A UK company Razormind has emerged with details of its current work and plans related to Blockchain which may take it head to head against corporate giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Eris as well the new crypto on the block Ethereum.

Razormind have over 260 staff and offices in London, Manchester, Belfast and Vancouver. Their clients are predominantly FinTech and household name banks including HSBC and Santander.

Exploring ways to tailor Blockchain to finance

When asked what made them delve into the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry and when their journey began, the CEO Mr Jawad Yaqub said:

“The pure joy of discovering Bitcoin. Around four years ago we made a small attempt to explore the source codes of Bitcoin (the famous 0.8.6 revision), Litecoin, Ripple, and later on Ethereum.” “It became clear what powers Bitcoin is the blockchain and so we quickly abstracted it out and explored ways to tailor blockchains to enterprise and finance use-cases within Razormind.” “Your readers may remember we built the first digital currency factory - Razorcoin - and started selling custom digital currencies, with their related clients, seed nodes, enterprise APIs etc. to businesses directly. I’m glad to say we built the first version of IrishCoin which was featured in the Wall St Journal. Our motivations were clear - we wanted to make blockchain accessible and safe to use for everyone.”

As an AI and computer science specialist Jawad believes it has the potential to change our lives for the better in so many ways, not just financially. He is also a strong proponent of decentralization and has it incorporated into much of their work.

Proof of index

An interesting example of this is their twist on their custom blockchains: without interfering with the decentralization aspect they have implemented a ‘proof of index’ instead of a proof of work upon which Ethereum and Bitcoin rely so heavily on.

Jawad says:

“DeOS is a decentralized OS which uses the blockchain as its register. It works by constantly indexing and allocating resources in the network for execution. Resources include items such as memory, cpu, storage, and bandwidth, assets, smart contracts etc. Each DeOS seed node indexes its available resources, and publishes this index to the network along with a list of tasks it wishes to perform on the network.” “Other nodes compare indices to see if new resources can be aggregated or connected to serve the tasks. By ‘solving the index’ the available resources and mapping them to tasks allows DeOS to create multiple ‘Execution Environments’ within which processes run securely and in a decentralized manner across the whole network of machines.” “The Proof of Index means the first node to publish the successful mapping of tasks to available resources gets that block added to the mother chain.”

I asked Jawad about the genesis of their products and he had this to say:

“At the moment we have three key work-streams allocated to research and development of our enterprise and blockchain products. The first is centred around core banking and enterprise tech - in this case it is Mesos which we use to create large, highly available, performance clusters to protect scale and grow our client’s enterprise architectures.” “The systems we build protect enterprise clients with verifiable audit trails, and live 24x7 support backed by SLAs. The service and platform can be deployed on client hardware or in the cloud, and clients can migrate existing infrastructure across easily via Docker or natively.” “That’s the first work stream. The second is my passion - Artificial Intelligence. Razor Labs has been exploring Tensor Flow - the Google Neural Network toolkit for Deep Learning use within enterprise and blockchain. We already use Apache Spark across a variety of Big Data use cases, and more recently we’ve been using it to keep track of supply chain patterns and also in improving our fraud detection abilities.”

DeOS system

“The final work stream is DeOS. A couple of years ago we designed and built a decentralized operating system powered by the blockchain and opened it up as a proof of concept to users. It was featured in LetsTalkBitCoin (“Towers In the Cloud” Show) and we have continued to build and refine it.” “Unlike Ethereum or Ripple, or Bitcoin it uses the blockchain as a register for the decentralized network and has secure Turing complete smart contracts, digital identity, and because most of the world doesn’t know or care about any of that we added a shiny desktop and office suite.” “As a result we do a lot of our internal blockchain product work on the DeOS system itself as it gives us the computing power, the blockchain advantages, and the security we need.”

Razormind, it seems, are a company to watch in this highly disruptive crypto, smart contract and blockchain space, having examined both the Bitcoin and Ethereum Blockchains with a fine toothcomb, finding the flaws and addressing them in the services they provide.

They seem to be very confident of the potential and security of their DeOS platform and after the problems experienced with the Ethereum’s DAO it is a testament that they are going forward with a token pre-sale crowdfunding in the coming weeks, as well as a full release of their DeOS platform which entails everything from storage to smart contracts.

Razor will not only be rivalling Ethereum but will also be direct competitors or, as they see it, an alternative option to corporate giants such as Microsoft, Eris and IBM in the crypto, Blockchain and smart contract space.