What is Ontropy?

Since time immemorial, a centralized third party has been the best manner to store your money. This changed following the financial meltdown of the banking system when Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the idea of a user-validated, decentralized settlement network called blockchain.

The result was a global system with no account minimums or cross-border fees and delays. It could never be shut down by a malicious government or force withdrawals. Blockchain allowed the user to be in control and profit from their own money.
Big data exploits from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more have similarly proven that our information is not our own. The difference is that the problem has not yet been solved in web3, with billions and billions of dollars being lost annually to oracle and bridge hacks.

Oracles and bridges are semi-centralized, third party validators that transfer our data. They’re the big tech companies of web3. An oracle will deliver data, like a random number or asset price, to a user at the behest of another. A bridge is a singular party that can interact and exchange with different mediums — it usually transfers assets from one blockchain to another.

Because oracles and bridges are semi-centralized, they are constantly exploited. Even more, they are expensive to use with a single random number request costing upwards of $4 on ChainLink’s Ethereum network. Ontropy, for reference, can perform the same request for less than a penny. Oracles and bridges are also notoriously slow and painful to use.

Our story begins with randomness. Just one year ago, we tried to put poker on-chain but failed because it was impossible to prove the cards were fairly generated — something that really matters when people are betting a lot of their own money. Because the point was decentralizing the game and preventing exploits, there could be no third-party dealer, unlike web2 poker.

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