we hosted an amazing AMA with Umbrella Network on the 21th of September
And here we will put some of the best questions:
Q1. Can you please introduce yourself ?
Yes sure, my name is John Chen, and I’m the Head of Marketing for Umbrella Network. I joined Umbrella at the end of last year and currently focus on marketing, community, and pretty much anything outside of actual engineering. I have an entrepreneurial background, having started up several businesses across consumer goods, digital media, and marketing. Just prior to Umbrella, I was running a digital media and marketing agency in Asia. I’m originally from the New York area, but I moved out to Singapore about 6 years ago, which is where I live today.
Q2. Can you please introduce Umbrella Network ?
Umbrella Network is a decentralized layer-2 data oracle service. So like all oracles, we bring data, usually off chain data, onto the blockchain. We give dApp developers access to rich and comprehensive data at the lowest price point and highest scalability.
What makes us different than all the other oracles out there, including Chainlink, Band and others, is that we aggregate our data before bringing it on chain. Other oracles have to bring one piece of data at a time on chain. 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 then write to the chain. This gives us tremendous advantages in terms of the scale, speed, and cost of getting that data to users compared to other oracles.
Q3. What are the advantages of Your project ?
Like mentioned before, our main advantage is our ability to aggregate data, which we do via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle trees, thus allowing us to bring thousands of data points 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. And also give us the ability to offer more data than anyone else as well.
So whether its the price of both BTC/USD and ETH/USDT, or the entire S&P 500, all of it is rolled up and put on chain at once. This leads to massive cost savings, is much faster, and more secure. As a result, this gives developers access to a lot more information, much cheaper, and can allow them to offer more complex solutions to their clients – similar to tradFi systems – but decentralized and much more cost-effective.
And while most other oracles offer a few hundred data points at most, we currently offer over 1,200 data pairs, all for free right now. And we plan to have over 10,000 data pairs available by end of this year available for applications to use. And finally, it’s not just crypto price pairs or even financial data that we can bring on chain, if there is an API in the real world, chances are we can bring that data, so it could be real time weather, sports stats, insurance info, real estate pricing, personal health insurance, Ecommerce data, you name it, the types of data we can bring on chain are virtually unlimited.
Q4. please tell us about the goal you want to achieve in this year ?
We have several goals set for this year which include:
1) Getting product adoption. This means getting onto Ethereum mainnet, which is happening next week, and getting projects to use our data feeds. This means making major partnerships with projects, not just in DeFi or blockchain, but across various sectors, for significant data usage of our oracles
2) Becoming multi-chain interoperable. We believe the future will be across multiple chains, not just one chain. So we want to be where the applications are, regardless of chain, where there is the need to access data. So we want to be there and be that provider.
Our current roadmap has us integrated and supporting 8 chains by Q2 2022, including BSC, ETH, MATIC, SOL, ADA, AVAX and others.
3) Moving into the enterprise market, as we believe there is a massive market opportunity in that segment, which quite frankly dwarfs that of DeFi. Not that we are abandoning DeFi, far from it, as that will continue to be a core focus, but we believe there are multiple sectors that present massive market opportunities that we can work on. So while there has been considerable progress made in DeFi, and projects bridging Traditional projects and Decentralize apps, there has not been as much progress made in the traditional enterprise market, where the needs for big data processing are tremendous. And our oracle is well suited for high speed, high scale data processing.
Q5. Every project has a story behind their name, Can you tell us more about the story ?
good question. So we think that an oracle should do more than just move data from one source or multiple sources onto the blockchain. It must also serve as protection by ensuring and securing the data quality and making sure the data isn’t manipulated or corrupted. We do that with our network of community validators using a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus. That’s what the nodes represent that make up the umbrella frame in our logo. It’s the community of validators forming our network that protects and ensures data quality. So that’s how we got to Umbrella Network. It’s a network of data nodes, its also a network of protection for your data.
And here we will put best questions from our members and Umbrella Network fans:
Q1.One of your main objectives for 2021 is to obtain market adoption and real use case scenarios with applications, could you comment on what are the main real scenarios you are evaluating for the application and use of Umbrella?
To be honest, the potential is almost endless. Almost every application on the blockchain needs access to data. Any financial application will need access to financial data, and that needs an oracle. The majority of games will need a random number generator, and that is best provided by an oracle. Any application that needs real world data, whether that’s stock quotes, healthcare data, real estate prices, e-commerce data, supply chain information, that all needs an oracle. As more and more applications move to the blockchain, the needs for various data from oracles will continue to explode.
And quite frankly, the novel use cases for data, some of it we can only imagine today. An Uber can’t really exist yet on the blockchain today because of current limitations, but that will change soon. But all these scenarios are ones that Umbrella can support, because we are able to bring data on chain at massive scale, and at incredibly affordable costs. It’s something that other oracles today continue to struggle with.
Currently we are working on many applications, from providing Wall Stree level advanced arbitrage free options pricing models to help further the innovation in derivatives trading in DeFi, to a verifiable random number generator for the gaming sector, to enterprise level high throughput transaction processing of corporate client data, just to name a few. This is just the beginning.
Q2.Umbrella Network highlights and emphasizes on bringing BIG DATA to the world of Blockchain, what are actually the main features behind this Big data and how does it solve the data related issues on the blockchain world?
