Umbrella Network AMA Recap

BSCDaily.com hosts Umbrella Network: the first truly decentralized oracle service providing low cost, massively scalable, and secure solutions for smart contracts.


BSCdaily – Admin: Hello and welcome to BSC Daily, @kimsamjoo @chen225

John Chen: Hey everyone! glad to be here!

Sam Kim: Good morning from Los Angeles. Excited to be here

BSCdaily – Admin: It’s our pleasure to have both of you here. Ready to start our AMA guys?

John Chen: ready!

Q1: Could you briefly introduce about yourself as well as Umbrella Network?

Sam Kim: Thanks for having us on your channel today. We’re really excited to engage with your community of BSC enthusiasts like us.

My name is Sam Kim, and I am the founding partner of Umbrella Network. I’ve been in the technology startup space for nearly all of my career, and the last 10 years prior to Umbrella Network was in the digital advertising space.

I co-founded Lucidity, a digital advertising platform on the blockchain, most recently. And prior to that, I co-founded Gimbal, a mobile/location based advertising technology provider who spearheaded beacon-based technology.

Umbrella Network is a community-based oracle using a proprietary sidechain / L2 to manage the scale and costs of running on chain data. We are the lowest cost provider of on chain data and provide the largest dataset in the industry.

We are migrating to BSC where the costs of running our oracle are 99% lower which allows us to put the operations of our network in the hands of the community. I’m sure we’ll get more into this in a bit.

For now, I’ll let John introduce himself.

John Chen: Thanks. Hey everyone and thanks for having us on today.

My name is John Chen and I’m currently the Head of Marketing for Umbrella. I have a bit of a mixed background having started and run several businesses over the years in marketing, distribution, and digital media. I’m currently also the founder of a regional digital marketing and media agency in Asia, with HQ in Singapore, where I am currently based. I grew up, however, in the  NJ/NY area in the US. There I went to columbia university where I met Sam many years ago.

I joined Umbrella because of Sam, and because I truly believe decentralized blockchain applications and the data oracles that support them, are the future. And one of the most pressing needs of this fast-growing industry is the need for secure, accurate, and low-cost data.  And I believe Umbrella, with its unique solution is well positioned to solve those needs.

BSCdaily – Admin: That’s incredible; I heard about Umbrella Network before but don’t know much about the stories of the team behind it. It’s wonderful to progress from college friends to partners of the same project

John Chen: Yeah it’s been a blast so far.

Q2: Can you discuss a bit about what makes Umbrella Network unique and different?

John Chen: Other oracles process a single piece of data in a single blockchain transaction.  This is how Chainlink, Band, and most other oracles process the data. We do things a bit differently.

We use Merkle trees to aggregate thousands of points of data into a single transacrion.  This brings about a few major benefits.

First, this allows us to have the lowest cost of data available on the market today for on-chain data. And not just slightly lower, but by several orders of magnitude lower. We were already significantly lower when operating on Ethereum. And now, having expanded over to BSC, we are now operating at 1/100 of those costs again. One of our main goals as a project is to try to drive the cost of data to as close to zero as possible.  So this is allowing us to move towards that objective.

Second,  this also gives us an advantage in having the most data available in the market. Other oracles have maybe 100 to a few 100 data pairs. We are currently in testnet, and already have over 1,000 data pairs available, from almost all cryptocurrency pairs like BTC/USD to mid to small caps, to equities, commodities, options & derivatives, and much more. And we will be continuing to ramp up our data offering to a lot more as we progress.

Q3: Can you share with us what is the $UMB token use case? What is the benefit to holding $UMB token for the long term?

Sam Kim: UMB token is really what fuels Umbrella Network. Most people assume that it’s used for payments. But in fact, that’s not what UMB is for. We believe payment tokens should be stable like USDT.

$UMB is one part governance token and one part a yield generating token. We run a Delegated Proof of Stake system where token holders elect the delegates. These delegates will serve on the governance board and be responsible for making major decisions regarding Umbrella Network.

At the same time, $UMB token holders can stake their tokens with validators on our network. Validators can use the tokens at stake in the proof of stake consensus mechanism used in our network. And as a result, they’ll share in both the rewards from consensus as well as a portion of user fees. These will all be on a pro rata basis.

