Band Protocol June 2021 Community Update
Dear Band Community,
The month of June has been spent preparing for the next major milestone for Band Protocol, the Mainnet upgrade from BandChain Phase 1 to Phase 2. With a successful test migration, thorough stress-testing and optimizations performed by our engineering team, we are officially ready to upgrade the network in the production environment. The core contributing team has submitted an official governance proposal to the community and we are now underway the voting period which is the final step before the launch of Phase 2.
BandChain Phase 2 brings premium oracle scripts to life, allowing traditional institutions and enterprises to serve their data on-chain for decentralized applications to use while collecting revenue on a per-request basis. Our team has dedicated extensive efforts to onboard new institutional-grade data providers and existing partners onto the upgraded architecture which will bring significant improvements to the reliability, security and coverage of data available on Band Protocol.
Tech Updates
In June, the number of Band Oracles requests in production continued to grow and surpassed 7.3M requests alongside the expanding Band Standard Dataset which holds over 230+ price symbols ready for integration.
Notable BandChain Update
In the last month, our team has focused on engineering efforts to perform internal testing procedures including stress-testing and integration testing to ensure that BandChain Phase 2 (Laozi) version is working properly under heavy loads. This includes covering extreme cases on Oracle Scripts to ensure that each data request can be handled correctly without compromise or vulnerability as well as IBC handling oracle requests and the transfer of tokens cross-chain.
With the testing process completed on the Laozi Testnet, we are proud to share that the official governance proposal to upgrade BandChain from Phase 1 (GuanYu) to Phase 2 (Laozi) has been proposed under BandChain Improvement Proposal 2 (BCIP-2).
BandChain v2.0.3 has been released as a mainnet candidate version, our team has also restructured the BandChain repository to follow Go’s versioning and format. This means that BandChain will be `v2` which can be imported as a dependency for other projects by using “go get github.com/bandprotocol/chain/v2”.
The team has also made optimized changes including refactoring code, bug fixes, and improvements on unit tests as well as performance to ensure that BandChain decentralized oracle network is working properly and safeguarded from errors.
For Band Protocol partners and integrated decentralized applications, the BandChain Proof-of-Authority Mainnet has been deployed and will be used to serve oracle requests in between the Mainnet upgrade process which is estimated to take roughly 6 hours after block 7486289.
Band Protocol Rebranded
On June 15 2021, our team completed the first rebranding of Band Protocol which is designed to better capture the vision and mission of Band Protocol to better serve scalable oracle technology for traditional enterprises and DeFi applications.
The rebranding included a full rework of the following;
- Band Protocol logo and colour scheme
- Bandprotocol.com website
- Band Standard Dataset
- CosmoScan block explorer along with a fix to the Ledger connection issue on the latest Chrome version
Check out the full rebranding details below:
Notable Band Standard Dataset Update
With more teams and developers relying on the Band Standard Dataset as the largest collection of reference price data for digital assets, commodities and foreign exchange — our team continues to work diligently to improve and optimize the product based on developer and partner feedback.
We have improved the gas price logic for the Ethereum feeder to ensure that oracle data requests and price updates operate with tighter margin of error during events of gas price spikes. In addition, the infrastructure and feeder have been set up to support oracle updates from the Proof-of-Authority Mainnet during the BandChain Mainnet upgrade from Phase 1 to Phase 2.
Partnership Developments
In the last quarter, our team has focused on establishing partnerships with new institutional-grade data providers and onboarding existing partners to the new features offered on BandChain Phase 2 — namely, the creation of premium oracle scripts and streaming revenue from decentralized protocols.
While these partnership developments will be announced closer towards the completed upgrade of BandChain on the Mainnet, our team continues to work with DeFi and industry applications on the integration of Band Oracles.
Most notably, we have established a formal relationship with Alpha Finance to support the Alpha Oracle Aggregator and empower developers to use external decentralized oracles alongside on-chain price feeds from DEXs such as Uniswap, Sushiswap and others. This enables Band Protocol to integrate and work with younger DeFi applications that aren’t yet supported on major exchanges to create a price feed for their native token with ease.
Coin98 Wallet Partnership
Coin98 Wallet, a leading decentralized wallet with native DeFi applications support, expands the integration of Band Protocol price oracles to create more transparent and stronger experiences for 260,000 users.
Expanding on the initial integration, Band Protocol price oracles now also provide secure feeds for more digital assets in various foreign exchange denominations such as USD, JPY, VND, CNY among others from the Band Standard Dataset.
In the upcoming Coin98 Mobile Wallet, the non-custodial wallet will support the native $BAND token used on the BandChain decentralized oracle network — significantly increasing the degree of utility and accessibility of Band Protocol.
Band Protocol is proud to continue a long-term and strong collaboration with Coin98 Wallet among other product arms. Our next steps are to bring BAND staking support to Coin98 Wallet and collaborate further on our mutual goals of mass adoption for blockchain technology.
Alpha Finance Partnership Update
Band Protocol is proud to work alongside Alpha Finance Lab to support the wider #DeFi ecosystem to integrate $BAND oracles alongside other oracle providers and on-chain price feeds.
With popular demand from other DeFi projects, we have established an open working relationship with Alpha Finance
to connect and support interested teams to integrate the Alpha Oracle Aggregator to access Band Oracles & on-chain price feeds from the likes of SushiSwap, Uniswap and more.
Battle-tested through Black Wednesday, where gas prices spiked to over 200 Gwei, the Alpha Oracle Aggregator has proven to:
- ensure a more reliable price feed and reduce risks from over-reliance on a single provider
- provide a plug and play solution that doesn’t require heavy engineering requirements
Band Oracles have secured $720M+ without incident in Alpha Homora V2 since the upgrade to the Alpha Oracle Aggregator.
Mirror Protocol Partnership Update
Congratulations to our partners at Mirror Protocol on the Mainnet launch of Mirror V2! Band Protocol is delighted to help the $MIR team to secure $2B in total value locked in 24 mAssets and now, expand collateral options to $MIR, $LUNA, $ANC in V2 with decentralized price oracles.
The Mirror team has also partnered with the leading DeFi applications across various blockchain networks to broaden the usage of mAssets. These partners include PancakeSwap, Mask Network, Set Protocol, Wing Finance, and many others who are also implicitly relying on the performance of Band Protocol.
With more projects integrating mAssets, Band Protocol has proven to be battle-tested to survive a wide range of market conditions without incident including Black Wednesday and continues to be the primary oracle for Mirror Protocol as they continue to rapidly accelerate development.
Moving forward, Band Protocol is proud to continue our strategic partnership with Mirror Protocol and close relationship with their wider community to bring borderless price exposure to real-world assets on-chain. Both teams are currently working on the next set of use-cases and mAssets to be listed on Mirror V2 — stay tuned!
Closing Remarks
Without our community, validators, partners, stakeholders and network, BandChain Phase 2 would not be possible. From our team to yours, we thank you for supporting us on our journey so far. We look forward to building out the scalable and end-to-end customizable decentralized oracle network for the growing and rapidly expanding blockchain industry. Stay tuned for Phase 2 updates coming soon!
About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts. 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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