Dear Band Community,
September 2021 marks a milestone for the year, not only with BandChain’s milestone of crossing over of the 10 million requests but also with the successful mainnet upgrade of BandChain Phase 2: Laozi. While last month’s focus was on the migration, we had also partnered with Boba Network and participated in MetaBUIDL, a hackathon organized by our partner NEAR protocol, with over $1M in prizes to reach out into the developer community in NEAR ecosystem.
Right after launch, the engineering team begun to enable different features through proposals, we started with the IBC oracle feature in BCIP-4 which allows data requests and results via IBC. More of such features is expected to be launched now that Laozi has stabilized and is ready to serve as a robust platform for Band Protocol’s future growth.
Successful Phase 2 Mainnet Migration
On September 23, The first block on BandChain Laozi Mainnet was mined from genesis. Over 60 validators on the network have participated in this effort to secure the new chain. The chain had paused for maintenance for three hours, and the new chain resumed by 12PM UTC as planned without any incidents.
Thanks to all the validators, community members, exchanges, wallets who have participated and collaborated in this event to usher in a new era of Band Protocol smoothly.
With the software upgrades that come in Laozi, we have a platform to launch many different features: starting from IBC, On-chain revenue integrations with premium providers, to Verifiable Random Function, and more.
Tech Updates
The total number of oracle requests on BandChain has been growing persistently and aggressively. On September 1st, it surpassed the 10,000,000 request mark without incident or issue. This implies the sustainable adoption of BandChain’s oracle over the last year.
Notable BandChain Update
Leading up to the Phase 2 upgrade, the engineering team released BandChain code v2.3.0 which bumps BandChain to Cosmos-SDK v0.44.0 and IBC-Go v1.1.0.
Afterward, the team also deployed Laozi testnet 4 to observe the stability of v2.3.0 — the latest release itself. This came to be the final candidate release for Laozi mainnet before the migration.
The team worked with validators to successfully migrate from GuanYu to Laozi with v2.3.0. After Laozi mainnet has stabilized, the team opened an official proposal to enable IBC oracle on Laozi mainnet. Once the proposal passes, IBC-compatible chains will be able to natively send data requests and receive results from BandChain through IBC.
Interested in being a validator to help secure BandChain? Read here.
Notable CosmoScan Update
The CosmoScan Block explorer was patched to display features available on BandChain Laozi version. This includes supporting different message types from IBC, and displaying Datasource’s accumulated revenue (fees) that is a crucial part of the on-chain revenue feature.
The team had also updated the CosmoScan backend to use BandChain.js to send messages via GRPC which streamlines the process more. We also used this chance to test BandChain.js library to further improve the user experience.
CosmoScan now also supports the display weight votes, a feature which is currently only available through using bandd command line interface.
Partnership Developments
Boba Partnership
Boba Network (Enya), previously known as OmisegoX, has partnered with Band Protocol to bring secure decentralized oracles to their layer-2 optimistic rollup platform to build a more trusted and scalable Ethereum ecosystem.
Boba is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible Layer 2 Optimistic Rollup that helps Ethereum smart contracts scale while delivering a delightful user experience. Boba enables Ethereum developers to build dApps that trigger code running on web-scale infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, making it possible to leverage sophisticated algorithms that are either far too expensive, far too slow, or practically impossible to execute on-chain.
With its strategic partnership with Band Protocol, developers on Boba network will be able to leverage Band Protocol oracles to connect to external data providers in a reliable, accurate, and decentralized manner. Band Protocol currently supports 230+ price symbols spanning across crypto assets, foreign exchange, and commodities on the Band Standard Dataset which can be made available on a symbol-by-symbol basis for Boba Network teams requiring price oracles.
NEAR Partnership Update
Band Protocol’s oracle has been a solution for blockchain developer community, and therefore, we value the relationship with our developer community who are essentially our users.
In September, we were glad to have worked alongside our partner NEAR protocol, to sponsor MetaBUIDL hackathon series to reach out to developers. The hackathon concluded with over $1M in prizes and with participation from developers on NEAR protocol who are now empowered to use BandChain’s solution to create custom decentralized oracles for any external data source. We plan to be active with the developer community going forward to make sure that we can consistently build great solutions to serve our ecosystem and users.
Closing Remarks
After rigorous testing internally and with our validators, BandChain Phase 2 has successfully launched as envisioned — thanks to our validators, community members, partners in coordinating and providing necessary actions. During this period, we were able to keep growing our usage and deliver smoothly without incidents. Looking forward, we can expect to use BandChain Phase 2 as a robust platform to launch a list of features to expand integration not only on the user side through IBC and VRF, but also on the data provider side with our on-chain revenue activated. The last quarter of 2021 will bring more steady integration growth with immense potential to accelerate adoption, and we invite you to stay tuned to the possibilities that Phase 2 would bring.
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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