Umbrella Network AMA w/ Kommunitas Community: Recap
Umbrella Network’s Strategic Partnerships & Business Development Manager, Joel Bergeron was recently invited for an AMA by the Kommunitas community to answer questions from the community.
At: Kommunitas Telegram Channel
On: Friday, 26th April 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 ***
PART ONE: BASIC INTRODUCTIONS:
Q1. Before we talk any further, could you introduce yourself to the public? And please explain briefly to us what Umbrella Network is?
Sure thing. So I am Joel, and I am a Canadian who lives in sunny Porto, Portugal.🇨🇦
I’ve been in the blockchain space since 2015. When I was living and working in Bali, Indonesia. I watched two rice farmers pay each other with Bitcoin (they had never had a bank account) And from then I knew this technology would change the world
Umbrella Network is a decentralized layer-2 data oracle solution.
We bring data on-chain!
So, like all oracles, we bring data, usually off-chain data, onto the blockchain. Almost all smart contracts and dApps need data to run and be useful applications. But currently, it is expensive to get data at scale on-chain. As a result, there is a limited amount of data, oftentimes updated infrequently.
Other oracles have to bring one piece of data at a time. So, if a dApp needs the price of both BTC/USD and ETH/USDT every single minute, then a typical oracle would have to write twice to the chain every minute, once for every data pair.
Whereas with Umbrella, we are able to aggregate data together, thousands of pieces of data currently, but potentially millions of data points, all at once and write it to the chain.
This gives us tremendous advantages in terms of scale, speed, and cost of getting that data to users compared to other oracles, and is what makes us different from other solutions on the market.
Q2. The token of a project has a primary use and practical purpose! So can you tell us what is the main role of $UMB in your ecosystem?
Sure thing
So the $UMB token is our native utility token that sits at the center of the Umbrella Network ecosystem. From staking and validating data, to governance…
$UMB is what drives it all.
Currently, we are still transitioning over to Delegated Proof of Stake for our consensus mechanism. Once we are done transitioning later this year, the paying, and sharing, of fees for data access will also be done using our token.
Our current circulating supply is about 134MM. The maximum supply is 500MM, though that’s just the theoretical cap which we will not end up utilizing in its entirety.
The majority of our tokens, 60%, are allocated to the community, who will ultimately be responsible for selecting validators, participating in governance, staking, and performing consensus, among others.
As we are a community-governed project, there could be more token burns or other deflationary measures that are implemented in the future, should the community vote to do so.
You can find more info here: https://umb.network/
Q3. I want you to highlight the main features in the Umbrella Network. Will the main features of your project stand out from your competitors?
There are so many!! 📣
Umbrella Network’s main value proposition is our ability to deliver data, at scale and securely onto the blockchain at incredibly low costs.
The main difference, and advantage, of Umbrella Network, compared to other oracles is in our architecture, which has the ability to aggregate data via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle trees.
This allows us to aggregate thousands of data points, and potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of data, 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.
We are decentralized, and 85% of other oracles out there have data sitting on private nodes\servers. SCARY!!
You get access to over 4000+ data pairs.
That’s 10X more data than the leading oracle provider.
Our roadmap puts us on track to exponentially expand to over 20,000 data pairs by Q4 2022.
We source our data from the most reliable providers on the market. Sources you can trust like premier data aggregators, top-tier global exchanges, exclusive data partnerships, enterprise-level collaborations, verified open-source projects, and even peer-reviewed academic sources.
I believe there are more killer features other than this. I’m not familiar with nodes things, and I just knew that 85% of other oracles out there are stored on private nodes servers.
It's so scary actually…how much money is flowing through centralized servers even in DeFi!
Q4. I want to know about Merkle Tree on your platform. Can you tell us more about that? What are the advantages of using Merkle Tree?
Sure thing.
I love Merkle Trees! Ha!
As mentioned previously, one of the main value propositions of Umbrella is our ability to deliver data at scale and securely onto the blockchain at low costs due to our Merkle Trees.
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. Overall, it’s the combination of operating as a layer 2 solution, being able to utilize Merkle trees to aggregate that data, which allows us to have such significant advantages when it comes to costs and scalability and that advantage isn’t just on the data offerings side, it’s also on the operations side when it comes to our validators.
As a simple comparison, right now it costs maybe 2500 USD a month to run an Umbrella validator node, whereas we have heard that to run a chain-link node can cost 20+ times more.
