Umbrella Table Talks — Recap

It’s been a month since the last Umbrella Table Talks. Many things happened so let’s find out the Umbrella latest updates and developments.

Roadmap Review

The talk started with reviewing the latest roadmap achievements and highlighting the release of the redemption portal and the new reward streams on March 14th.

“In the last three months, the Umbrella engineering team has been focusing on getting the redemption portal and new reward streams up and running.

After spending a significant amount of time fine-tuning the system, we managed to launch it on the 14th of this month. Though there were some minor glitches, the redemption process has been going smoothly. We’ve increased the redemption quota from 250,000 tokens last year to a million tokens a day this year, considering changes in token price, circulation supply, and other factors.

Initially, we expect a rush of people wanting to convert their rewards to tokens, similar to what we saw last year. However, we have set a cap to control the amount of UMB going into the market and favor smaller holders as the quota decreases. Our experience from last year’s redemption process has guided our strategy this year, and we anticipate more people will be able to redeem their rewards in the coming weeks as traffic starts to lie down,” John Chen, said.

On that front Philippe, BD and Partnerships Manager, noted that although the team had intended to release the redemption and reward portals simultaneously, they were unable to do so because the smart contract audit for the reward streams took a few days longer than expected.

After clarifying this aspect the team continued with its roadmap review and disclosed a change for the next milestones. The team, in fact, is considering moving up the custom request and RNG 2.0 to Q2.

“Regarding custom requests, we originally planned to focus on this in Q3, but after looking at all the upcoming milestones, we realized it’s actually a pivotal point for us. While improving API key management and data sources are certainly important, a custom request solution would be a significant evolution from our current Merkle tree based architecture.

Our Merkle tree architecture has many benefits, but one of its limitations is the inability to provide data on demand. Custom requests would address this need and allow us to provide data exactly when projects require it. This will be a significant addition to our solutions, particularly for projects on chains like Ethereum and Arbitrum. Additionally, the new custom request architecture will be crucial for RNG 2.0.

We plan to prioritize this and start working on it in April, with the goal of rolling out the solution soon after”, John explained.

AMA Section

Following this update, the team fielded questions from the community.

Most of the initial stakeholders are not (actively) working in/on the business anymore Miguel, Sam?.

There is a full team that’s working towards our broader mission of bringing as much scalable data on chain as possible. And that has never kind of changed from day one. We have a core team responsible for BD partnerships, product development, engineering and marketing. We also have a community council that is active after transitioning to becoming a DAO. Despite being senior advisors, Miguel, Sam, and I are still actively involved in the project.

Sam is part of our weekly high-level strategy discussions in terms of the direction of the project while Miguel is still our technical advisor and provides a lot of valuable insight in terms of architectural design.

He is one of the initial designers of the custom request solution and he is going to continue to be part of the rollout and development of the custom quest solution. So, they are still involved. Overall, we have a very active team that is committed to the project every day.

Will Umbrella Network receive an ARB airdrop and if yes, what is your action plan for those tokens? -

Umbrella Network does not have any agreements with Arbitrum with regards to the airdrop.

Guys please remove or drastically increase the daily rUMB2 redemption quota. I check several times per day for the quota to be renewed but every time I check, the remaining allowance is negligible (a few hundred max). Loyal stakers are suffering because of the quota!!!

We increased the redemption quota from 200,000 to a million. While larger investors may redeem a lot at the beginning, smaller investors can still redeem their tokens every day. We ask for your patience and assure you that everyone will get their tokens in the end. Additionally, we spoke with Ascendex, and all rUmb2 tokens on their platform will be automatically redeemed on the 28th of this month, so there’s nothing you need to do on your end.

I would also like to mention that based on last year’s redemption process, the quota was always tapped out for the first two weeks, but after two to three weeks, it became much easier to redeem. Please keep in mind that the quota resets every day at around 4–4:30 PM UTC time, so if you want to redeem as soon as possible, you can set an alarm for that time. This year, we did a 24-hour hard reset every day, which should make it easier for investors to redeem their tokens gradually.

Will staking redeeming be available on BSC next time?

We have phased out the rewards program, so there won’t be redemption anymore moving forward. There’s no plans to do redemption on BSC because the rewards program has been unsettled.

How many paying customers do you need in order to become profitable, and what role does crypto investor speculation play?

We have several different initiatives in place that we’re rolling out that have different revenue generating profiles. One is a potential kind of SaaS model when it comes to projects using our data. Another is more of a consultative approach where we are working with larger projects, or layer one blockchains to integrate our oracle into their ecosystem, like an IBM services type revenue model versus a SaaS-based data consumption revenue model. It’s hard to triangulate it and say, we need 250 customers because the revenue profile shifts. But what we can say is that since last year when the market and overall conditions were extremely challenging, we have trimmed and cut cost expenditures of the project by a significant amount where our operating costs on a month to month basis is significantly lower at this point.

