Band Protocol 2020 Recap
Dear Band Community,
Welcome to the end of a year full of surprises, full of both ups and downs. Normally at this time of the month, we would be sharing our monthly community update — however, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the 2020 year first before sharing our December milestones with you all.
It’s been almost 365 days since we announced our transition to Band Protocol 2.0 from the reminiscent community token and bonding curve model in v1.0. By the end of 2019, we had only launched Band Protocol 1.0 for three months, partnered with six projects for integration and four data providers to support price feeds.
Fast forward to the end of 2020, we are integrating with over 50+ decentralized projects to provide crucial oracle technology, onboarded 15 genesis validators for Band Protocol v2.0 from the top blockchain security and services firms which have grown to 70+ validators on the network at the time of writing.
2020 marked a significant year of technical development as well for Band Protocol. We kicked off the year by announcing an early alpha release of Band Protocol 2.0, most commonly known as BandChain. This was the culmination of sleepless nights and rigorous technical work in both 2020 and the second half of 2019 in stealth to present an oracle solution that is better suited to support the growing number of decentralized applications in DeFi, gaming and enterprise use-cases without taking away the notion of decentralization.
With the oracle infrastructure complete, four testnets, one proof-of-authority network, and CosmoScan, the official block explorer for BandChain — we were finally ready to launch a fully decentralized oracle network, BandChain, in the production environment on October 15, 2020.
Fast forward to today, BandChain has been operating in a stable manner on the mainnet for more than six months without issue, bonding over 89M BAND tokens to secure the oracle network and served over 450,000+ unique oracle requests from institutional-grade data providers to our partners and integrators.
This would not have been possible without our community and partners who have always worked closely with the Band Protocol team to provide critical feedback and constant support on the eventful yet rewarding rollercoaster ride that we now call 2020.
Band Protocol December 2020 Community Update
Tech Updates
In December, the total amount of data requests on BandChain, surpassing 450,000 requests and growing by an astounding 450% in one month. We also released the Band Standard Dataset, which serves as the largest and most frequently updated price oracle feed covering a wide range of data points and data sources for all decentralized finance applications to use.
The Band Standard Dataset is fully functioning on the Ethereum Kovan testnet and will become available on a number of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchain platforms — stay tuned for these upcoming announcements in 2021!
Band Standard Dataset Launch
Band Protocol announced the official launch of the Band Standard Dataset — an exhaustive reference price dataset with frequent updates and comprehensive, customizable feeds covering 100+ feeds for crypto assets, commodities and foreign exchange rates.
For developers who prioritize performance and scalability, Band Protocol, a decentralized oracle network, has become the long-term solution to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in value locked up in smart contracts as seen in just Mirror Protocol and Fantom alone.
The Standard Dataset contains price feeds are aggregated from a number of premium data sources, the list of which includes: Brave New Coin, Coingecko, CryptoCompare, Coinbase, Binance, Huobi Global, Kraken, Bitfinex, Bittrex, AlphaVantage, XE, OXR, and Fixer
This serves as the largest and most frequently updated price oracle feed covering a wide range of data points and data sources, curated on a network of 72 trusted and reliable BAND validators.
Data will always be the cornerstone of DeFi and wider blockchain applications. Through the Band Standard Dataset and constant growth in partnerships, we will continue to add even more enterprise-grade data providers and price support for any asset.
Notable BandChain Update
The BandChain team has implemented a robust program that requests price data periodically to ensure that data is consistently up-to-date. In addition, this includes a relay service that sends transactions to target networks such as Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain to update price data from BandChain to any destination blockchain — ensuring that data will be available at all times.
Notable Oracle Script Update
The oracle scripts used for the Band Standard Dataset and stock prices have been reviewed and tested to ensure that the data provided is always correct in the edge cases that one or more data sources fail.
Furthermore, more data sources from institutional-grade providers and services are being added to increase the reliability and robustness of each oracle script for our partners to use in production.
Upgraded Infrastructure
With the immense growth in usage and data requests on the Mainnet, we have tightened our internal infrastructure (sentry nodes and query nodes) to make sure BandChain is consistently operating in a stable manner and can handle a high load of requests especially during volatile market movements and any potential unforeseen situations.
The spec of validator and sentry node instances has been upgraded and monitoring tools have been set up to detect as well as alert validator nodes that are down or not providing oracle data.
