Umbrella AMA SUMMARY
Umbrella is a decentralized oracle service, providing low cost, massively scalable, and secure solutions for smart contracts. Can you tell us more about it, and explain to our community what problems the project aims to solve?
John Chen
Umbrella Network is a decentralized layer-2 data oracle service. 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. Oracles are the critical component that provides that data, so it is absolutely essential. But currently, it is expensive to get data at scale on-chain. And as a result, there is a limited amount of data, oftentimes updated infrequently or only if there is a large enough swing in the data.
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.
Piotr
Increasing the speed of data transfer and reducing transaction costs is undoubtedly a very interesting idea to implement in today’s Oracle reality. Good work Umbrella!
John Chen
Yes, we think so also. our broader objective is to try and get the cost of data as low as possible so that applications can really innovate and deliver better solutions.
Can you say something about you and your teammates? Our community need to know how experienced is the core of the project.John Chen
John Chen
Definitely, we’ve come a long way since the beginning of the project just a little over a year ago, when it was just a core team of maybe 7 or 8 engineers, to now where we are approachinng 40 members to the team and counting. We’re still engineering heavy, with more than 20 to the team that would be considered core development. The core product team, including our founder Sam Kim, has been working together on blockchain projects for many years, even before Umbrella, so we have a long and extensive working history. Sam, Miguel our acting CTO, and the senior blockchain team has been working together across several blockchain and software development projects since many years back, and many come from with deep blockchain expertise from other projects like blockchain.com, adchain, lucidity and a few others.
Piotr
Leading a project through the world operating as Oracle you need to have a good, experienced and close-knit team, this speaks well of you. Recently there has been a lot of talk behind the scenes about Layer2 possibly playing an important role in the future of blockchain as a whole, so I think you guys still have a bright future ahead of you.
John Chen
Thanks! Yes we are excited for the road ahead. we’ve got a lot of developments in the works in 2022, excited to share that with the community
What’s your idea to reward your community, what are the benefits for people who will support you? Also, say something interesting for users about $UMB use-cases. Everybody loves benefits and money, so this is for sure important to know how passive earning works in Umbrella.
John Chen
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 paying the fees for data access, $UMB is what drives it all. And our tokenomics structure is very community oriented too. The majority of our tokens, 60%, are allocated to the community, who will ultimately be responsible for selecting validators, participating in governance, staking, performing consensus, among others.
And currently, to reward long-term ‘hodling’, we have very attractive staking/rewards programs in place. Last time I checked, APYs ranged from around 50% on our Hadley Stream to up to over 250% for our Polar Stream staking. And these staking programs will be around for at least the next 3–4 years, with new ones planned as we continue to expand. For more information on our programs, you can visit https://staking.umb.network.
And in terms of use cases, its incredibly broad. Like I mentioned before, almost all applications will need data to be useful. As a simple analogy, imagine the application ecosystem on your mobile phone. how many of them would be useful it you put your phone on airplane mode? That is effectively what would happen with dapps if they lost access to data. So whether thats financial data to power DeFi, weather data to help with insurance, sports data for betting apps, ecommerce data, personal healthcase data, gaming session data for the emerging gamefi industry, the applications are literally endless.
Piotr
The interest rate you quoted is quite attractive, I’ll have to check it out! As for devolving power over the fate of the project to your community, aren’t you a little concerned that the community might make choices in some situations that are not necessarily right in relation to the operation of the project, perhaps due to lack of knowledge?
John Chen
We have a governance process in place, where proposals are first put forth for discussion on our community forum. then those that are adequately discussed and pass certain criteria are put onto our voting platform where token holders of our project can vote on the proposal. Once that’s completed, they go to our community council for ratification and then it will be executed by our core team. so while there is still some risk of it, we believe we have a fairly robust process that safeguards against it.
Piotr
This is a very clever solution, thanks for sharing it with us!
Could you describe Umbrella’s biggest achievements? How can developers use your technology in their solutions? Please expand for us the role of Layer 2 in your overall ecosystem.
John Chen
We’re still a fairly young project, but I think we’ve achieved quite a bit in the year or so we’ve been in operation. We are already live on 4 mainnets (Eth, BSC, polygon and avalanche), and are continuing to add support for additional chains, including solana, cardano, arbitrum and others later this year. And we have already about 2,000 data feeds available for developers to use and access. We should be doubling that amount in just the next few days to over 4–5,000 data feeds. As a comparison, other oracles today offer maybe a few hundred data pairs at most. We offer a wide variety of data, from crypto price pairs to stocks & commodities, advanced options data, a random number generator for gaming, and we ‘ve got a ton of other cool data solutions in the works for this year. And as a layer 2 solution, we’re also able to build out very custom, complex solutions for our partners. We’re currently talking to gaming, energy, insurance, travel, and many other verticals about how we can build custom, scalable, and oftentimes sophisticated data feeds. A lot of stuff that other oracles today simply aren’t equipped to handle.
if anyone is interested to access our data feeds, or needs a custom one built, a lot of which we are currently doing for free, they can fill out this form: https://share-eu1.hsforms.com/1T8lL5J2GQ6WPzEdayZWhzgf1g4f
Piotr
With the technology you are trying to bring to market, you have a great opportunity to be recognised among other projects such as the iconic Chainlink, I wish you this and I know it is possible because as you mentioned, you are doing something that others have not yet done!
