Band Standard Dataset — Four Months in Review

Published in

Band Protocol

6 min readMay 12, 2021

Since releasing the Band Standard Dataset over four months ago, it has grown into the largest collection of frequently updating reference price feeds for all existing DeFi and emerging smart contract verticals including money markets, derivatives prediction markets, insurance and more. With the ever-expanding support for new price feeds covering digital assets, commodities, and foreign exchange on the Band Standard Dataset — we are on track to expand data coverage alongside BandChain Phase 2 where institutional-grade data providers will be able to provide any type of premium data directly to decentralized applications.

In the last four months, the number of Band Standard Dataset integrations on the Mainnet securing real value in smart contracts has been rapidly growing to over 25+ partners with many more working behind the scenes with our team in a test environment. Out of the 4.9M oracle requests on the BandChain Mainnet, the Band Standard Dataset accounts for 2.8M fulfilled requests as the most popular, extensive and frequently updated set.

To recap, here are why a growing amount of developers and smart contract protocols are choosing to use the Band Standard Dataset:

Band Protocol offloads oracle computation from destination chains and networks which are prone to congestion onto BandChain, a highly scalable blockchain where over 72+ validators are actively securing the oracle network.
Band Protocol provides rapid price updates at a low cost of usage, developers can retrieve accurate and reliable price updates of multiple feeds in the same block.
Band Protocol has been built with flexibility, allowing querying for any price pairs as opposed to standard denominations in only USD, BTC or ETH. This means price feeds can be paired against any of the 200+ symbols supported on the dataset.
Band Protocol continues to grow in partners with billions of dollars in value integrating Band Standard Dataset as well as a rapidly growing set of institutional-grade data sources.

Let’s take a deeper look at who is using the Band Standard Dataset, the growth in adoption, and future plans for expansion.

Integration Partners & Blockchain Platforms

The enhancements in flexibility and cross-chain compatibility achieved by launching BandChain, has allowed Band Protocol to support both EVM-compatible and non-EVM networks with much ease.

To date, there are over 14+ L1 and L2 scaling solutions where the Band Standard Dataset is live — among the cohort are leading blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon (Matic Network), Fantom, Polkadot, Terra and others.

Four months from inception, the Band Standard Dataset is being used to secure billions of dollars in value from the most frequently used decentralized applications across all supported blockchain platforms. This includes over 25+ partners live on Mainnet and our Google Cloud Public Data integration of the Band Standard Dataset available on Google BigQuery where Evgeny Medvedev, Google Developer Expert, has implemented it into a Real-time Crypto Price Anomaly Detection product.

Technical Statistics & Usage

The Band Standard Dataset has been aggregating the prices of digital assets from up to 10 enterprise-grade data providers at a default update interval of 5 minutes and 1% price deviation. For less volatile assets including foreign exchange and commodities, feeds are updated periodically every 5–60 minutes on BandChain to ensure that relevant market movements are captured while also optimizing for transaction fees.

Throughout operation in production and integration on the Mainnet for over 25+ partners, all price oracles have been operating without failure or issue for over 2.87 million total number of requests.

Expanded Financial Data Support

With DeFi applications growing in all verticals, in particular derivatives, stock price oracles will be added into the Band Standard Dataset for developers to use. This will begin with the most popular and requested indices (FTSE, DJIA, N225) and equities based on partner and developer needs. Band Protocol price oracles for traditional stocks and equities are currently securing over $2.4B in smart contracts on Mirror Protocol.

For BandChain Phase 2, institutional-grade data providers will be able to provide premium data to decentralized applications through Band Protocol and earn revenue on-chain. This brings the breadth of data able to be supported by Band Oracles to new lengths, enabling our team to also expand the commodities segment to include oil, lumber, and metals among others as well as crypto-native data such as ETH gas prices, total market cap, DeFi market cap, BTC dominance and more.

Furthermore, BandChain Phase 2 will see the introduction of on-chain data from decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap and more for spot and time-weighted average price oracles.

What’s Coming Up Next For The Band Standard Dataset?

Permissionless Support For New Price Oracles

We are bringing a more open and transparent process for our partners, community and developers to onboard new assets/tokens to the Band Standard Dataset based on a specified criteria and voting process.

Here how what an example of the token criteria could look like:

supported by at least four of the data providers we support at the time of the request
strong average daily trading volume across at least four leading exchanges
to be integrated and used in production

While yet to be determined, the potential process to list a new asset will be designed in such a way that brings utility and voting power to BAND holders — similar to Mirror Protocol polls which have worked seamlessly for adding new asset listings. Here’s what our initial plans look like:

Open a poll or proposal on BandChain or Snapshot (or similar platform) for off-chain voting
Proposal includes

Asset/data to be supported
List of supported data sources that the data is available from

3. Users will be required to hold a certain amount of BAND to open a proposal

Use BAND as voting power
Standard voting parameters with quorum and period

Revised Developer Resources and Grants Program

In addition to revised documentation, the team will be kicking off an official grants program for our developer community to contribute and participate in shaping Band Protocol. The Band Standard Dataset will be redesigned alongside Band Protocol’s website suite to display feed support and categorization more intuitively.

This will include enhancement of existing front-end to better display price oracle categories, networks supported and in progress as well as revised developer documentation to enable developers to seamlessly integrate price data without the help of Band Protocol. Unified contract address and documentation for each chain will be provided alongside a list of assets on each network.

Moving Forward

With the blueprints for the next stage of Band Protocol innovation laid out for the Band Standard Dataset, we look forward to releasing the upgrade closer towards the launch of BandChain Phase 2 (Laozi) on the Mainnet coming up in Q2.

Stay tuned for more updates on the major Band Protocol developments for 2021 on both partnership and technical fronts!

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.