Band Protocol Tech Update November 2019

After a successful Mainnet launch on Ethereum, our focus at Band Protocol has been to inform DeFi projects the benefits of utilizing Band Protocol’s decentralized oracle and following up with integrations to drive scalability, reliability and speed of DeFi protocols.

November Recap

Looking back in November, we have pushed hard developing and refining our technology, built meaningful partnerships and announced multiple community initiatives.We have released the Ambassador and Bug Bounty program, partnered with Constant and the next Binance Launchpad project, TroyTrade, to integrate our data oracle solution while also launching the new OpenAPI feature to bridge Web 2.0 data and enable almost an array of use cases in our oracle protocol. To elaborate on this feature, we have published how smart contracts can utilize CoinGecko API to power DeFi applications and collaborated with Binance to publish how smart contracts can leverage its infrastructure and API. Most recently, we have launched the public beta version of the Mobile Staking Portal, our latest ecosystem tool that allows users to conveniently stake from their mobile wallets.

Looking Ahead for December

Before the holiday season, we’re looking to drive many partnerships with DeFi projects in the pipeline with a focus on materializing collaborations into working products. We’re also looking forward to a new and exciting protocol upgrade coming along with the proof-of-concept implementation soon to be in the alpha stage. Finally, we have the Band Chain spec being drafted by working closely with industry leaders on the design, particularly focusing on the economic (payment, staking) and cross-chain interoperability aspects of the soon-to-be blockchain.

Protocol Upgrade Under Development

Our community is the backbone of the entire project and we want to make sure we keep you posted on the tech development progress in our protocol upgrade. In the past month, we have worked on three key improvements to be released in the next iteration of Band Protocol:

1. Web Request Oracle (OpenAPI)
2. Interoperable Decentralized Data Delivery Network (D3N)
3. Band Chain

Moreover, we have made a recent change in the frontend tech stack to make the user-facing interfaces more secure and error-free with the introduction of ReasonML.

Web Request Oracle (OpenAPI)

With the release of our Open API spec call, smart contracts connected to Band Protocol will be able to call and leverage any API on the open internet to drive rapid iteration and bring more functionalities to the blockchain.

This has already been implemented on the testnet with our next steps to integrate with Mainnet. This would be a huge development for Band Protocol so we are conducting thorough security testing and auditing before production release.

We have begun working on the integration of this functionality in close collaboration with various API providers in addition to blockchain projects and will continue to do so in the next few months.

Interoperable Decentralized Data Delivery Network (D3N)

Not only is Band Protocol here to connect real-world data onto the blockchain, but Band also facilitates cross-chain interoperability between any blockchain network.

For a data oracle to operate scalably on multiple blockchain networks, we need to extend beyond the push model that we have implemented on Ethereum. Rather, we’ll use a query-and-proof model instead.

We’re in the process of refining and documenting the spec before releasing it to the community for review. Please note that the current implementation is for an internal test.

This marks the first step toward a longer-term development to decouple Band Protocol from the Ethereum network and become fully blockchain-agnostic.

Band Chain

To facilitate data governance and fee structure consistently, Band Protocol will need its own blockchain: Band Chain.

Here’s what needs to be implemented:

• Tokens: Both BAND and Dataset Tokens need to be migrated from Ethereum and onto the Band Chain itself. This makes the token transfers much cheaper and easier to integrate with multiple chains.
• Fee model: We’re researching two cases: query fee payment with BAND on the Band Chain or to switch to staking model and eliminate fees altogether.
• Data query mechanism: We need to support a query-and-proof model with a set of tools that dApp can use to easily integrate with the new query model.

These are early designs illustrating our internal proof-of-concept that works. Going forward, we’re publishing more on the spec and code as we finalize the design. We’d love to hear your take and feedback!

Additionally, we’re focusing on fleshing out the spec and economic design of the Band Chain. We expect the work to continue toward early next year.

Introducing ReasonML

With the complexity of blockchain applications, we need a better tool to ensure a bug-free implementation of user-facing frontend interface for smart contracts.

Blockchain applications are complex. From experience, we’ve found that the flexibility of JavaScript makes the dApp difficult to maintain. Attempting to fill in that gap, we experimented with Typescript but found that it wasn’t going to cut it either. We needed a language with a much more powerful type inference to catch every error that may occur during run time.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve experimented with ReasonML — a programming language pioneered by the creator of React.

The result is nothing short of specular. Mixing a blend of functional programming (OCaml), famous for its bug-free nature, and the recent hook paradigm of React, application development with ReasonML has become a breeze.

With this adoption, we aim to pioneer a secure implementation of dApp in both the smart contracts and also on the frontend.

In Summary

There’s a real need for a scalable decentralized oracle solution more than ever.

Band Protocol by design is working and scalable by nature, our priority is to bring a high-quality product to the hands of users that will power the next generation of the Web. To do so, we need to make technical improvements across various aspects over the next iterations which we have outlined in this article.

By continuing to quickly adapt and brings fast evidence-based iterations on protocol design, we’re confident that Band will remain competitive and become a dominant player in the space with real adoptions.

About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a decentralized oracle framework for Web3.0 applications. Band Protocol connects smart contracts with trusted off-chain information, provided through community-curated oracle data providers. Blockchains are enabled to connect to any web API with assured data integrity through dPoS economic incentives through one simple function call. Developers using Band Protocol will be able to easily build and manage off-chain oracles, reputation scores, identity management systems and much more.

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