So once again, $UMB will allow holders to participate in governance while also sharing in the Proof of Stake rewards + Share of User Fees.

BSCdaily – Admin: It’s motivating to see how many benefits people can gain from owning UMB tokens

Q4: You launched on Ethereum public testnet in March, and are already gearing for mainnet this summer.  Why migrate over to BSC now?

John Chen: We always had plans since the early days of the project to integrate into BSC.  However, we decided to prioritize that recently given the challenges we were starting to face on Ethereum.  ETH was becoming a victim of its own success.  The network was constantly congested, transaction were slow and sometimes failed to even successfully execute.  And of course those gas fees! Astronomical. Nobody wants to pay $50 for a transaction.

Two of our main goals at Umbrella are 1) to drive the costs of data down to as close to zero as possible, like we mentioned before, and 2) to become a truly decentralize and community owned oracle. Migrating over to BSC will allow us to get closer to achieving those goals.

So goal one I mentioned a bit already before, how with  BSC’s operating  costs and transaction fees being about 1% of ETH, we will be even more cost efficient. and  with our  second goal, this is  also cost  related.  This is because on ETH, we were only really able to work with bigger, well-capitalized validators like Huobi, HashQuark, InfStones.

Ok by the way, gas on ETH as I’m typing this, is over $300, not $50.

In any case, shifting to BSC allows us to open up to the community the ability to be a validator in our ecosystem, as the costs to run a node will be about 1% of the costs on Ethereum, and allowing us to realize our goal of being a decentralized project.

Sam Kim: Just to add a little on that

I was looking at the gas and yes, it’s over 300 gwei right now.

BSCdaily – Admin: Yeah, the absurdly high gas account for 90% of the reasons why users are migrating to BSC

Sam Kim: Yes, realize I’m preaching to the choir.

But that’s why we’re so excited. I’m particularly excited about putting the validator operations into the hands of the community. And BSC really allows us to achieve this goal.

Q5: What is your long term vision and goals for Umbrella Network? How do you see yourselves fitting into the overall ecosystem?

Sam Kim: Our long term goal is to be fully decentralized and to provide the most robust data set in the industry at the lowest cost. This allows us to maximize security and to be the highest volume provider of data to dApps.

And BSC is very much at the center of our strategy.

BSC will be the hub in our multi-chain strategy so that we can support project whether they operate on ETH, Solana or DOT. We’re looking forward to working with projects across all of the various ecosystems.

John Chen: Just to add to Sam, we will ultimately be a  cross-chain interoperable project.  We just want to be where the developers are, where the applications reside and are being used, where there is a need for data.

Q6: How can we obtain or where can we buy $UMB token?

John Chen: We are currently listed on several of the major decentralized exchanges including PancakeSwap, UniSwap, SushiSwap. You can also get $UMB on a couple centralized exchanges as well such as AscendEx (formerly BitMax) as well as gate.io

Right now we are also offering two staking programs, called Umbrella Streams, as well as a few rewards programs for SushiSwap and PancakeSwap.  You can go to staking.umb.network/ to learn more.

APY is quite good right now so please check it out for more details.

Q7: Where can we find out more about Umbrella Network?

John Chen: We’ve got a lot of great resources.  Please visit our website and check out our telegram group, and follow our twitter.  We’ve got a great and welcoming community. Here are some links:

Website: www.umb.network/

Telegram: t.me/umbrellanet

Twitter: twitter.com/umbnetwork

Medium: medium.com/umbrella-network

We also just set up our reddit channel, and a few other socials, you can visit our website which will have links up shortly to our other channels.


BSCdaily – Admin: Time for wrapping up, any last words you would like to say to our community? @kimsamjoo @chen225

Sam Kim: Hey guys. Thanks for your time. And it was great being here with you. Look forward to seeing you guys in our community channels and engaging on Twitter

John Chen: Thanks everyone for your time! It’s been fun. We are excited to engage with more members of BSC communities. Hopefully we see some of you in our chat groups! Thanks everyone!

BSCdaily – Admin: It was a pleasure having you guys @kimsamjoo @chen225

Thank you so much for spending time with our community & all the very best for Umbrella Network

Source : bscdaily

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