This chart shows how awesome they are Here is some detailed technical documentation:
https://umbrella-network.readme.io/docs/umbrella-network-architecture
Q5. How long has your project been built? Can you tell us what your project has achieved so far? And what are the goals of the Umbrella Network in the future?
We launched Umbrella at the end of 2020, and spent most of 2021 building out the product and features, rolling it out onto 4 mainnets — Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, Polygon. For 2022, we are heavily focusing on market/product adoption.
Part of this means going out and securing meaningful partnerships with projects, and delivering valuable solutions for our partners, where there will be the usage of our oracles and solutions, custom data feeds may be created, and we are bringing value to the partnership.
Our broader goal is to drive the cost of data to as close to zero as possible. When data is almost free and easily accessible, there is an opportunity for true innovation.
When applications can’t get the data they need, it will stifle development. How can you build an Uber on the blockchain if you can’t get up-to-date geolocation information on-chain, or be able to handle 5 million concurrent users at once given the massive amount of data processing?
These things are still a challenge for the industry today, but it will change as overall throughput improves, and more volumes and
PART TWO: LIVE QUESTIONS FROM THE COMMUNITY
Q1.PARTNERS are the most important that strengthen the ecosystems of all projects. Could you tell us about your project partners and the partnership strategy it has adopted? @Joel_UMB
The amazing thing with being an oracle is EVERYONE needs data!
So everyone can take advantage of our data and true partnership in DeFi, GameFi, TradFi etc.
We actually just planted 7500 trees for Earth day. We purchased 100X trees for every one of our new partners this year.
More Info:
Veritree 10M tree campaign: https://lnkd.in/e67xXnt5
Twitter: https://twitter.com/umbnetwork/status/1517518330520915969?s=21&t=dCLmC9IbGvfL5lGbfA1jMQ
Q2. What are the ways for your project to generate revenue in the long run? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships,?
@Joel_UMB
We want to focus on bringing online as much data as we can. Data like Sports, E-sports, Weather, Location, etc. It's exciting actually. As it will be the first time much of this data is available to developers.
Q3. You announced your first Cohort of community validators last month August. Can you shed more light on this, how were you able to properly manage the selection process? @Joel_UMB
Sure thing. Our goal is to have over 100 community validators protecting and running our network.
For now, we are helping onboard them with support. But in the near future, you will be able to sign up yourself!
Q4. How can someone request or propose a new pair or information/data be traced by the Umbrella Network? How to add a new integration to the feed? @Joel_UMB
Great question! I love when people come to us looking for new data sets or price pairs.
Bringing custom data on-chain is very easy for us. We only need an API or WebSocket to make it happen!
Q5. Umbrella was created using the 2 layer technology of Ethereum, so it’s only capable to work with Ethereum based projects? Or also is able to work with other blockchains? @Joel_UMB
We are working on solutions to help both EVMs and Subnets\Subchains with interoperability.
It's a huge issue in our industry.
PART THREE: LEARN AND EARN. QUIZ:
Q1. What is Umbrella Network’s total supply?
Andrew: @Shaa93 .500M
Q2. What are Umbrella Network’s 2.0 staking streams?
Cengizhan Tekin : @cengizhantekin hadley, polar, astro
Q3. Which company is Umbrella Network collaborating with to unlock GameFi?
Prangally : @prangally metalcore
Q4. Which date did Umbrella Network launch Passport Beta on Mainnet?
TommY : @TommY_C2 Mar 7, 2022
Q5. How many followers do Umbrella Network’s Twitter have?
jidan: @doithay1617 56.9k
Before we ended today’s AMA, do you have additional information related to Umbrella Network?
You can find more info on our community here: https://umb.network/community/
Thanks, everyone!
Bye guys! Thanks again
***AMA Concluded***
Join the discussion on Telegram at https://t.me/umbrellanet
About Umbrella Network
Umbrella Network is a scalable, decentralized, and community-owned oracle that utilizes Layer 2 technology to integrate real-time data into smart contracts for accurate and timely reports. Umbrella Network brings the world’s data to blockchains to enable DeFi applications to perform at the optimum level regarding precise information dissemination. It believes a decentralized oracle is paramount to creating a truly decentralized financial space.
Follow Umbrella Network on:
Telegram| Twitter | Announcements | Website | Governance
If you’re interested in becoming an Umbrella Network Partner, sign up here.
To add your token as FCD or L2D, click here.
