Pillars Of A Protocol

5 min readDec 17, 2020

The Zora Way

Zoracles Protocol was designed to provide confidential data to smart contracts. Our foundation has been developing Zk-Snarks to hide inputs from data sources that supply price feed information through Open Oracle.

We will continue to further develop this market vertical while pursuing a very promising opportunity with a new product: Zora.cc — Confidential Credit Checks.

Our team views confidential credit checks as a gateway to solving decentralized identity. We are exploring a “Proof of Identity” algorithm that would deliver credit scores on-chain via aggregation of API data from the major credit reporting agencies. DApps could use this data to securely validate a person’s identity for complex commercial activity such as home buying, collateralized lending & car financing.

These commercial activities represent the majority of most individual’s financing needs and blockchain opens new possibilities with peer-to-peer lending. To accomplish our mission, Zoracles Protocol has identified a few key areas in which we hold as our core values.

Superior Product

The most important Zoracles principle is building a superior product. There is a lot of competition in the crypto industry, but we are positioned to gain market share by developing a product that is superior to current offerings. This can derive from an innovative product vision or privacy & anonymity features that aren’t currently offered by oracle networks.

Our team is committed to product excellence. The development group has grown to 8 engineers and our work efforts are segmented across a few product teams:

Price Feed (Open Oracle) — https://data.zoracles.com- We launched this project with the mission of providing confidential data to smart contracts. Through current and future partnerships, we intend to deliver. Our “Snarks as a Service” is currently being piloted with dApps that are interested in upgrading Open Oracle with ZKPs (zero-knowledge proofs).
Governance (Zora token)— https://gov.zoracles.com- Decentralized governance is hard. We are building a platform to formalize decision-making and provide transparency to the process of creating Zoracles Improvement Proposals. Our target date for launch is Dec. 31, 2020.
New Product — (Zora.cc — Coming soon)- With an anticipated launch in Spring 2021, the Zoracles Protocol is excited to introduce our first consumer-facing dApp. Users will have access to free credit scores along with making this data available on-chain. Another benefit of building this infrastructure will be a “Proof of Identity” algorithm that will validate individuals for lending use cases.

Each of these product teams is supported by our developer group focused on building Zk-Snarks to enhance privacy guarantees. This cross-functional unit can leverage code & experience to add anonymity to our various product lines.

Having this unit accessible to each team uniquely positions Zoracles Protocol to deliver superior products. This strategic advantage will differentiate our products and provide a clear value proposition in the crypto marketplace.

In addition, the body of knowledge gained working on internal projects with zero-knowledge proofs can be leveraged to enterprises when requests for our “Snarks as a Service” become more frequent.

Meaningful Adoption

Building a great product is great, but is it only half of our vision. Each product needs users and we plan to aggressively pursue adoption by putting our products in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Too often in crypto, teams are satisfied and become complacent with building technology that just sits in GitHub. The community and team behind Zoracles understand our mission to deliver superior products that are utilized and provide real-world value.

We will measure each product against the industry leader in the crypto space but also the greater digital marketplace. Our protocol isn’t limited to compete for users from other crypto projects, but we want to go toe-to-toe with industry giants like Credit Karma.

This is no small feat and we are not under the impression this will happen overnight, but we strongly believe it was important to communicate our commitment to achieving meaningful adoption.

High-Impact Marketing

In the tech industry, marketing is often an afterthought. After all, a great product should sell itself. While we agree with building superior products, unless you have a first-mover advantage, we believe some efforts and resources should be allocated to marketing.

Our current strategy revolves around focusing on more signal and less noise. Countless opportunties have been presented to the community leaders and founding team members for AMAs, YouTube videos and other marketing services. We have filtered these proposals with one criteria in mind; high-impact.

This simply means getting the best bang for our buck in connecting our product portfolio to users. Time is a very valuable resource in software development and we want to ensure each opportunity to showcase our products leaves a lasting impression for various audiences.

Also, we are screening for marketing partners that have shared interests. This is important in selecting channels that are synergistically aligned with the crypto community.

PIPELINE

A week ago, we kicked off our first hackathon and the results were excellent. The focus was designing a Zora.cc splashpage would accompany a back-end infrastructure that is currently being developed. Think Twilio for “decentralized identity.”

At the conclusion of the hackathon, a few designs were selected and winners were invited to participate in Zora.cc product meetings. Below is one of the front-end designs that captured the essence of our hackathon. Our team wanted a simple, minimalist and clean design inspiration. We received several and the splashpage below captured our requirements best.

We were pleasantly surprised at the high-quality work and conversations that took place in the hackathon and look foward to working with some of the participants in the near future.

Zoracles Plus

A recent development scheduled for late 2021 is a protocol extension we are calling Zoracles Plus. We can’t provide much information due to its early stage of development and competitive intelligence advantages we hope to perserve.

The key takeaway is that the team is very forward-thinking and have a full pipeline and possibilities on the journey ahead for Zoracles Protocol. If you feel you can contribute or just want to be part of our community, see the links below and drop by anytime.

We would like to hear from you!

About Zoracles

Zoracles partners with DeFi projects using zero-knowledge proofs to provide confidential data to smart contracts. Their end-to-end solution entails VRFs to provide additional security measures for their “Snarks as a Service.”