Launching the Band Standard Dataset
As Band Protocol continues to rapidly scale our integration and partnerships across the various blockchain platforms and applications, we are proud to announce the official launch of the Band Standard Dataset — an exhaustive reference price dataset with frequent updates and comprehensive, customizable feeds. With expansive support for crypto assets, commodities and foreign exchange rates, the Band Standard Dataset covers a growing set of 100+ price feeds for any decentralized finance protocol to readily-integrate. Join the growing list of DeFi and dApps that are using Band Protocol standard dataset to enhance the security of your smart contracts.
👉 Build using the Band Standard Dataset today!
Price feeds underpin the majority of decentralized finance (DeFi) Protocols that exist today. The notional amount of value secured by DeFi continues to rise at an unprecedented rate, recently surpassing $15B among industry verticals such as lending, derivatives, synthetic assets, decentralized exchange, and stablecoins.
The all too common blockchain ‘oracle problem’ involves the reliability, security, and trustworthiness of third-party oracles and the trustless execution of smart contracts. Nevertheless, it is still habitual for many protocols to use bandaid solutions that come in the form of centralized or internal mechanisms which have the risks of ongoing maintenance costs, single points of failure, low-quality data, and lack of redundancy on both data source and validator layers.
For developers who prioritize performance and scalability, Band Protocol, a decentralized oracle network, has become the long-term solution to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in value locked up in smart contracts as seen in just Mirror Protocol and Fantom alone.
Before we shine a light on the Band Standard Dataset, let’s run through the two main requirements that a cutting-edge DeFi application needs:
Developers Require Comprehensive, Extensible, and Customizable Feeds
The critical aspect we have learned from our conversations with over 90+ projects, it’s that no two protocols’ data requirements are ever the same. However, the majority of the price oracle solutions today are still extremely restrictive with predetermined datasets or unscalable procedures to create a custom oracle including curating and auditing your own set of trusted validators.
In addition to the relatively small number of supported tokens, the popular feeds provided by many oracles are also meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution, with little to no room for customization in parameters such as update time, price deviation, or security.
The lack of token support is especially detrimental to any protocols looking to support relatively newer or less popular tokens including their own. In those cases, they would have to either have to request and wait for the third-party oracle to support the token, or use centralized oracle implementation for different assets — neither of which is desirable due to major risk factors.
DeFi Deserves Frequent and In-Time Updates
Another key pain point that we have identified is that majority of other oracles update very intermittently — this is with the possible exception of the few most used feeds such as BTC and ETH.
This shortcoming is due to the economics of actually pushing the price data on-chain combined with the associated transaction and network fees. While there are often percentage price deviation mechanics in place to aid with keeping the on-chain price updated, this is often unchangeable once the feed is live or requires a full redeployment where validators must be migrated along with underlying decentralized applications.
Introducing The Band Standard Dataset
With all of that in mind, we are thrilled to introduce the Band Standard Dataset. This dataset comprises a number of price feeds aimed at allowing developers to have the greatest diversity and flexibility in the price feed while maintaining the highest data quality and accessibility possible.
Here is a list of the main advantages of using the Band Standard Dataset:
Heavily Optimized and Low Cost of Usage
With all of our Standard Dataset solutions, we allow developers to query multiple price pairs at the same time in one transaction. Optimized for gas, developers can now retrieve accurate and reliable price updates of many feeds in the same block.
End-to-End Flexibility
Along with that, we also allow querying for any price pairs, as opposed to the standard <TOKEN>/USD, <TOKEN>/BTC, and <TOKEN>/ETH pairs. Price feeds can be paired against any of the 100+ feeds supported on the Band Standard Dataset. This means, for example, any of the following pairs below are possible:
BTC/USDBTC/ETHETH/CNYEUR/BTCBNB/FTTDOT/ATOM
This flexibility, combined with the ability to query multiple price pairs simultaneously will significantly reduce the engineering resources required on our feed users as well as ensuring that the resulting code is much simpler and less error-prone by extension.
Constantly Increasing Diversity
In addition to the flexibility mentioned above, BandChain’s infrastructure is designed with full customizability — adding support for a new token or other price data can be streamlined and launched significantly faster than the other solutions. This will greatly benefit developers and protocols looking to support new or less-known tokens.
Over 100+ Secure Price Feeds Available For Developers
The Standard Dataset will initially comprise over 100 asset price feeds, ranging from various cryptocurrency tokens, to various foreign exchanges, to commodities.
These feeds uses price data aggregated from a number of premium data sources, the list of which includes:
Cryptocurrency
Foreign Exchange Rates & Commodities
Data from these sources are retrieved by a subset of BandChain’s 71+ reputable validators and medianized on two layers, the validator and data provider level, which is then aggregated on BandChain into a single final result to be stored on the blockchain state. The data retrieval, aggregation, and storage process is transparent, publicly viewable, auditable, and verifiable through our Cosmoscan, our official block explorer for BandChain.
As we move forward, this list will continue to improve and grow in feed support as well as institutional-grade data providers based on feedback from our partners and the developer community in general.
Using The Band Standard Dataset
Initially, data from the Standard Dataset will be available from three sources
- through our
StdReferencesmart contracts - through our client libraries
- through our REST API endpoints
Solidity Smart Contracts
We have implemented a new StdReference contract to allow anyone to query data from our Standard Dataset. For Ethereum developers, the contract itself is live on the Kovan Ethereum testnet. We are working with our partner chains to announce the support of the Band Standard Dataset in the very near future!
Currently, the price that can be queried from the contract is being primarily updated by the Band Foundation. We are currently working with a partner to allow anyone to permissionlessly feed the price data using the proof from Band’s oracle in return for a bounty/reward. This means that in the case that the Foundation stopped feeding data for any reason, there is an economic incentive for anyone on the network to easily take up the role of the feeder and feed the price data themselves.
We will be going over deep dive into our price contract mechanics as well as our price feed infrastructure in much more detail in a future article. In the meantime, please see our article on using Bandchain’s proof.
Client Libraries
Along with the Standard Dataset, we have also released a new version of our ⚡️bandchain.js JavaScript client library. This new version comes with a new getReferenceData function that allows developers to query data from the Dataset.
We will be working on expanding our library to support additional languages and features in near the future.
Pushing Forward
Data will always be the cornerstone of DeFi and wider blockchain applications. Through the Band Standard Dataset and constant growth in partnerships, we will continue to add even more enterprise-grade data providers and price support for any asset.
Looking to build a DeFi application? You can integrate following our developer documentation, join the #developers channel on Discord, or simply connect with us through email.
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.
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