Umbrella Network AMA w/Crypto Stalkers: Recap
Umbrella Network’s President, John Chen, was recently invited for an AMA by Crypto Stalkers to answer questions from the community.
AMA at: Crypto Stalkers Telegram Channel
On: Friday, 15th October, 2021 | Time: 2:00 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 ***
PART ONE:
Q1. Could you please introduce yourself and your team?
Sure no problem.
My name is John Chen, and I’m the President & Head of Marketing for Umbrella Network. I joined Umbrella Network at the end of last year and currently focus on ensuring that we are building and sticking to our roadmap of deliverables, marketing, community, and pretty much anything outside of actual product development.
I have an entrepreneurial background, having started up several businesses across consumer goods, digital media, and marketing.
For our team, we are an engineering-heavy team and have a total of about 18 engineers and growing, and another 4 or 5 that’s in marketing, operations, and other support areas.
The senior core team, led by our founder Sam Kim, has been working together on blockchain projects even before Umbrella, so we have a long and extensive working history across multiple projects.
Q2. What is the main concept behind “Umbrella Network” Why did you choose this name?
Important one 😁
Yes it sure is. Umbrella Network is a decentralized layer-2 data oracle service. So like all oracles, we bring data, usually off-chain data, onto the blockchain. We give dApp developers access to rich and comprehensive data at the lowest price point and highest scalability.
The main concept behind the name Umbrella Network is that we think that an oracle should 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 community validators using a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus. That’s what the nodes represent that make up the umbrella frame in our logo. It’s the community of validators forming our network that protects and ensures data quality. So that’s how we got to Umbrella Network. It’s a network of data nodes, and that of a network of protection for your data!
Q3. There are so many oracles in the ecosystem, why will users use Umbrella Network? What’s its uniqueness?
The uniqueness or should I say — main advantage of Umbrella Network compared to the other Oracles in the Ecosystem is our ability to aggregate data via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle trees.
This allows us to bring thousands of data points, and potentially hundreds of thousands, to the blockchain in a single transaction, whereas other oracles can only bring one data point per transaction.
This advantage allows us to offer data at a significantly lower cost than any other oracle on the market. It also gives us the ability to offer more data than anyone else as well.
So whether it’s the price of both BTC/USD and ETH/USDT, or the entire S&P 500, all of it is aggregated and put on-chain at once. This leads to massive cost savings, is much faster, and is more secure.
As a result, this gives developers access to a lot more information, much cheaper, and can allow them to offer more complex solutions to their clients — similar to currently more advanced traditional finance systems for example — but decentralized and much more cost-effective.
And while most other oracles offer a few hundred data points at most, we currently offer around 2,000 data pairs, right now all for free.
We plan to have over 10,000 data pairs available by the end of this year for applications to use.
And finally, it’s not just crypto price pairs or even financial data that we can bring on-chain, if there is an API in the real world, chances are we can bring on that data. So it could be real-time weather, sports stats, insurance info, real estate pricing, personal health insurance, eCommerce data, you name it, the types of data are virtually unlimited.
Q4. For a community owned projects its necessary to keep the community intact with the projects development, what measures you’ve taken to boost up the community?
You’re right! It’s definitely important to keep the community intact, engaged and informed. We have always strived to be a truly decentralized, community-owned oracle.
For our project’s development, we currently have a Community Council that helps with overseeing our community ambassador program and will be critical to various governance functions for the project. Even our acquisition of Lucidity had to be voted on by the community/governance council so that there is proper oversight from the community on what is best for the project.
Furthermore, the majority of our token allocation, roughly 60%, are allocated to our community, which includes our token holders, validators, partners and in the form of rewards given out to token holders who stake in our programs. We believe this help to promote longer term holding.
We also have very active (and friendly) telegram and discord channels where the community is strong and stays engaged. Currently we have about 30k+ members in our telegram community, and over 42k members on twitter. We will continue to grow and foster our community as it is a fundamental component of our project.
Q5. You’re supporting 2 chain currently BSC & ETH, Do you have plans to move towards FTM, SOL OR Polygon blockchains?
I’m a fan of FTM though 😅
Yes FTM is on radar!
We have been pretty busy this year trying to execute and build out our roadmap. We believe the future of DeFi and Blockchain lies in cross-chain compatibility, and not just one chain. So we want to be where the applications are, regardless of the chain, where there is the need to access data.
We’ve got a pretty ambitious roadmap, which has us integrating and supporting 8 chains by Q2 2022, including BSC, ETH, MATIC, SOL, ADA, and AVAX among others.
We are already live on BSC and Ethereum, and will be live on Polygon before end of this month. Solana will be in November. Fantom, like i mentioned is also on our radar, and we will most likely look to support them sometime in 2022.
