ORAO AMA with the Russian gate.io community

Today we had an AMA with gate.io’s Russian community. Participating were Nik, our CEO, and Tobias, our community and content manager. Together with the organizers we chose three questions to introduce ourselves, and then opened up for the AMA proper, with questions from their community.

Moderator: What got you into crypto to start with?

Nik: The first crypto I held was bitcoin back in 2010–2011 and I received it as payment for a small project I built for a Canadian client. Fast forward to 2015 I provided data to Fortune Top 20 companies which is how I gained experience with enterprise level data requirements. The same year I started looking into crypto and in January 2017 I co-founded a crypto indexing website. This website stored tens of Billions of raw trades from over 200 crypto exchanges and extrapolated a wide range of data indicators that are not possible to obtain through default ticker-based dataset.

Tobias: I got interested in crypto in 2017. I studied Economics and political science, so I found it fascinating to follow how different countries were tackling crypto regulations differently. From there I got into trading, which got me into the tech aspect of it all. I have worked in crypto since 2018. It’s an incredible space, and I feel privileged to be here.

Moderator: What would you say sets ORAO apart from all the other oracle projects?

Nik: ORAO provides general data types not just crypto pricing data which is the default and only data type for most oracle systems. This allows for a completely new ecosystem of services running on the blockchain. Providing proactive data rating assures that inaccurate bad data doesn’t get to the end user. The computation layer enables VAD (value added data), cutting costs of running and dev of dapps and simplifying them.

Tobias: ORAO was built because we saw that there are a few bottlenecks in current oracle implementations. A few of the other oracle projects are trying to veer now from being single chain platforms to becoming blockchain agnostic. ORAO is built that way from the beginning. We are also creating a network that is data agnostic. With the explosion we have seen in DeFi oracles are obviously important, but so far oracles are providing almost exclusively financial data. And even then, mostly simple price feeds. ORAO introduces the ability to add new ‘Predefined Data Protocols’, where new data products can be created very easily. If you want to write a betting smart contract for esports tournaments, ORAO will have data protocols to support that, so you can make sure your betting contract gets reliable data. Our plan is to support anything the market demands. Weather data, election results, the price of tea in China, whatever.

Moderator: Will ORAO have any kind of staking program?

Tobias: Yes. You will be able to stake ORAO to become a validator on our network, which does not require developer knowledge. 20% of the total supply of tokens is reserved for validator rewards, so there will definitely be an opportunity for early holders to secure rewards by helping to protect the network.

Community: Are there any plans to burn tokens?

Tobias: No, there are no plans to burn tokens. You can benefit from staking as a validator, but the total supply is fixed, and we don’t plan to shrink it.

Community: What are ORAO’s plans for the future, since the Roadmap is quite modest, only until the end of the year, what is the value for future ORAO holders?

Nik: Our roadmap is not detailed as we are focused on building and defining the fine details of the product.
ORAO will pave the path and enable a whole new ecosystem of dapps and what is available on the blockchain. Currently, blockchain apps and services are limited with the data that is available. If you want to build a sports betting app, you need to build an oracle just for that app. We’re providing support for all different kinds of data from ground up.

Community: How is the ORAO token used in ORAO? How to keep motivated to keep ORAO tokens in the long run? How do you plan to dominate the market?

Nik: Other than support for general data, ORAO allows for proactive data rating and reputation scoring of every data provider. This allows us to provide accurate and instant ready-to-use data as the bad and inaccurate data will never be delivered to the end user.

Community: Where does ORAO generate revenue from? How is ORAO’s revenue distributed for mutual benefit?

Tobias: With the very successful sales we have held up to now, we have secured quite a good runway for our project. Once the oracle network is live, we will also run validator nodes, as we invite the community to do. Beyond that, 3% of the total supply is held in reserve, and will begin vesting in 18 months.

Community: Is ORAO capable of detecting malicious traffic not only from customers, but also from other Internet users?

Nik: Data providers are the ones who can affect the network with bad data, that is why we have proactive data rating.
A data provider can submit bad data for sports and good data for crypto financials. ORAO understands the differences and acts accordingly lowering the rating for the data streams and overall reputation of the data provider.

