Umbrella Network AMA Recap with UniFarm Community

On Friday, 14th May 2021, at 3:00 PM UTC

Umbrella Network’s Head of Marketing, John Chen, was recently invited for an AMA by UniFarm to answer questions from the community.

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 Begins ~

Q1. Let’s start first with an introduction, can you explain to us what is the Umbrella Network?

John Chen: Yes sure, Umbrella Network is a community-owned, decentralized, layer 2 data oracle. Our goal is to bring the most cost-effective and largest set of real-world, off-chain data securely onto the blockchain. We currently offer the largest assortment of data available to application developers with over 1,200 data pairs including major cryptocurrency pairs like ETH/USD as well as mid and low cap crypto. We also provide an extensive set of real-world financial data like stock prices, commodities, indexes, options & derivatives, plus a lot more.

Q2. Why named Umbrella the project? I’m very interested in the reason behind it.

John Chen: Good question, not enough people actually ask this, haha! We think an oracle must do more than just move data from one source or multiple sources onto the blockchain. It must also serve as protection by ensuring and securing the data quality. And making sure the data isn’t manipulated or corrupted.

We do that with our network of validators and community members. That’s what the nodes represent that make up our umbrella frame in our logo. It’s the community of validators forming our network that protects and ensures data quality.

Q3. What makes Umbrella Network more Community Centric? What kind of community engagement program do you prefer conducting?

John Chen: We have always strived to be a truly decentralized, community-owned oracle. We are able to do this in several ways:

1. The majority of our token allocation, 60%, are allocated to our community, which includes our token holders, validators, and partners, and in the form of rewards given out to token holders who stake in our programs.
2. With our expansion over to BSC, we are now able to open up our community to be able to run validator nodes. As a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) decentralized oracle, we want to give the power to the community to run validation on our data. This will be happening sooner than planned because of the significantly lower costs to run nodes on BSC, so we are excited to be rolling this out by end of May.
3. And third, from a community engagement perspective, we have multiple programs we are engaged in or rolling out, from various challenges like our upcoming BSC Developer’s Challenge where we will be encouraging developers to help create the next set of applications for our platform, to our Global UMBassador program that we are in the process of rolling out to bring on members of our community to join us in our mission to spread our project across the globe.

We will be opening up applications to be a validator on BSC later this month, so interested members can apply. Stay tuned for more details on this. But unlike the economics on Ethereum, running a validator node on BSC for Umbrella will not require a large capital base and can be done much more effectively.

Q4. Please share links where these interested individuals can join Umbrella Network.

John Chen: Yes sure, you can keep up to date with our announcements, and more than welcome to join our community in the links below:

Website: https://www.umb.network/

Telegram: https://t.me/umbrellanet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/umbnetwork

Medium: https://medium.com/umbrella-network

Q5. Any specific reason to choose Umbrella’s decentralized nodes being built using Layer 2 Merkle Trees?

John Chen: Other oracle projects currently in the market today, typically bring a single piece of data on-chain in a single transaction. It’s a one to one relationship. So, if you need the price of BTC/USD as well as ETH/USDT, it would take two separate transactions to bring them on-chain.

Our solution, because it is built using layer 2 Merkle trees, can bring thousands of data pairs in a single transaction. And our tech has the potential to scale that to millions of data points rolled into a single transaction. This gives us a significant advantage when it comes to cost, speed, and scalability.

For example, a single transaction on Ethereum, even before the recent gas spikes, cost around $50. This meant it would cost $50 to query and confirm a single crypto price feed. With Umbrella, we are currently bringing 1,200 data pairs on-chain in the single transaction, so then our cost per piece of data drops drastically to about $0.04. And this was on Ethereum. After moving over to BSC, that cost is again reduced by over 90%. So, we are by far, the lowest cost oracle on the market today because of this.

Our ultimate goal is to get the cost of data down to as close to zero as possible, as only then can we truly see DeFi applications grow and develop much more freely, without being shackled with prohibitive data costs that can stifle innovation.

Q6. How do you see this partnership with Unifarm? Can we expect any exciting surprises from both?

John Chen: It’s been great so far! and it’s just the beginning. We see a lot of cross-collaboration opportunities. Initially from joining Unifarm’s latest Cohort 7 and being a part of such a great group of like-minded projects. We just did a live stream AMA with you guys and the other members in the cohort and it was really great to be able to have a meaningful dialogue with everyone. The teams have all been fantastic.

Unifarm has built a great business model of creating one place to farm multiple tokens. And certainly with a big emphasis placed on their community and community building, which is crucial. There is just a lot of opportunity to support each other and cross-pollinate. We are very much looking forward to working with all the different projects and their respective communities.

And secondly, we see great long term potential to support both Unifarm as well as other projects within the ecosystem with our scalable, low-cost oracle solution. We feel that we can provide significant value in helping provide data that is secure, cost-effective, and scalable to help grow the DeFi ecosystem together.

Q7. What is the most interesting aspect of Umbrella Network’s next milestone which makes you more exciting?