Our ultimate goal is to be multi-chain interoperable, and support as many of the significant layer 1 ecosystems as we can.
A healthy Q2 2022 😱
Healthy and busy!
PART TWO: TWITTER POSTS:
Q1. Oracles play a crucial role in the blockchain ecosystem. The blockchain would be like a phone on airplane mode if it didn’t have oracles. Could you describe how your Oracle network differs from other popular projects like Band Protocol and Chainlink? By @Maccaao
Great question. So like I touched upon earlier, Umbrella differs from other oracle projects on several fronts, with the main one being that we have the ability to aggregate data, which we do via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle Trees. This allows us to bring thousands of data points to the blockchain in a single transaction, whereas other oracles can only bring one data point per transaction.
This advantage allows us to offer data at a significantly lower cost than any other oracle on the market and the ability to offer more data than anyone else.
And while Chainlink is the current dominant player in the oracle market with a great team, fantastic marketing, and a clear first-mover advantage — they are sometimes seen as a more centralized oracle.
That’s because they essentially operate under a Proof of Authority consensus, simply due to the fact that the senior team there has the final say as to who can be a validator in their network. This is in some ways due to their architecture, which makes it rather costly to bring data on-chain.
We are more decentralized because we are able to allow almost anyone from the community to become a validator. We operate under a delegated proof of stake consensus, which is far more democratic and decentralized. And we can allow almost anyone in the community to be a validator because of the incredibly low costs to be a node operator. Operating a node for some of the other oracles could cost 50–100x more in comparison.
Q2. Language is a barrier to many crypto enthusiasts, well, we all know many projects support the English-speaking community. So, are you aiming to use local communities to raise more awareness of $UMB among these people in different countries? By @AimenKhalid15
100%
Our community is extremely valued and important to us. And we’ve got several programs in place to help continue to foster its growth and development. We have a growing ambassador program, with UMBassadors representing from countries all over the world. We currently have over 50+ members in that group and continuing to grow. Our UMBassadors along with our overall community has helped us grow, represent and promote the project and played a big part in raising the awareness despite the language differences.
Apart from our Official Umbrella Network Channel, we have multiple community channels across different regions of the world — Indonesia, Bangladesh, Spain, Germany, Russia, and Vietnam just to name a few.
We also have a growing program to foster our developer community. We are active in various hackathons globally, from Ethonline to those held by Gitcoin, among others and our involvement in that area will only continue to grow, as this is a major area for us.
Having a thriving developer community is key for us as those are the ones who will be building applications and utilizing our data solutions.
Q3. I can see that the Umbrella Network is said to provide more data than any other network and at a much lower cost than any other oracle in the ecosystem.
So, I’d like to know where do you get your data from, and how reliable is it? What standard do you use to evaluate the data? By @AlunaNadaIndah
Umbrella’s nodes pull data from various APIs and arrive at consensus via an on chain smart contract. We use Merkle Trees to allow nodes to validate thousands of transactions for the price of a single transaction.
With regards to reliability, the technical architecture of Umbrella Network ensures that only crypto graphically verified and economically incentivized truthful data is available to users.
Our Merkle trees, or Binary hash trees, is a data structure that allows efficient and secure verification of large amounts of data. They also help to ensure that data blocks received from other peers in any peer-to-peer network are received undamaged and unaltered. In doing so, dApps can bring thousands of real-world data points on chain, at a low cost without sacrificing security or data integrity.
Furthermore, on the data sourcing side, we obtain data from multiple data sources, including from higher end, premium, professional data aggregators. So that means that we have several layers of data validation.
The first is having paid, professionally aggregated data that already has been cleaned, sanitized and pulled from multiple exchanges.
The second is from Umbrella’s standpoint, where we then take multiple sources of data, including these aggregate data sources, and then run a community run, decentralized consensus using our network of community validators via Delegated Proof of Stake on that data to ensure accuracy.
Q4. Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to your project? Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your project in the non-crypto space? By @Greyhair_08
A tricky one 😉
Good question actually.
We think it’s important to have both crypto investors as well as broader support in our community. We have several plans in place to do that. One is through broader outreach via press and exposure through non crypto based media. But that also means we need to have valuable news and information that is also interesting for the broader public.
One way we believe we can do that is through our expansion into the various sectors including the broader enterprise market. Areas like digital adtech via our recent acquisition of Lucidity, for example, was a great strategic addition to our project, and also quite well received by both our community and the broader public. And we will be looking at other enterprise segments as well.
