Umbrella Network AMA w/SpykeFast: Recap
Umbrella Network’s President and Head of Marketing, John Chen, was recently invited for an AMA by SpykeFast to answer questions from the community.
AMA at: SpykeFast Telegram Channel
On: Friday, 22nd October, 2021 | 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: SPYKEFAST TEAM QUESTIONS:
Q1. Kindly give brief introduction about yourself, Crypto experience and your role at #Umbrella Network Project?
Sure. My name is John Chen and I’ve been an investor in the crypto space since 2017. I have mostly a finance and entrepreneurial background, having built businesses in consumer goods, digital media and marketing.
I joined Umbrella Network back at the end of last year, a little after the project was originally launched. Initially it was to help my good friend Sam, the founder with some various aspects of marketing during the early days, but it’s grown now to encompass pretty much anything outside of actual product development.
I’m currently the President and Head of Marketing at Umbrella and currently focused on overseeing all aspects of the project, ensuring we are delivering against our roadmap, as well as managing the growth of our ecosystem and community.
Q2. Let’s talk in detail about #Umbrella Network project. What are the main features of the project?
So Umbrella Network is a layer 2, decentralized, community owned data oracle. We bring off chain data unchain, so smart contracts and apps can access it.
We have a few major features that differentiate us from other oracles on the market. Our main advantage is our ability to aggregate data via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle trees, which allows us to bring thousands of data points, even hundreds of thousands of data points, to the blockchain in a single transaction, whereas other oracles can only bring one data point per transaction.
So in other words, if a Dapp wants all the stock prices of the S&P 500, most oracles would have to bring each price point onchain one at a time. We are able to take all of it, aggregate it together and bring it onchain at once. This obviously has major implications in terms of speed, costs, scalability, among others.
So because of this, we can offer data at a lower cost than anyone else, are able to provide more data pairs than other oracles, and can also do a host of other things, like build out complex custom data feeds, or process data or transactions off chain.
Right now we offer over 1800 data pairs to applications on ethereum and BSC, where we are already live on mainnet. From crypto price pairs to stock prices, commodities, advanced options data, and a whole slew of others. Compared to most other oracles today, which offer anywhere from 200–300 data pairs.
We are ramping that up rapidly, looking to have about 10,000+ data pairs available by the end of this year.
This clearly speaks about Umbrella Network strength, when put in against other oracles.
Yeah it’s relatively easy and virtually free for us to onboard new data, build out new pricing pairs, which isn’t the case for most oracles. It’s why they don’t offer as much data.
Q3. What are the major utilities of holding the #Umbrella Network Native token? How does team plan to enhance it value so as to attract users onboard?
The $UMB token is our native utility token that really sits at the center of the Umbrella Network ecosystem. Currently we offer some attractive staking programs for our token holders, with APY ranging from 75% up to 350%, last I checked.
By Q1 of next year, we will be transitioning to delegated proof of stake consensus with our validator network, so token holders will then be able to stake their tokens with their validator of choice, and receive a share of the data usage fees from applications utilizing our oracles.
Overall, our tokenomics is very community oriented, with 60% of our token allocation earmarked for our community of token holders, validators, partners, etc. and with half of that set into our rewards program, which runs for four years. It’s what allows us to offer such attractive APYs for long term holding.
In terms of enhancing value, we are just focused on continuing to build and grow our ecosystem, releasing solutions that add value to our partners, continuing to expand and broaden our overall project. We believe this is the best way to enhance value for the project, our community, and our token as we increase market adoption.
Staking $UMB is easy… ☔
Yes our staking distributes our rewards token the rUMB, which redeems 1:1 for umb in the future. It’s another strategy we have in place that helps to promote long term holding.
Q4. How has the development been so far with #Umbrella Network Platform? Are things proceeding ahead right on track?
There is a recent update as well regarding this, which I thought would ask.
☂️☂️🔥 🗣 Sam Kim explains why we acquired Lucidity 😍
“As $UMB incorporates Lucidity, the UMB community will gain exposure to the benefits of Lucidity’s work with leading brands such as Hyundai, KFC, Dentsu, Xandr and more.” 🔥
☂️Read the full post here👉 https://medium.com/umbrella-network/launching-the-enterprise-blockchain-business-why-the-umbrella-network-acquired-lucidity-47f4db6e5eff
Regarding acquisition of Lucidity…definitely gives more exposure to Umbrella Network ☔💯
So we are still a fairly young project, having just IDO’d in Feb of this year, but overall, I think we have put together an ambitious roadmap and for the most part, have been able to meet most of our milestones and deadlines. So far we have already managed to go live on BSC mainnet in May, went live on Ethereum mainnet at the end of September, launched our community validator program in the summer.
We also just released our advanced arbitrage free options pricing models earlier this week, which is bringing the most advanced, wall street level options pricing data to the defi market. And will be launching on Polygon next week.
And we are also releasing our verifiable random number generator by the end of this month, which is going to be a very useful solution for the growing blockchain gaming sector.
Yeah.. The main focus is to keep BUIDLing
And yes, we also managed to make an acquisition of Lucidity back at the end of Aug, which is another major achievement for us.
