#SwapBAND Trading Contest Spotlight — Band Protocol

Let’s learn more about our current trading contest partner: Band Protocol!

7 min readApr 16, 2020

In light of our current trading competition with Band Protocol, KyberSwap has collaborated with their team to put together this spotlight article that covers:

What is Band Protocol?
How are they different?
BAND Token Utility & Staking
Current partners and integrations methods.

In addition, to celebrate the listing of BAND token, Band Protocol is offering $6,000 in prizes to the top 53 traders that trade BAND on KyberSwap and 10 lucky winners on Twitter.

🥇1st place: $1,200

🥈2nd: $900

🥉3rd: $600

4–53th (next 50 users): $60

Join the trading competition here!

What is Band Protocol?

Band Protocol is a cross-chain decentralized oracle solution that provides smart contracts the tools to specify and aggregate data sources that developers use to securely build any decentralized application. Based on Cosmos-SDK, Band Protocol is the first oracle solution to provide full flexibility for developers to choose their data sources and aggregate the data to their respective needs. All blockchains such as Ethereum, cannot access real-world data and API available outside their network and must rely on an oracle service which connects external data and APIs to blockchain.

Backed by world leading VC, Sequoia Capital, and the top crypto exchange Binance, Band Protocol allows developers to customize their data request end-to-end to meet their respective needs and build blockchain applications such as decentralized finance (DeFi), prediction markets and games that requires secure connection to accurate real-world data and APIs.

BandChain, a high performance blockchain built specifically for oracle data computations with a blocktime of 2 seconds, is secured through delegated-proof-of-stake economic incentives using the BAND native token. This allows data queries to be consumed on destination blockchains within 6 seconds, meetings the demands of a real-time data request. BAND is used as a medium of exchange for query fees for private APIs or APIs under a paywall. Anyone can stake BAND to one of their reputable block validators such as Stakefish, Chorus One or Cosmostation to contribute to sourcing and aggregating data for data requesters in return for block rewards.

Decentralized oracles and DeFi protocol security have never been more important — we have seen the extent of how price oracles dictate and control the behaviour of smart contracts. For example, in February margin lending and borrowing platform bZx lost an estimated 2,388 ETH in a flash loan arbitrage exploiting their dependency on a single oracle source: on-chain price which is easily manipulatable. Synthetix lost over $37K+ due to a human error on their single price oracle for XAG/USD. In March, MakerDAO was left with millions in undercollateralized Dai due to data provider transactions getting congested in the Ethereum network.

A robust decentralized oracle design is essential for the sustainable growth of DeFi.

Band Protocol’s Unique Features

Flexible Data Request Script

BandChain, allows developers to create a custom data oracle script that allows smart contracts to easily specify their data sources and the data aggregation method. This not only protects smart contracts from having a single faulty data source, but also enables decentralized applications to tap into multiple high-quality data sources and aggregate data points into a single value.

Scalability

BandChain is built specifically for heavy oracle computations to allow validators to perform any complex data request within 6 seconds and submit a single, aggregated final value to the data requesters on target blockchains.

This prevents applications from being fed significantly delayed data in the case of congested networks which would require individual data provider updates and data aggregation transactions on the same network.

Decentralized Staking Model

Band Protocol utilizes a delegated-proof-of-stake consensus to create a decentralized oracle network where data validators who source and aggregate data for smart contracts must stake BAND tokens. This ensures that validators have economic incentive and skin in the game to uphold their jobs and the integrity of data provided to smart contracts or risk token slashing.

Low Cost Real-Time Spot Data

While all oracles can provide reference data, by nature it is always delayed to an extent as it is only updated at specific time intervals.

BandChain has a short blocktime of 2 seconds and can handle over 1000 transactions per second to ensure that real-time oracle data can be relayed to destination blockchains in 6 seconds or less. This means developers can invoke the data request script on-demand to receive spot data updates for only the price of transaction fees (similarly to gas). This will allow any DeFi project to immensely reduce their price update’s margin of error, enhancing protocol security and user experience.

Cross-Chain Compatibility

Band Protocol will play a key role in blockchain interoperability, especially through Cosmos’ IBC — a secure method for any Cosmos-SDK based blockchain to communicate. For blockchains that are not on Cosmos, Band Protocol uses lite client (bridge) smart contracts to allow oracle data relaying to any destination blockchain given that it has sufficient signatures from BandChain’s validators and thus cannot be altered.

This will enable many previously restricted use-cases to be brought on chain such as cross-chain compatible DeFi applications with secure price oracles.

How Has Band Protocol Been Integrated With Partners?

Since Band’s launch onto the Ethereum mainnet, they have collaborated with over 20+ partners in the blockchain ecosystem which include bZx, Fantom, Wanchain, Troy, Elrond, Tomochain, Constant, Incognito, AirSwap and more!

bZx, a top margin lending and borrowing platform, will also be implementing Band Protocol’s oracles in the full re-release of their protocol to safeguard against dependencies on any sole oracle solution. bZx will leverage the flexibility of Band Protocol to consume time-weighted price data that accounts for slippage and liquidity which will be cross-referenced with Chainlink & UniSwap price oracles. Diversifying their oracle dependencies and risk, if quoted rates have price deviations due to failures or corruption, there is a circuit-breaker to halt further trades on that data point, protecting millions of dollars in user funds.

Smart contract platforms such as Wanchain have integrated Band Protocol to provide faster and more decentralized oracles for end-users interacting with their interoperable open-finance ecosystem. DeFi protocols such as FinNexus on Wanchain, marketplace for hybrid decentralized/traditional financial products, can tap into real-time price data through BandChain for the first time as opposed to reference data that is always delayed.

Fantom, a full feature DeFi platform outside of Ethereum, is using Band Protocol to establish secure and decentralized price feeds for developers to build low-latency, high performance applications. Band Protocol supports real-time price feeds for over 175 tradeable synthetic assets on the fTrade & fLend platform and are piloting ‘batched price information’ with smart contract transactions to ensure that end-users on Fantom are not compromised in the event of network congestions or invalid data points.

The Band Protocol Team

We’ve met the Band Protocol team multiple times at Devcon 5, Osaka Blockchain Week (and Beyond Consensus Meetup), and the DEX’s on Ethereum meetup where we discussed the state of oracles and the expansive use-cases for DeFi protocols that could emerge through a more robust oracle standard.

The team carry significant experiences in the blockchain industry tracing back to 2013. The team built a crypto faucet mobile game with over 700,000 users in 2015. Soravis was an early investor to Kyber Network and other crypto projects while Sorawit built a high frequency crypto trading solution for Hudson River Trading, one of the top trading firms in the world before founding Band Protocol.

Band Protocol Founding Team

Recent Band Protocol Updates

Band Protocol partners up with over 16 reputable block validators including Cosmostation, Stakefish, Chorus One, StakeWithUs, Figment Networks, Infstones, Forbole and more.
Band Protocol partners up with layer-1 blockchains Elrond, Tomochain, Wanchain, Fantom, Kava, Portal Network to provide a secure, scalable cross-chain oracle solution.
Band Protocol has partnered up decentralized applications bZx, 2key, Incognito, Troy, Kyber Network, AirSwap to integrate low-latency, cost-effective oracles.
BandChain’s Phase 0 testnet #2 launched successfully
Band Protocol co-hosts Cross-Chain Virtual Hackathon with over $24,000 in prizes alongside Cosmos & Agoric.

Band Protocol Technical Resources

Band Protocol Social Media

You can buy $BAND in our #SwapBAND Trading Competition here!