John Chen
Thanks for the support! we are excited to be working with and supporting the needs of Synapse Network.
Could you explain why the Umbrella network architecture is better than other Oracle projects that offer similar solutions?
John Chen
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. 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 more secure.
Overall, its 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, its also on the operations side when it comes to our validators. We are able to have a community run validator network because its also incredibly inexpensive to participate in consensus and verify data, unlike some of the other major oracles, which aren’t as decentralized because it is incredibly costly to run a validator node, so most of them have to be corporate or professional 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 chainlink node can cost 20+ times more
Piotr
You must have put a lot of work into all this, I admire and appreciate it at the same time.
John Chen
Yeah the underlying engine for our platform has been under development for over 4 years.
Tell us please, do you already have a marketing plan for the future, what are you going to do, to make the project more popular?
John Chen
We’ve got a fairly comprehensive marketing plan that spans across community development, PR & media, social, content, partnerships, a growing ambassador program, among others. But that marketing must also be coupled with a solid execution plan. Without solid news of product adoption, market traction, and new products & features being rolled out, the marketing would not be effective. So for us, it’s important to focus on both successful execution of an aggressive roadmap and deliver that to our community, and amplify that with an effective marketing strategy.
For 2022, we are going to be very focused on product and market adoption, and securing more meaningful partnerships with great projects such as yourselves.
Your project gives the impression of being highly technological, what would you tell new crypto users, to convince them that your project is worth investing in their money?
John Chen
We believe that overall there is a massive market opportunity for oracles. Almost all applications will need data, and that means they will need to use oracles to get it. But as the market matures, the volumes of data needed will grow, and so will the complexity. What will really be needed is a data provider that can bring data on chain that is incredibly low cost, and at massive scale. And at the same time, data that can be used across multiple chains, as we don’t think it will just be one dominant chain in the future. There will be applications and blockchains for specific industries or use cases that will start to evolve. We are well positioned to capitalize exactly for this scenario. There are few if any other oracles in the market that can handle the scale of volume that we can process, and definitely not at the low cost advantage that we have. And as we are still a relatively new project, there is tremendous room for growth in the coming years as both Umbrella and the broader blockchain ecosystems continue to mature.
Winners questions
Andrey
Can you share to us your tokenomics? How much is the total and circulation supply of your tokens? Will there be buy back system or token burning in the future?
John Chen
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, 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.
Justine
What are the steps to become a part of your community, and start getting revenues? Where do we buy, where do we sign up? This looks like an amazing project!
John Chen
Thanks for your enthusiasm! Our token is currently listed on Kucoin, gate.io, poloniex, ascendex for CEX, and also on Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Sushi for DEX. Easy to join our community, we have our telegram group, twitter, and other socials you can join/follow. We also have an Umbassador program you can join if you want to be even more involved, as well as a community validator program you can apply to if you want to be a validator and earn fees / rewards as a participant to help us verify data. Here are some of those links:
Telegram Community — https://t.me/umbrellanet
Telegram Announcements — https://t.me/umbnetannouncement
Twitter — https://twitter.com/umbnetwork
Medium — https://medium.com/umbrella-network
Youtube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4g6K_50Ihbua2UCOiHgCFg/featured
Discord — https://discord.gg/G9x4TsHSd7
Umbassador Program — https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdk4QpD8APHBhOpUikqM3rQsdJlLDMfU3tv-Kwq_IRCfeRkXg/viewform
Validator Program — https://forms.gle/Z9qMJjJzAfEWMFvk6
Comixhero
Why did you choose ERC-20 to support $Umbrella Network actually this Network has so high gas fee for transactions, doesn’t it a limitation for Umbrella Network? Are there plans to develop your own network? Thank you!
John Chen
We actually operate on a layer 2 sidechain, and currently have our computational base on BSC. However, we can theoretically move that to any chain, it’s one of the many advantages of being a layer 2. Our $UMB token is an ERC20 token, because, like many projects, its where 90% of the major projects are, and where the transaction volume, application ecosystem are. Maybe in the future that may change, but right now its the dominant change. We will see how things are with respect to gas fees when Eth2.0, or “Consensus Layer” hopefully launches later this year. Hopefully some of the issues around gas fees are mitigated slightly.
About Synapse Network
Synapse Network is developing a cross-chain investment and start-up acceleration ecosystem based on blockchain technology to give everybody an equal chance to contribute to great upcoming projects and to do so early on. We are bridging the gap between the traditional & crypto market. The idea of the Synapse Network technology goes beyond the standard offer of launchpads available on the market, becoming a true technological brand providing tech solutions.
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