Notable Developer Client Tool Update
Pyband v0.1.0 has been published to Pypi and is now using the newest version of our request program. This includes `bandchain.js` with the same specification as Pyband with all implementation completed.
Next steps are to publish the spec and use in BandChain’s official block explorer, CosmoScan.
Notable CosmoScan Update
The transaction page has been revamped to improve the messages embedded in each transaction. See the following comparison from old to new here:
Partnership Developments
For the month of December, we integrated and partnered with two leading blockchain platforms to be one of the first to market with decentralized synthetic asset trading for traditional equities as well as release an oracle gateway for all Polkadot and Substrate-based projects to seamlessly integrate and utilize.
Band Protocol Joins OpenAPI Initiative Alongside Bloomberg, IBM, Microsoft
Band Protocol is proud to join OpenAPI Initiative as the first blockchain firm alongside Google Cloud, IBM, eBay, Bloomberg and Microsoft among others, to connect blockchain applications to common Application Programming Interfaces (API) and streamline the exchange of data between smart contracts and off-chain data sources.
Band Protocol will be contributing heavily to the evolving OpenAPI Specification (OAS), enabling blockchain projects to query and connect seamlessly to a vendor-neutral and open-source API through decentralized oracle technology such as the BandChain decentralized oracle network.
By working with closely world-leading enterprises on the Open API Initiative, Band Protocol is enabling smart contracts to reliably and securely interact with traditional centralized technology and APIs and with each other.
Together, we are bringing interoperability between smart contracts and traditional enterprise services into reality.
Collaboration With Acala For Polkadot Open Oracle Gateway
Band Protocol announced our collaboration with Acala Network, a cross-chain DeFi hub and stablecoin based on Substrate, to release the Open Oracle Gateway — an open oracle service for all Polkadot, Kusama, Acala ecosystems and beyond. All DeFi applications in the Polkadot ecosystem can seamlessly use Band Protocol oracle to secure their applications.
This means that secure and real-time decentralized price feeds for collateral assets such as DOT, BTC, and ETH will be provided by $BAND to Acala as well as any other blockchain connected to the Polkadot Network. The Oracle Gateway is deployed and running on Acala’s Mandala Test Network.
Any oracle provider can be set up, and through a governance proposal, it would be enacted through a runtime upgrade. The provider will then be able to post off-chain data to Acala where data feeds from all parties will be aggregated into a single reliable feed.
The Open Oracle Gateway is designed to be a critical piece of infrastructure for Polkadot, realizing a common goal of uniting decentralized oracle and service providers to collectively enhance the security and reliability of cross-chain DeFi.
Mirror Protocol Partnership
Mirror Protocol, a DeFi protocol enabling synthetic assets that provide exposure to real-world assets by Terra, has partnered with Band Protocol and successfully integrated Band price feeds to secure $74M+ TVL in blue-chip stocks, commodities and ETFs.
Mirror is designed to expand global accessibility to foreign markets — using liquidity pools for each asset and scalable, real-time decentralized oracles provided by Band Protocol, orders can be executed as fast as the blocktime of the network on Terra or Ethereum.
Band Protocol is providing real-time price feeds for an array of initial Mirrored Assets based on popularity, provision of long and short positions, and coverage. The feeds are live on the BandChain decentralized oracle network, updating every 15 seconds to reflect spot prices.
Band Protocol is thrilled to work with Terra to be one of the first to market in bringing 24-hour trading to synthetics of stocks, ETFs and more. With security and usability as the top priority, both teams will continue to create and improve Mirror Protocol.
Injective Partnership
Band Protocol is proud to help Injective achieve a major milestone by expanding support into traditional equity markets. BAND has been integrated to deliver low-latency and truly decentralized price oracles for various stocks that update every 15 seconds.
This integration brings a decentralized oracle to not only the stock derivatives product but also wider developers looking to build on Injective and access reliable external data sources or APIs.
Documentation is in the works and will be released early next year!
With the help of Band Protocol and Terra, we collectively confident in Injective’s ability to deliver an unparalleled trading experience for everyone worldwide.
We look forward to adding support for new stocks, indices, ETFs, and other derivatives in the coming months!