Therefore it will be much easier now to break even than during the early first year and a half of the project.

We are heavily focused on adoption for many reasons. Long term, it’s also because we want to make sure that we have a clear path to revenue in order to break even, and then subsequently reach profitability.

As a startup in the crypto space, it’s important for us to prioritize longevity and consider the role of crypto investors’ speculation. Like other mid to small cap blockchain projects, our token will attract long-term investors who value the technology and community, as well as those who are more interested in speculative gains. We recognize that speculation is a part of the ecosystem and do not actively promote or discourage it. Our focus remains on delivering value to projects by bringing as much data on chain as possible and providing scalable and customizable oracle solutions. By advancing in these areas, we believe that value will naturally accrue, and the speculative aspect will be just one part of the overall equation.

Any news about extending the runway?

Previously we made an official announcement that our runway would last until September of this year. It’s hard to predict where the market’s going to head, whether that’s in the cryptocurrency markets or just in general the broader macroeconomic climate. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there. It’s always hard predict how things will move along, which is why we’re always very careful when it comes to making announcements around the runway.

But right now, if the market were to continue at its current pace, which so far has been better than last year, this first quarter at least our runway should not be a significant concern, at least for 2023. We should be able to operate and continue our broader focus well into 2024. Overall, we are in much better shape today than we were at the end of last year.

Any output from the conference in Barcelona?

I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which was a large tech event featuring various blockchain projects. During the event, I had conversations with two or three projects, including layer two NFT projects working on dynamic NFTs.

We discussed ways to integrate data into these dynamic NFTs. Additionally, I spoke with some DeFi projects that were tokenizing securities. Although the event was not solely focused on blockchain, it still provided some great opportunities to connect with other projects. In the coming year, we plan to increase our activity at conferences, share news with the community, and onboard more projects to drive adoption.

The recent USDC depeg in mind, is the DAO considering diversifying it’s treasury?

We internally reviewed the situation after USDC depegged. It was a stressful weekend. It started on Friday evening, and we spent the weekend looking at various alternatives. Fortunately, it regained its peg on Monday, and Circle announced on Saturday that they would honor one-for-one redemption. On Sunday, the Fed made further announcements that stabilized the market. Although things didn’t go south as they could have, it was still a wake-up call for us. Since then, we have discussed diversifying the treasury among the council and senior team. We were heavily focused on USDC, but now we plan to diversify into USDT, Ethereum, and our own UMB token as a value store. Our goal is to diversify into at least three assets, including two stables and ETH.

What sets you guys apart from Chainlink? Uh, what, like what do you guys do better than chainlink and maybe some areas you can improve to match what they’re doing?

We pride ourselves on two key aspects of our oracle technology that set us apart. First, as a layer two oracle, we have unique advantages in terms of data aggregation and scalability. Second, our Merkel tree architecture allows us to aggregate vast amounts of data and write it on chain as a single root hash, ensuring accuracy and verification of the data. This enables us to be more frequent in writing information on chain, with a single transaction cost, even when dealing with a large number of data points. Furthermore, our layer two approach allows us to process complex custom data off chain before writing it on chain, and easily add new data feeds onchain without requiring a new data structure.

Our roadmap includes the development of a custom solution that will significantly improve our current solution, enabling us to write any piece of data on demand to the chain, providing near real-time delivery of data that was not possible before. This will be a core focus for us in Q2 as we continue to develop and roll out this solution.

Do you think it is possible to bring your Oracle on Radix chain after the release of the Babylon Smart contracts?

We were considering deploying on Radix, however, our capabilities just makes it a complicated endeavor because it’s not an EVM chain. We would have to spend a lot of effort and time deploying there and we would not be able to work on the Oracle improvements that we’ve just mentioned and what we’ve done before. So, even so we were really interested and, and we still are, it’s not on our roadmap for now, but it is an ecosystem that we’re looking at.

Any new exchanges this year?

We’re open to listing but it’s not a priority right now. While listing on Binance for example would certainly increase our visibility in the long term, it’s hard to say in the short term. Our main focus right now is to build our product, focus on adoption and make sure we have as long of a runway as possible to fulfill all those objectives. Trying to get listed on an exchange requires resources, there’s listing fees, liquidity requirements, all these things that would hold us back on achieving our core objectives.

So, for the time being, we need to focus and build value on that front first.

This is not something that is going to be forever, but at least for the next few months, We need to prioritize certain things. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but for the sake of transparency we wanted to be clear in terms of what our current objectives are, and we wanna be focused right now.

See you at the next Table Talks 👋🏻.

About Umbrella Network

Umbrella Network is a scalable, decentralized, and community-owned data oracle that utilizes Layer 2 technology to integrate real-time data into smart contracts. Umbrella Network is able to aggregate data to bring onto the blockchain, enabling faster, more cost effective delivery of information at scale. It believes a decentralized oracle is paramount to creating a truly decentralized blockchain ecosystem space.

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