
Community: What happens in the case where there are many predefined data protocols and a node is not capable to deliver data for them all ?
Tobias: No data provider will be forced to provide any specific data product. You’ll be able to run exactly the products you want, and no more.
Community: So for a seller of data, can they actively come to you, or do you seek them out if there is a demand? What kind of incentives do they get when someone buys their data, they will also get rewards from Staking while they wait, right?
Nik: Yes, data providers can come to us and submit their own data protocol proposals. The same goes for data buyers — you need a certain type of data, we’ll research what data points you need if they’re not obvious and create a data protocol around it. When it comes to data sources, you can rest assured we will provide data from the start but we will slowly phase out our data sourcing service.
The data providers will be paid for their data. The providers do not need to keep their nodes running if there is no demand at that moment, which lowers their cost. They will be notified through email when an auction is submitted.
Community: Being some site, what are the cost implications of running say their own webscraper for user queries vs using the dao oracles. In the case for airfare where an algorithm would have to scrape many different sites for costs/info and also store in a db likely, will simply using dao oracles reduce many network costs while also being easier to implement?
Nik: It all depends on the dao network itself. It’s too difficult to answer this question without specifics. There are many airfare search engines out there — like skyscanner for example. I’m sure a good service can be created in a reasonable time and through ORAO be used on many blockchains.
Community: More and more are getting into this space, yet don’t have the technical knowledge, but want data as it is valuable for their business, will you have something for them, with an easy to use UX in the future ? Also where do you see Orao in 5 years time?
Nik: We’re working on a completely new UI/UX for our frontend page. You’ll like what you’ll see. We expect to put the beta out beginning May, the app we’re using to test is on blockexplorer.orao.network, however when you create an account it wont let you save data, it’s there just for the devs.
In 5 years time we expect ORAO to be delivering data to retail, on-chain and off-chain. We believe we will organize the world’s data.
Moderator: We thank Nik and Tobias for being with us tonight for an awesome AMA!
🛠We are excited for our partnership with ORAO that will offer customizable off-chain data products for Elrond smart contracts via ORAO oracles: https://elrond.com/blog/customizable-oracles-orao-network
Nik: Thank you everyone!
Tobias: Thank you for a great AMA, everyone! Do join us in our own community group if you have any more questions later on.
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If you would like to learn more about ORAO, you can check out our website, dig into our whitepaper, or join our Telegram group to speak directly to members of the team and our community.
