Umbrella Network, which joined Polkastarter’s thriving community in early January this year, has recently announced the launch of its public Testnet on BCS.
Introduction
Umbrella Network is a DeFi and blockchain oracle that is scalable, cost-effective, and community-owned. Its Layer 2 technology employs the most recent advances in Merkle tree technology to write multiple data points on a single on-chain transaction, allowing for accurate, secure, and low-cost batching of data to smart contracts. Umbrella believes that a community-owned oracle is not only feasible, but also necessary for establishing a truly decentralized financial system.
Umbrella Network can be used in one of two ways.
1.) First-Class Data (FCD), which is always available on-chain. These are some of the most frequently used data sets, including top crypto pairs, top crypto-fiat pairs, and some of our developers’ most popular data feeds, such as implied volatility for BTC and ETH.
2.) Layer 2 Data, which includes a comprehensive data set for top crypto and non-crypto pairs, indexes, implied and realized volatility, and much more.
Umbrella Network is expanding to BCS
Despite the fact that the development team refers to themselves as “Ethereum Maximalists” and has a strong belief in Ethereum, particularly ETH2.0, the time has come for Umbrella Network to evolve with the shifting ecosystem and move much of its computation and Proof of Stake consensus to a new chain that can help them achieve their two main business objectives: 1) to drive the cost of on-chain data as low as possible; and 2) to be fully decentralized, community owned & operated.
So, why did the Umbrella Network team select BSC over Ethereum? What does the future hold for Umbrella Network and the Binance Smart Chain community?
Firstly, it is much faster and, more importantly, significantly less expensive. Ethereum has become a victim of its own success, and it is now one of the most widely held “investments” in cryptocurrency. As a result, its price reflects the increased popularity of both Ethereum and cryptocurrency in general. Furthermore, there is actual usage on Ethereum that is causing network congestion, which has sustained and persistently raised the price of gas (Gwei), implying that transactions on Ethereum are expensive, slow, and frequently fail to execute successfully.
It makes it more difficult for Umbrella Network to achieve its first objective because of the high costs of the Ethereum network: to be the cheapest data provider. High costs for transactions mean greater costs for data. It also makes it surprisingly difficult, if not impossible, for it to achieve the second objective: being a community-owned and operated oracle.
The Umbrella Network is intended to be a community-owned oracle running on a DPoS system. Validators/nodes should be included within the community and should include individuals and small operators and large, well-funded professionals who reflect the community as a whole. Every consensus round leads to an Ethereum transaction that can cost up to $35, even if they are the lowest price oracle, and if Gwei spikes, they can cost a lot more. Because consensus is repeated every 1-3 minutes, the cost to a validator for non-professional validators can be prohibitively costly. If $35 are assumed every 3 minutes to cost per consensus, it will cost over $16,000 a day. That is why they currently run on Ethereum, with only 3 professional validators. Although they were fantastic partners with whom they love to work, it does not reflect the community in real terms. Moving to BSC will allow you to change this dynamic immediately.
The costs of operating a BSC validator are 99% cheaper than what Ethereum costs. They can put the control and ownership of Umbrella Network in the hands of the community at 1 percent of Ethereum’s cost and increase the number of validators in its network.
The main aim of a completely decentralized project belonging to the community was always to launch the Umbrella Network last year. And now, they can start moving ahead of schedule towards that goal, and their validators can reflect the wider community.
The BSC Testnet of Umbrella Network is now operational
Their move to the public testnet is just one step closer to their ultimate goal. They have made tremendous progress in the last few weeks working on the platform, optimizing the code base, improving features and functionality, developing a new BSC Block explorer, and finalizing documentation to be ready for launch.
In the last few weeks, they have also secured partnerships with nine BSC projects, including Smoothy Finance, Blockbank, OpenDefi, 8Pay, and others, bringing the total number of partners in their ecosystem to over 40.
Furthermore, they now provide over 1,200 data pairs for use, including major crypto key pairs, mid and low cap, equities, commodities, indexes, options pricing data, and the entire S&P 500. And they will continue to add data in the coming weeks as we approach the mainnet launch.
With Umbrella Network on BSC, they will be able to take advantage of the significantly lower operating costs, which are currently about 1% of those of Ethereum, and pass those savings on to their end-users in the form of even cheaper data.
Additionally, validators will be able to run nodes with significantly less overhead. This enables them to provide their community with the opportunity to run validator nodes. Applications to join as an Umbrella community validator is now open. Interested parties can apply here.
They will now be able to begin their journey to becoming a fully decentralized and truly community-owned oracle ahead of schedule. Umbrella Network expects to launch on BSC mainnet this month in June. Stay tuned for further announcements!
Source : bscdaily
