Decentralized finance blockchain platform Razor Network announced today that the company has raised $3.7 million in a seed funding round.

The financing came from NGC Ventures, Alameda Research, Spark Digital Capital and private investors, including Mariano Conti, a former executive at MakerDAO.

Traditionally, networks require access to external data to operate and decentralized ledger blockchain networks use smart contracts to execute real-world programmable financial agreements. This is ordinarily done using centralized servers called “oracles.” However, because they are centralized, they can be a single point of failure.

Razor Network wants to change that process with a decentralized oracle, thus providing decentralized data for smart contracts using a network. Razor says it’s not only fast but efficient, fault-tolerant and secure.

“Mariano really understands what we’re doing,” Razor Network founder and Chief Executive Hrishikesh Huilgolkar said about private investor Mariano Conti, former head of oracles for MakerDAO, in an interview with Coindesk. “He probably created the first oracle to ever go into production so he’s quite a good addition to our team.”

Oracles automate fetching external data, reducing the need to rely on centralized servers. That greatly increases network resilience against censorship and bottlenecks. It also means that the system can be deployed anytime and anywhere and it’s blockchain-agnostic.

Razor Network is secured using a Proof-of-Stake algorithm network with strict penalties for misbehavior to keep bad actors at a minimum. The network is also compatible with Ethereum, which is a cryptocurrency token commonly used in business applications.

“The oracle is arguably the most important piece of any DeFi application,” Huilgolkar said. “More importantly, the oracle needs to be fully permissionless to be secure.”

Razor Network will launch in 2021 and developers will be able to build state-of-the-art dapps on the network. The upcoming launch will also follow and be compatible with the first phase of Ethereum 2.0.

Developers interested in building on top of the Razor Network can find more information on Razor Network’s developer portal in an “Explainer document.”

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