Fantom Partnership Update
Fantom, the team advised by Andre Cronje, has launched liquid staking and synthetic assets in partnership with Band Protocol. Band Protocol oracles are securing 16 assets upon launch, later expanding up to 176 synthetic assets.
Leveraging a fast, scalable and secure layer-1 platform, Fantom Finance combined with the matched scalability and security from Band Protocol creates a decentralized trading experience unlike any other. Trades are confirmed in a few seconds with low fees ($0.000001).
Band Protocol’s scalable oracle technology is used to derive accurate and real-time information for all assets synthesized on Liquid Staking. Supported assets at launch include FTM, fUSD, fGBP, fCNY, fEUR, fKRW, fJPY, fCHF, fBTC, fETH, fLINK, fBAND, fBNB, fGold, fSilver and fWTI.
Fantom will continue to work closely with Band Protocol as they expand their offering to 176 unique synthetic assets while onboarding additional enterprise-grade data providers to maximize the degree of security and redundancy for end-users.
Users can access Liquid Staking and Fantom Finance using the Fantom wallet at: https://pwawallet.fantom.network/.
Nervos Partnership Update
Band Protocol is proud to announce that our integration with NervosNetwork, China’s leading public blockchain ecosystem, to bring reliable and secure third-party data to The Nervos CKB is complete!
Nervos developers are now fully empowered to access an expansive set of price feeds and other real-world data sources with custom aggregation and update parameters to reliably secure any category of decentralized application.
The Nervos team has also developed a web application to visualize the oracle bridge including price feeds which are live on the Mainnet. Nervos will continue to work together with Band Protocol to drive adoption and set a standard for the usage of scalable and secure decentralized oracles. This collaboration effort begins with DeFi and then expand into other industry verticals such as insurance and games.
Moonbeam Partnership
Moonbeam, the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, has completed the implementation of Band Protocol to bring decentralized and scalable cross-chain oracles to developers building on the Moonbase Alpha Testnet.
The Moonbeam protocol is built and powered by Purestake, a leading provider in blockchain infrastructure and validator services. By supporting Solidity smart contracts and mirroring the Ethereum dev environment, it is simple and easy for developers to build on Polkadot.
The Moonbeam team has also created developer documentation and new tutorials for the Band Protocol integration, demonstrating how to leverage the new oracle system using Moonbase Alpha, Moonbeam’s TestNet.
👉 http://docs.moonbeam.network/integrations/oracles/band-protocol/band-user/
Creating a foundation for Polkadot developers to integrate highly secure and reliable oracles is the collective goal of both Moonbeam and Band Protocol teams. We look forward to integrating with the various teams and projects expanding to the Polkadot ecosystem!
SCB10x: Global DeFi and Blockchain Summit
Hosted by one of the largest commercial banks in Thailand, SCB10x hosted Band Protocol CEO Soravis Srinawakoon on a panel with Tascha (Alpha Finance) to discuss the importance of price oracles in DeFi, the rapidly expanding Thailand blockchain ecosystem and wider decentralized finance space.
Check out the panel here:
Band Jedi’s Launch banduniverse.io
From the BAND community, for the BAND community — our very own Jedi’s have launched banduniverse.io for anyone to get the latest news and updates about Band Protocol. This includes a concise factsheet and overview of the many integrations with blockchain platforms and applications.
Check it out here:
Closing Remarks
Heading straight into 2021, our focus will be direct with enterprises and institutions in alignment with BandChain Phase 2 which will support the automatic revenue and fee collection on-chain for permissioned and credentialed API.
While this is currently being coordinated on a manual-basis, BandChain Phase 2 will strengthen the existing infrastructure to accommodate exponential demand and bridge the gap between traditional enterprise and blockchain applications even closer.
With the help of our partners and Band community, we will continue to raise the degree of decentralization on BandChain to grow the number of reputable and active validators to over 100.
Without saying too much, we look forward to sharing with you our in-depth plan and roadmap for 2021 in the early weeks of January. For now, Happy New Year from the Band Protocol team, we wish you all the best for a bigger and better 2021.
About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts. Blockchains are great at immutable storage and deterministic, verifiable computations — however, they cannot securely access data available outside the blockchain networks. Band Protocol enables smart contract applications such as DeFi, prediction markets, and games to be built on-chain without relying on the single point of failure of a centralized oracle. Band Protocol is backed by a strong network of stakeholders including Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms in the world, and the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
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