John Chen: We are just super excited for what the future holds. There is just a massive market opportunity in providing mission-critical data onto the blockchain. And currently, there are just so many pain points, ones that we feel that we can help to alleviate. The big milestones coming up will be the BSC Mainnet launch in June, and the Ethereum Mainnet launch in July. Once we are fully live and operational, we will be looking forward to a few things:

1. Actual adoption of our platform and tech! We have already forged over 30+ partnerships in the past few months, and this month during our #BSCMonth push as we expanded onto Binance Smart Chain, we are looking to add another 10+ BSC projects on board as partners (which includes Unifarm!). So we have a lot of partners lined up that will be in various stages of integration to use our platform. This will help to really validate our tech and use case. Like mentioned before, we currently offer 1,200 data pairs, but will soon be up to 5,000 data pairs and growing rapidly. Compare that to currently leading oracles, which offer anywhere between 100–200 data pairs. It’s a big difference.
2. And, our longer-term goal has always been to be a multi-chain interoperable project. We just want to be where the developers are, where the deeds for data will be. So after ETH and BSC, we will be integrating into other chains like Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, Polygon and others.

Moving to the second section of the AMA,

~ LIVE Community Session ~

Q1. What innovations has UMB brought to the DEFI space? How is UMB changing the new DeFi ecosystem and what are the plans for the next 100 days?

John Chen: We believe that we have a novel and innovative solution to some of the problems plaguing oracles today. The high cost to bring data on-chain, the lack of frequently updated data, and the low amount of data variety available to developers today. All of this is in large part tied to the first part, which is the high cost. When that is solved, a lot of benefits can be enjoyed. We are one of the first oracle projects to be able to bring the level of massive scalability to the oracle space. And we believe that just like how in the mobile market, when costly, low data throughput 3G moved towards 4G LTE, there was an explosion in use cases for mobile phones, there can be a similar explosion in innovation in DeFi when the bottleneck of slow, expensive small volumes of data is removed. Our plans in the next 100 days will hopefully begin to address some of these challenges as we roll out from public testnet to mainnet and start to begin to gain traction and product adoption.

Q2. Currently, most investors only care about profits at the moment but ignore the long-term benefits. So can you give them some advice on why they should buy and hold this token/coin in the long term?

John Chen: There are 2 things I want to highlight here:

1. We are a tech-oriented, product-oriented project. We have set up a lot of product milestones, and we have so far hit all of them, and intend to continue to do so moving forward. We are optimistic about the long term potential of not only the overall market opportunity for data oracles as the industry matures; but of the potential contribution Umbrella can make in the space as we provide an innovative solution to the market.
2. We are also a community-focused project and are intensely focused on maintaining that. So, a large portion of our token allocation is geared toward the community and token holders. 33% of our token allocation is set towards our rewards program. So, long term token holders who stake with us will receive a generous portion of the overall token allocation so that we can keep this project in the hands of our community.

Q3. I want to support your project, tell us more about the Ambassador Program and in what ways can we participate?

John Chen: Yes, we have an ongoing UMBassador program that is in the process of rolling out. For those that are interested, please visit here for more information, and also how to apply — https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-network-announces-launch-of-global-umbassador-program-2b1eeaf932b6

Q4. Currently from where can I buy $UMB? Is it possible that I can get $UMB only by holding it?

John Chen: Our $UMB token is available on Uniswap, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap. And for CEX we are listed on AscendEx (formerly Bitmax) and gate.io. There may be more listings in the future so please stay tuned.

Q5. Who is UMB’s biggest rival? In the future, does UMB have a plan to beat your rival or cooperate with them? I think that will be a huge step forward for UMB.

John Chen: We feel that the market for data and data oracles is massive. It is just as important as the blockchain itself. Applications cannot have too many real-world use cases if they don’t have access to real-world data. Right now, the largest and most well-known oracle in the market is Chainlink, which last time i checked has about a 20B market cap. We don’t have to compete with Chainlink. We respect them immensely and believe there is plenty of room to have multiple oracles in the market today and in the future, serving various use cases. We will be focused on situations where applications may need a lot of data, at scale, and at a low cost. Projects that just need to utilize a single or few data points, may not necessarily benefit as much from our solution. So, there is definitely room for many solutions.

Q6. How did you come up with the idea of using Merkle trees? Why aren’t the other oracles using it? It seems obvious in retrospect?

John Chen: Sam, the founding partner of Umbrella, is also the Founder of Lucidity, which is a Layer 2 blockchain-based solution to help run marketing analytics for the digital advertising industry. That solution also uses a layer 2 sidechain that aggregates hundreds of thousands of data points into a single transaction, as in digital advertising, digital ad impressions need to be processed at an incredibly high throughput of 500,000+ impressions per second. The engine for Umbrella was developed at lucidity, which means our core tech has already been battle-tested to handle extremely high volumes of data. It actually isn’t as simple as just the Merkle tree concept itself and took several years of refinement and evolution to get to where it is today.

~ AMA Concluded ~

Join the discussion on Telegram at https://t.me/umbrellanet