Internal AMA w/ Umbrella Network’s President, John Chen: Recap
Umbrella Network’s President, John Chen, recently held an internal AMA in the main Umbrella Network Telegram channel to answer questions from the community.
Venue: Umbrella Network Telegram Channel
On: Thursday. 17th March 2022 |Time: 1:00 PM UTC
Umbrella is a scalable, community-owned oracle that securely brings external data on-chain. It is the first decentralized oracle service to empower the community with the scale and security modern DeFi applications require.
The transcript is almost entirely in its original AMA form, mildly edited for punctuation and readability only.
*** AMA starts ***
OPEN FORUM:
Q1. 1.Is it gonna be available to stake rumb1 on Ascendex?
2.Is it gonna be possible to stake UMB for RUMB2 on Ascendex if yes any ETA for that?
3.Is it gonna be possible to stake rumb2 on Ascendex if yes are we gonna get same % and both options for staking 6 and 12 months with the same multiplicator as you mentioned on medium (hadley stream)
1. We are working with Ascendex currently to provide both Hadley 2.0 staking as well as Astro staking. Stay tuned for updates on this. Their integration team is working on getting this live.
2. Yes see above.
3. Right now we are focusing on getting Hadley 2.0 and Astro live on there. down the road, we expect to have staking for rUMB2 as well. Should that be the case, we will most likely have that also roll out on Ascendex.
Q2. @chen225 Hi John. First, thank you (whole team) for new streams. The whole procedure was without problem for me. Nice and clear.
I have suggestion for dashboard. I stake UMB and also RUMB1. I can see how much I already got in RUMB2 rewards. But its cumulative from both streams. I would like to see it separately. How much RUMB2 I got from Hadley and how much RUMB2 from Astro. It will be great overview for stakers who are staking on more than one stream. And also better control for us that everything is going right. Thank you and have a nice day.
We are looking into splitting the rewards data so you can see how much you are earning from Hadley vs Astro. However there are some things we still need to work out. Introducing lockups complicates things significantly as you can theoretically stake multiple lockups.
Meaning, I could have more than one 6mo, more than one 12mo, with different lockup end dates. This makes things a bit more complex when it comes to calculating the total annual reward %, particularly since the rewards pool is shared between Hadley and Astro. But we are working on getting this done.
The first thing we will be adding to the dashboard will be the Reward % (formerly called APY, but that’s actually not accurate terminology) so users can compare returns. After that, we will work to split the rewards data between the different staking options.
But thanks for your feedback and glad you have not had any issues with the procedures.
Q3. @chen225 Hi sir, Finality at UMB is 1min on average, does it mean UMb is getting out of the oracle business for trading (on-chain or derivatives) of any kind in the long run? Are there plans to shorten the time to develop more customers?
2nd question: why does DPOS have to launch in 2 parts, what's the difference between the two, and what kind of impact does both split releases have on nodes or stakers?
We can increase the frequency of our data feed update to more than once per minute. However, as of right now, we have not had a business need to do that. We are working with some new partners that may need a higher frequency of data updates, so down the road, we will be addressing this.
We have a few solutions for this actually that we are working on. One is to obviously just mint blocks at a higher frequency, but that increases costs so we have to plan that carefully.
The other solution we have is called Custom Data Request, which we will be announced soon with more details, but that solution will allow users to request specific data from our oracles at any time, which would address the frequency issue.
Transition to DPoS is pretty complicated. We are doing it in several phases because it’s a major architectural shift. So we will be first testing out a rewards scheme off-chain first in Phase 1, which will allow us to test and tweak things if we need to, without having to make major contract redeployments, among other things.
We expect this to have less impact on nodes and stakers in the long run than if we did everything at once.
Q4. Are there approaches to evaluate illiquid assets with oracles in long term? e.g. Pre-icos, Pre-idos, NFTs etc.?
second layer solutions usually don’t have such a good reputation when it comes to security. How do you prevent flash loan or sandwich attacks once DPOS is here?
Are there efforts to offer the node operators permissionless access in the future, so that they can operate a node without the consent of the team?
We are discussing with some partners on evaluating illiquid assets, such as private real estate, private equity, etc. They will have the same challenges on- chain as off-chain, and we will need to have a reliable data source to be able to bring on-chain.
With NFTs, we can partner with various NFT exchanges and try to figure out things like floor prices among other mechanisms but this is all very early stage at the moment.
Yes , we have plans for onboarding community validators with more permissionless access in the future, where they won’t need to apply and go through a screening process.
Our overall goal is to get to this point down the road so almost anyone can be a validator with just some basic requirements, and without the participation of the core project team
Q5. It’s been said that the initial rUMB1 locked up in polar for 12 months will be returned as rUMB2 after staking lock up is over. This would make it so there are millions of extra rUMB2 over the initially planned amount. Technically speaking there wouldn’t be enough of a redemption quota for everyone to redeem afterwards. Shouldn’t rUMB1 should be given back as either UMB or rUMB1 (and then redeemed for UMB manually)?
We will be adjusting the redemption quota as necessary as the amount of rUMB increases so that it is in a proper ratio so that there won’t be too much of a bottleneck.
Q6. @chen225 hey John! A few questions from some community members who couldn’t make it:
1. How do you and the team think the whole process with the conversion of rUMB1 to UMB went?
2. Have you changed how this process will be done at the next conversion event?
3. What do you and the team think about changing staking in the future? Have you thought about getting rid of reward tokens (rUMB£) and just using UMB?
Hey what’s up Keirran:
- To be quite honest, we were expecting this to not run super smoothly initially just because there wasn’t a single solution that would please everyone in the community.