Furthermore, as we enter into various industries, like gaming, NFTs, or the supply chain market, as examples, non-crypto investors, including more mainstream/traditional investors, will start to take note of this, and we believe build further awareness outside of just the crypto space.
but look for some exciting announcements from us in the coming weeks around some of those segments 🙂
Q5. Reading your Litepaper, I just noticed that apart from $UMB, you have another token — “rUMB”. What does it do? Also is it possible to buy or swap it with the $UMB or other tokens? By @Jasonnmoree
So the rUMB tokens are what UMB token holders receive as reward/yield when they stake it on our staking portal. Current APY for staking ranges anywhere between 70% and 350%+ depending on the staking program.
The rUMB that is received will be redeemable on a 1:1 basis for UMB tokens in the future. As of now, the rUMB will convert either by Feb 2022 or earlier if certain achievements/milestones are met on the project.
Realistically, we probably expect this to happen at the end of this year, though this isn’t finalized yet. So on the roadmap, we have listed out the actual User Interface that the community will go to with their rUMB to do the conversion.
So, the community will be able to see the full UI in November and be able to convert their rUMB, possibly in December depending on when our achievement/milestone is hit.
Look out for an announcement on this later this month from us.
You can learn more about our staking programs here -> staking.umb.network
PART THREE. LIVE SESSION:
Q1. On which DEX platforms can I buy your token and are you planning to list on new exchanges?!!!!
For Dex’s we are currently listed on Uniswap, Sushiswap and Pancakeswap. for CEX, we just listed on Poloniex this week, and Kucoin a few weeks ago. We are also listed on gate.io, MEXC Global, Ascendex, and a few others.
We are always working on new listings, but as you know, we cannot comment on that as per rules with those exchanges. But we are looking to list on more Tier 1 exchanges, and will announce to the community when its imminent.
Q2. Currently a lot of people are looking at NFTs, metaverse, and games. Can you tell me what advantages will you have in this field future?
We believe the next big wave for blockchain adoption is going to be around blockchain gaming.
While DeFi has great momentum and a lot of exciting projects, gaming presents an even broader global audience potential. And there are just so many advantages blockchain will offer with NFTs, Play2Earn and other novel and innovative approaches that is really going to democratize the gaming industry and give the power back to the players.
We are thrilled for future developments here, and are rolling out our verifiable number generator later this month that will be able to support various gaming initiatives in providing a better way to do random generation of things like loot boxes, for example.
Look for more announcements in this area from us in the coming weeks.
Q3. My question is about your long term marketing plans. How, or through which big partnerships do you plan on utilizing to pass your product onto the normal — especially non-crypto people?
We’ve got a fairly comprehensive marketing plan that spans across community development, social, influencer, content, partnerships, exchange listings etc. But honestly, those are only as effective as the message being delivered.
And for us, the key messaging we want to deliver is that we are execution focused, building out a disruptive and innovative solution that is going to solve real problems within the blockchain ecosystems. If we are able to execute against our roadmap, and deliver the value to the different ecosystems of application developers, we believe we will be able to build significant value and subsequently bring on the major partnerships and product adoption.
I believe those core achievements, coupled with an effective marketing strategy, is what is going to grow our project really, not only for us, but for our community.
Q4. Do you have An Ambassador Program available? If yes, how can I join it? And can you tell us what the benefit Available for the Ambassador?
Yes we are always looking for more Umbassadors to join our program.
You can find more information here -> https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-network-announces-launch-of-global-umbassador-program-2b1eeaf932b6
And apply here -> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdk4QpD8APHBhOpUikqM3rQsdJlLDMfU3tv-Kwq_IRCfeRkXg/viewform
Q5. What is the most ambitious goal of your project? What is the ultimate vision that Your project is trying to achieve within the cryptocurrencies market? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any Upcoming Updates?
We are looking to bring the world’s data on chain. And we want to try and drive the cost of data to as close to zero as possible.
Right now, there is not enough data available on chain, it is expensive, and sometimes not updated frequently. Sometimes data can’t even be brought on because of prohibitive costs or a custom data feed is too complex to be added. We are looking to solve all of these issues.
Data is super critical to almost any more complex application. Think about what you can do with your laptop when you aren’t connected to wifi. Its pretty limited. When data is readily available and comes at little or no cost, that’s when real innovation can happen.
Thankyou “@chen225” for your precious time.
It’s really awesome to introduce Umbrella Network to our community. I’ll recommend everyone to Join their telegram group 👇
thanks @N4V1111 for hosting, and thanks everyone who took the time out to participate!
It was a nice experience hosting you especially with such detailed answers that’ll be fruitful for Community to understand in a better sense.
Here are some of our socials:
Website — https://umb.network/
Telegram Community — https://t.me/umbrellanet
Telegram Announcements — https://t.me/umbnetannouncement
Discord — https://discord.gg/G9x4TsHSd7
Twitter — https://twitter.com/umbnetwork
Medium — https://medium.com/umbrella-network
take care everyone!
***AMA Concluded***
Join the discussion on Telegram at https://t.me/umbrellanet