Community: what are some of the key features that make ORAO stand out? What is there in ORAO that is not in other projects?

Tobias: The most important features to me are general data and blockchain agnosticism. ORAO does not just provide financial data. Anything that can be objectively confirmed and judged by other data providers and validators, ORAO can support. Weather data, obituaries, football match winners, etc.

Community: For which networks do you plan to expand the development capabilities of the ORAO platform?

Tobias: We can and will expand wherever we see demand. We recently announced a partnership with Elrond, so of course we will support them. But in the long run, any smart contract chain that is popular, we can connect to. Blockchain agnosticism is important to us, and we built ORAO to be good for that from the ground up.

Community: What makes ORAO the best solution to real life problems? What is the main difference from your competitors?

Nik: proactive data rating, general data support and computational capabilities.
I want to explain that the computational capabilities allow dapp builders and investors to cut costs and to develop their services faster. For example if you’re buying an oracle that provides crypto pricing, ORAO can provide you with that data and also calculate the outliers, pricing bands, historical prices and more — it all depends on what the end user requires. Another example is with travel data — if you want to buy travel data for Aeroflot from a data provider, ORAO can add other travel data related to the same airports.

Community: Many DEFI project coins have plummeted over the past week. What is ORAO doing to make a difference and provide users with a better user experience?

Tobias: The crypto market will be volatile for a long time to come. That said, the price for our token at sale was a very modest $0.015, so those who purchased it so far hopefully won’t feel they were caught in a bubble. In the long run, while obviously we can’t predict price, ORAO is a solid project that is making steady development progress.

Community: Security and trust is one of the things that users are most interested in in the blockchain system, so where is ORAO’s transparency reflected?

Nik: Agreed — the current blockchains have a major issue where you find out that the data is bad only after the block is mined — meaning after the dapp already used it. This is a big issue and we’re resolving it by only allowing good data that is rated by our proprietary algorithms. The data that will be distributed to the blockchains will be the one that passes the rating threshold.

Community: Is ORAO a global project? Is there a plan to reach Korean, European and African communities? will you run multiple language lines for non-native english speakers?

Nik: Absolutely! We’re actively discussing cooperation with projects in Africa and Korea. As our community grows, we will dedicate resources to communities in their native language.

Community: Who is ORAO’s competitor? What are ORAO’s strengths to compete with?

Nik: There are established oracle networks however they do not provide the services and solve problems like ORAO does. We believe our approach is novel and a game changer for the entire crypto industry.

Community: Can you explain the general tokenomics and liquidity locks around ORAO?

Tobias: The max supply is 1 billion tokens. All tokens are subject to some vesting and/or lockup, so for example the people who participated in the sales a few weeks ago have a 6 month vesting period, where they unlock some tokens each month. Earlier investors are subject to longer vesting periods, and team and advisor tokens do not even begin to release for the first 12 months. As time goes on, the token allocations dedicated to liquidity, validator rewards etc will grow. We will reach the full 1 billion token supply in approximately 5 years.

Community: How big is your company? How many developers and team members are currently working? Do you hire remote workers? If someone wants to work with you, where should they go?

Nik: We are a team of 10 people, and we are all working remote due to COVID. We are headquartered in Singapore but the team is distributed among 5 countries.
Developers who are interested should contact us through the form on the website (footer) or directly send their CV to hello@orao.network.

Community: As I understand it, one advantage of ORAO is the proactive evaluation of data before it is delivered to the end user. Question: By what principle or algorithm is the accuracy calculated as data enters the system?

Nik: The algorithm uses many parameters some of which are standard deviation, deviation between streams of the same data protocol between different data providers and so on. We are also adding neural nets for data where it makes sense. Unfortunately we cannot give you the exact formula to make sure bad providers do not exploit it. Google doesn’t share it’s PageRank formula.

Moderator: This concludes the AMA session, and thanks to Nik and Tobias from Orao Network for taking the time to spend it for our community!

Nik: Spasiba bolshoi!

Tobias: Thanks, all! It was a pleasure to answer your questions.

If you would like to learn more about ORAO, you can check out our website, dig into our whitepaper, or join our Telegram channel to speak directly to members of the team and our community.