- The broader goal for us, and I think for the broader community of Umb holders, was to try and control the amount of new UMB going into the circulating supply. Once launched, I think it’s gone about as good as we can expect it to go.
- The initial 2 weeks or so had some bottleneck for redemption, but things started to clear up after the initial rush. Our plan was to have a long-term solution that can continue, at this point, for the foreseeable future. We can make adjustments to the quota as needed as circulation figures increase.
- We are hoping to no have to have another transition phase moving forward, of switching from rUMB2 to rUMB3, having seen how things have gone during this one.
The tokenomics were planned way at the beginning of the project, and we’ve certainly learned a lot during the past year+. We’ve got lot of great feedback from the community with respect to the rewards program and will look to implement a better solution, without having to change the high level tokenomics of total rewards distributed to the community. But we have a few potential solutions moving forward that will hopefully make things a lot easier and better.
- Yes we are looking at several options at this point, including removing the rewards token altogether and just implementing locking mechanisms, as well as a potential solution with a single rewards token without any future conversions, and will present some of them in the coming months.
Q7. @chen225 Thank for answer. I have another one😊
What will be goal to achieve for Rumb3 round before one year period. Did you already set it up?
We’re trying to avoid any more rUMB versions, as I just mentioned. We will update the community on a recommended path forward as they develop.
Q8. We’re already a month past the normal rUMB1 staking end date. Where are these extra tokens coming from?
We have a fixed rewards pool, about 160mm since inception I believe. About 40mm a year for rewards to the community.
We issued a bit more rUMB1 than planned, but it doesn’t affect the total amount of rewards we have earmarked for the community. a month more of rUMB1 just means there is a bit less of rUMB2 but it doesn’t affect the grand total of rewards.
Q9. Hello! When will we can trade rUMB2?
As mentioned earlier, Umbrella itself will not be providing liquidity for the rUMB2 token, just like we didn’t do for rUMB1 but we did hold a community vote to see if the community wanted to allow the trading of rUMB2, and the vote results were in favor of allowing it to freely trade.
That just means third parties will need to provide liquidity on exchanges like Uniswap to allow trading.
Q10. Can you convert rUMB2 at 1 for 1, like you can rUMB1?
Yes rUMB2 will be redeemable for UMB 1:1 like all our reward tokens, once that is made redeemable, which will be sometime in the future, within a year or less. As we work to finalize improvements to the rewards program, we will have further recommendations and updates on this.
Q11. Current APY not showing on the new streams, maybe temporary issue
Yes, we are aware and making updates to the UI. those updates will start rolling out today, so soon you will be able to see the APY, or Reward % on the dashboard.
Right now, the current Reward % for Hadley 2.0 on ETH is around 107%
Though that will change as more people move their staking from 1.0 to 2.0. but right now its quite high. So Astro 6mo and 12mo, will be ~160% and ~235%, respectively. Those are all changing in real-time so are subject to change.
Also, the current distribution of rewards between the pools is the following: Hadley-Astro rewards pool vs Polar rewards pool is in an 80:20 ratio and the ETH to BSC rewards pool ratio is 92:8 ratio.
The ETH: BSC rewards ratio is based on a proxy of the amount of UMB BEP20 tokens in circulation vs ERC20, as per a former vote we held that now guides how we allocate rewards between the 2 chains.
Q12. Cool! I moved my staking to rumb2 and I also staked my rumb1 to get more rumb2. So I’m double staking! Can you guys make it so both rewards go into one withdrawal contract as opposed to having to withdraw them separately?
I’m not sure if this will be possible, but our engineering can assess this further.
Q13. Can you explain in a bit more detail about the passport beta and how they work?
Previously, in order to get our Layer 2 Data, you would have to add custom code to your smart contract to fetch the data. There are API calls involved, Merkle proofs needed to verify the data, etc.
Additional code and operations in any smart contract also means more gas and costs. One of the few criticisms we received for Umbrella was around this additional friction to retrieve data. Our Passport Beta solution addresses this issue as it drastically reduces the friction to fetch that data.
The service now will deliver requested data to any smart contract, removing all the work you would have to do to access our L2D. We will also be charging for this service down the road, but the costs for us to deliver the data to you, should be less than the costs you would incur to have to go and fetch it yourselves.
So hopefully this is a win-win situation for everyone. More details for the solution can be found here: https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-network-launches-passport-beta-on-mainnet-1b4ef0673a82
Q14. Question — From a security standpoint, exploits based on reentrancy and price oracle manipulation happen in this space. How does Umbrella Network protect itself from these kind of exploits?
We can offer oracles with time or volume-weighted features TWAP & VWAP to help mitigate price oracle manipulation. As our network of community validators continues to increase, this should continue to enhance the security of the overall network.
Additionally, from the price feed perspective, we are drawing from multiple sources including a lot of premium data sources, before our validators then run consensus on that data, to prevent any singular price outlier, which may be through manipulation, from impacting the final data, particularly since we don’t average the data but take the median.
If you want to discuss more in detail, I’d be happy to address further
I’ve got to run everyone
Happy to answer some questions later on if there are any.
Thanks everyone for your time.
**AMA Concluded***
About Umbrella Network
Umbrella Network is a scalable, cost-efficient, and community-owned oracle for the DeFi and blockchain community. Its Layer 2 technology uses the latest advances in Merkle tree technology to write multiple data points on a single on-chain transaction, so it allows for batching data to smart contracts accurately, securely, and inexpensively.
Umbrella believes a community-owned oracle is not only possible but essential to creating a truly decentralized financial system.
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