February 2020 Update: Releasing Wenchang Testnet, Community Outreach, Upcoming Hackathons
Dear Band Community,
A month ago in January, we announced our rollout plan for BandChain, the next iteration of Band Protocol, in four separate phases. We’re excited to share our tremendous progress in the development of Band Chain and the Band community while also highlighting our business development efforts.
That being said, we look forward to March where we will be ramping up another testnet of Wenchang with block validators and announce more hackathons in tandem with some leading DeFi projects.
Tech Update
Testnet Launch of Band Protocol Phase 0
To recap, on February 19 we announced the first testnet launch of BandChain Phase 0 — codenamed Wenchang. This is the first step and fundamental layer of BandChain that is connected to the Cosmos-SDK ecosystem. With a focus to enable staking as soon as possible, the Wenchang release supports token-relative mechanics such as token transfers, staking and slashing for malicious actors.
Alphanet Launch of Band Protocol Phase 1
More interestingly, Band Protocol has released the Phase 1 of BandChain for developers to hack on during the hackathon with TBWG, the largest blockchain consortium in Thailand. We’ve used this opportunity to gather valuable feedback on our technical documentation from the developers and hackers themselves.
Open-source BandChain Development on Github
Band Protocol’s engineering team is shipping features at the fastest rate ever, check out our commits/Github activities/issue tickets in the BandChain repositories! https://github.com/bandprotocol/bandchain
On that note, we are scaling up our engineering team this year. We have onboarded new developers and are still actively recruiting — if you’re a developer, please do reach out to us via Telegram or email.
Community Development
From the beginning of 2020, we set out a major goal to be more involved in community outreach both offline and online. We’re glad to safely say that we have delivered on our goal and have plans to ramp out community efforts even more!
Community Discussions
Introducing fortnightly AMA sessions on our Telegram channel has been pivotal and to have our community reception turn out much more lively than we anticipated, it’s been extremely rewarding for the Band Protocol team. Throughout these AMAs, we have been able to decipher some of the most difficult yet constructive questions while also ensuring that the community’s vision for the technical and community development of Band Protocol is being realized.
Recap on Community Discussion #1: 02/02/2020
TBWG Hackathon & Bangkok’s First DeFi Meetup
During the course of February, we also had the pleasure of hosting a hackathon with TBWG & Bangkok’s first DeFi meetup alongside MakerDAO, Omisego, KULAP and BlockspaperT. With so much positive energy from Thailand’s top tech talents and community, we couldn’t be more excited for Thailand to drive #DeFi forward in the emerging crypto and financial market.
We’ve been doing our best to communicate and remain active on Twitter & Telegram, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Business Development
February was a rollercoaster month for the DeFi and blockchain space as a whole. We witnessed a temporary Chainlink oracle failure which resulted in $37K in malicious profit and also multiple attacks on bZx and Synthetix.
Security of Price Oracles in DeFi Applications
We’ve posted a recap of the bZx oracle attack and also shared our take on how DeFi protocols should implement oracles — more specifically, how relying on one oracle is better than none, but using more oracles is certainly better in terms of risk and safety.
With a key focus to protect the users who have more than $1B locked up in DeFi, February has opened up the opportunity for Band Protocol to work with multiple projects to prevent another oracle issue from hindering the health and growth of the DeFi space again.
We’re excited to share these developments in the foreseeable future with our community.
Onboarding Validators for BandChain
Additionally, we’ve streamlined our focus to onboard multiple block validators for BandChain Phase 0. Early-stage block validation testing is scheduled to begin as soon as next week! We welcome all community-run nodes and we have already witnessed a few nodes spin up by our community members. Stay tuned for more updates as we quickly roll out our official validator node and detail regarding upcoming Mainnet!
Collaborations to Establish Oracle Standard
In tandem with the Alliance of Decentralized Oracles (Band Protocol, Chainlink, Tellor, Witnet, UMA and more), we are taking the initiative to cooperate for better security in the oracle space and have proposed EIP-2362 for a standard interface for numeric pull oracles.
Check out our ADO calls here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvjLPvhyg8
Upcoming Next
With the development of BandChain Wenchang accelerating quickly, we look forward to our early-stage block validation testnet early next week as we bring Mainnet one step closer.
In the upcoming weeks we will also be announcing more virtual hackathons in partnership with some of the leading decentralized finance projects in the space!
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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