We’ve still got a very aggressive roadmap ahead of us and we are planning to be live on 8 to 10 blockchains by mid 2022
Found this.. ☔
Things looking right on track. 💯
We are looking to be multi-chain interoperable so that we can provide data across the broader blockchain multiverse, wherever there are apps with data needs, and also be able to support cross chain functionality and messaging.
Look for an update from us next week as we will be revising our roadmap and adding some more milestones to an already packed Q4 and 2022
Q5. How is Umbrella Network project different from other competitors?
Yes, so like i mentioned a bit before, our unique merkle tree architecture allows us to aggregate all of our data before writing it onchain. This brings about several major benefits.
1) We can bring much more data at scale and at a significantly lower cost.
2) We can provide much more frequently updated data. Most oracles today, because of the high costs, sometimes only update their price feeds once a day, or when a certain % change occurs. We don’t need to do that and can update every few minutes, or even more frequently should there be a need for it.
3) We are able to provide a much larger assortment of data, not just major crypto pairs, but mid and low cap crypto, almost any sort of financial data whether that’s equities, commodities, derivatives, synthetics, to healthcare, sports stats, real estate, you name it.
Another area that makes us different is that we run on a layer 2 sidechain, so it allows us to natively be able to do more complex off chain computing before putting anything onchain.
This is something that we can also provide dapps and smart contracts, as it can be cost prohibitive to try to run everything on chain. We see this being a major area of value for blockchain gaming as it will be challenging for more sophisticated games to try to process everything onchain, especially if there are like 200,000 concurrent users.
And finally, being a layer 2 project also allows us to be able to be truly chain agnostic, and support a variety of different layer 1 protocols.
Also found this… A broad comparison between different oracles. The community here can check out.
Some great insights put in by you @chen225… 🙏
Theres also a more recent one we published on hackernoon.
PART TWO: LIVE SESSION:
Q1. There are several sites where cryptocurrency asset values are presented and these values are slightly different from site to site. How does Umbrella take this data? Does it come from more than one of these sites or from a specific one? What elements are taken into account to choose the final value of the assets?
We pull our pricing from multiple data sources, some of which are premium, professional data aggregators, others are cryptocurrency exchanges or aggregators of crypto exchange data.
Most of the aggregators themselves have already gone through and sanitized their data, removed outliers, etc. But once we have these data sets, we once again have our validators run consensus on these values to arrive at a final data point.
Outliers are removed, and a median price point is taken to ensure accuracy and reliability. So there are several layers of data checks and validations before a final value is derived that our users will be able to trust.
Q2. Hi mr. @chen225
UMB is already in 2 networks, namely ETH and BSC, will it be added to other networks in the future? Like Polygon and SOLONA which are popular these days
So in addition to BSC and ETH, we will be launching on Polygon by next week, and after that we have plans to integrate and support Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, Moonbeam, Plasm. We are also in the midst of assessing and adding a few more chains to support on our roadmap for the next few months. We will be announcing these additions next week so stay tuned.
Q3. As a community owned project where Stakers, Developers, Validators and the Foundation together govern how the network is operated. By working and govern together in Umbrella Network how does it gives result to your network?What will be the role of the community in your platform?
As a community owned project, this is a major focus for us. We aren’t there yet in terms of total decentralization and community governance, but this is an area we will be working on later this year and early part of next year as we transition to full DPoS.
We are currently working on structuring out a governance framework that will more heavily involve our community, which will ultimately vote for and elect a community run governance council, which will then decide on the future of Umbrella Network.
We currently already have a community council of community representatives that vote on key governance related issues. Our lucidity acquisition, for example, was voted on and approved by the community. And we recently had another vote on some key directions that Umbrella will be taking as it relates to GameFi and the growing blockchain gaming sector, which Umbrella is investing heavily in as another future area for growth. We will have some more details around these developments very soon, so stay tuned to our announcement channels.
Q4. I was answering a question regarding the potential processing speed of our oracles.
We currently refresh our data on BSC every 3 minutes for about 1,800 pairs of data simultaneously, but we can process much much faster and a LOT more data all at once.
There are virtually no theoretical limits to the amount of data a merkle tree can hold. So we could technically aggregate millions of data points all at once, and process it at real time speed. Lucidity, for example, which has a similar architecture, can process half a million transactions per second if needed, as the digital adtech industry requires that level of high throughput.
Q5. Currently most investors only care about profits at the but ignore the long-term benefits. So can you give them some reasons why they should buy and hold your token in the long term?
We think that the oracle market opportunity is going to be huge. Almost every blockchain application is going to need data from off chain, or potentially some type of off chain computing. As market segments like DeFi, Gamefi and new emerging areas continue to grow, oracles will undoubtedly grow alongside them. And right now, its still super early in the game.
If we are to compare this to the mobile era, we are now at 2G mobile data, where the data is still expensive and limited. But once the bandwidth increases and a lot more data becomes available and at a much cheaper rate, there will be an explosion of continued innovation in terms of the types of applications that can be built on the blockchain.
We believe that we are well poised to capitalize on this upcoming growth, as one of the few oracles that is well positioned to be able to provide data at incredible economies of scale, so as the industry continues to mature, we will be able to capitalize on this.
***AMA Concluded***
