Band Protocol 2019 Recap

Dear Band Community,

2019 has been a crazy year for Band Protocol with tremendous progress. Entering January 2019, we were a team of four full-time employees. We are about to enter 2020 with a team of 12 employees with many independent developers supporting and utilising our fully decentralized oracle network.

Here is a few recap of the progress we have done thus far.

January — June 2019: Technical development

• We spent the first half of the year detailing out and implementing most of the features of our decentralized data oracle network with an emphasis on security and scalability.
• We introduced the first iteration of our oracle design in this blog post and marked the beginning of our community building.
• Our whitepaper is published after many iterations of peer reviews

June — August 2019: Mainnet preparation and token launch plan

• We partnered with leading formal verification company Certik to complete a code security audit as well as a general partnership to tackle oracle design.
• Completed a security audit with no critical issue found.
• After many months of discussing with many top exchanges, we partnered with the world’s leading exchange Binance to complete a token launch. Binance is one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world with a supporting ecosystem including global community, staking service, lending service, and many more. This allows us to gain a global footprint as well as allow us to reach out to the widest audience possible, true to the decentralization ethos.

September — December 2019: Mainnet launch and commercial partnership

• Our mainnet was officially launched in September with another dApp BitSwing to showcase the power of our oracle network.
• Our first initial financial data feed was launched along with staking portal. Since then, the amount of XFN holders has grown from 10 to over 200+ holders with the value of XFN growing over 150%.
• We partnered with 4 leading data providers to support the launch of our initial financial data feed.
• Once the initial launch was done successfully, we were pushing on all front to push out partnerships that drive meaningful adoption of our network.
• Since all layer 1 blockchain solutions need an oracle, beyond Ethereum we are starting to partner with Elrond, Wanchain and Tomochain as a start. We prioritize those that are currently working with decentralized financial application or enterprises and we expect this integration to continue into 2020.
• We start to push the boundary with decentralized finance which needs oracle to operate securely. We partnered with Troy, Constant, Portal Network, 2Key, and many more applications that need access to reliable oracle solution. While in many cases, integration is still being tested, we expect this to form a majority part of our work in 2020 — i.e. driving adoption of our oracle.
• Beyond simple partnership, we also support Band token holders to utilize their BAND tokens. For example, one can now take a loan from Constant by collateralising BAND tokens — further pushing the adoption of Band utility.
• We also listened to our community feedback, many of our token holders hold their tokens from their mobile and hence we launched a mobile staking portal for better ease of access!

BAND 2.0

• As we reflected back on all of our partnership discussion, we realise there is a need for more flexible design of our oracle. Similar to many startups, there will be many iterations following the initial launch. Hence, we start to take the first step in taking all the feedback from our partner and begin to implement the initial design of the next generation of Band Protocol that is more flexible for data query to serve many use cases including traditional enterprises.
• We launched the new OpenAPI feature to accommodate public API connection from our data providers.
• We have started to implement the new Band Chain design which includes the new decentralized data delivery network (D3N). While this is still in an early day, we have begun the work to implement the initial version for private testing in December. We will publish this publicly in Q1 2020 when we have a solid design with peer reviews.
• While we may not reach all the goal in 2019 including the launch of other data feed such as Sport Data, we are re-prioritizing the main network design and have made more progress than we anticipated. This is due to the fact that we want to have a more mature design going forward otherwise there will be many changes if we launch too many data feed at once.
• Apart from technical BAND 2.0, we have also recently just onboarded new head of marketing who will lead our push for community building starting next month. We take our community feedback very seriously and we look to do more on our community building effort going forward. If you are a major BAND holders and are looking to contribute more to our project, please reach out to connect@bandprotocol.com or sign up for our ambassador program! We look forward to talking to all of you!

Thank you once again for your continuous support. Working on a fully decentralized network is never going to be easy but we are humbled by all of our community support during all the ups and downs. We will continue to push strongly into 2020 and beyond, both in terms of technical development and commercial partnership. We wish all of you enjoy your holiday and see you again in 2020.

Happy New Year!

-Soravis Srinawakoon, on behalf of the entire Band Protocol team