This is one of the current challenges in the blockchain ecosystem today. Right now, there doesn’t exist an oracle that can process at the volume, scale, and cost efficiencies that enterprises need for big data level capacity, at least not one that is not being developed by corporations on their own private blockchains. But we have built something that can handle the high TPS, high throughput necessary for big data processing, and also at the proper economies of scale so that we can provide to others at a low enough cost point that it can be implemented without prohibitive costs. This currently simply does not exist in the market today. So we look forward to being able to further our entry into the enterprise big data market, which has tremendous potential. Stay tuned for more developments on this front.
Q3.Chainlink is generally the most popular oracle network but the risks and centralization points of it are always talked about. Could you summarize some points where UMBRELLA has better specifications than Chainlink for example? Is Umbrella more decentralized?
Chainlin is the current market leader and dominant player in the ecosystem today. It had first mover advantage and majority market share today. But it is still early in the overall market development, and we believe there is room for several players, though I think they tend to differ in opinion here on that. There are those who maintain that Chainlink has a more centralized structure, effectively having a Proof of Authority consensus, as they have the final say on who can be a validator in their network. This is in some ways due to their architecture, which makes it rather costly to bring data on chain, as they, like the majority of oracles in the market today, bring data on chain one piece of information at a time.
As a result, it is incredibly expensive to run a validator node for chainlink. It’s why the majority of them are their corporate partners or professional validators.
For us, because we are so much more low cost to operate, both in terms of the cost of data that is eventually passed onto the developers who use our data feeds, as well as to our community of validators who operate our nodes. Operating a node on chainlink would cost tens of thousands of dollars a month, whereas for us, it is less than $2,000, and that cost continues to drop as our network grows. So we are able to allow almost any member of our community, with basic experience runing a cloud server, to be able to operate a node, and most importantly, afford to operate a node. this allows us to be more decentralized.
So in summary, the key points of differentiation is in our architecture, which allows us to aggragate data, which then leads to all the benefits we have including significantly lower cost of data, much higher scalability, and more decentralization than our peers.
Q4.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?
So at the center of our project is the $UMB token, with is a utility token that is used for staking, and will soon be used for governance for our project. And as a community-owned project, a full 60% of our token allocation is reserved for the community, which includes the broader community as well as validators. More than half of that 60% is reserved for our staking program, which runs for 4 years and is what stakers are getting when they stake in our Hadley and Polar Streams. You can find more info about our programs at staking.umb.network.
We have a few staking programs that currently reward anywhere from 80% on our Hadley Stream to over 400% on our Polar stream.
Our max supply is 500mm, with current circulating supply at around 88MM. We do plan on having various mechanisms for reducing supply including doing potential buybacks and token burns. We will most likely not come close to the theoretical max cap of 500mm. And as a community owned project, down the road part of that will be decided in conjunction with the community.
More details on our tokenomics can be found here -> https://medium.com/umbrella-network/an-update-on-umbrella-networks-umb-tokenomics-b81030bd699e
And in terms of our token currently, we IDO’d back in Feb of this year, and we are currently listed on Uniswap, Sushiswap, PancakeSwap for DEX’s, and available on Ascendex, gate.io and MEXC for CEX. And we have imminent plans for another listing, which we will be announcing, so please stay tuned on our announcement channels.
Q5.Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to your project Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your in non-crypto space?
We think its important to have both crypto investors as well as broader support in our community. We have several plans in place to do that. One is through broader outreach via press and exposure through non crypto based media. But that also means we need to have news and information that is also interesting for the broader public. One way we believe we can do that is through our work in several areas that have broader public interest, like NFTs and gaming, for example. Another is as we enter into the enterprise market. So as we enter into various industries, like gaming, NFTs, digital advertising & media, or the supply chain market, as examples, non-crypto investors, including more mainstream casual investors, will start to take note of this, and we believe build further awareness outside of just the crypto space. This is a long term strategy that we believe will garner broader support outside of just the crypto investors and enthusiasts, as we continue to expand our capabilities and help to broaden our oracle utility across multiple market segments.
Q6.Would you explain what’s the economic model of Umbrella Network? You have over 1,200 data pairs available for purchase on your platform, but do you take any fees per purchase? Are there any other ways of investing on your platform aside from buying data?
Currently we are offering all of our data feeds for free. We offer 1,200 data feeds, more than any other oracle in the market today. But we will have over 10,000 data available before the end of this year. It is very easy and cost effective for us to add new data feeds due to our architecture. By next year we will start to charge for our data, but it will be on a SaaS based model, where we would charge users based on the volume of data that they consume, so depending on the tier of data usage, they would be charged a monthly fee. Similar to how you would subscribe to your mobile data plan, you pay whatever monthly fee based on the data plan that you have. This is different from any oracles today, that usually charges by data pair, which is significantly more expensive. In terms of other ways of being involved on our platform aside from buying data, you can become a token holder and stake your tokens to earn fees from the validators doing the consensus, so all token holders would essentially profit share from the network. That wont go into effect until we roll out our DPoS consensus mechanisms in Q1 of 2022. Currently you are able to stake to earn rewards, which will continue for another 4 years.
Q7.Can you tell us about your project and team long term vision? How big is your team and will you add more team in the future?
Our overall long term vision is to drive the cost of data on the blockchain to as close to zero as possible. And to be the provider of data for all the applications that need massive volumes of data. Right now that is one of the major problems on the blockchain. If you compare this to the internet age, we are still in the late 1990’s. where there is little data available, and it costs an arm and a leg to get it. As a result, there is a lack of advanced applications being developed because data is expensive and hard to come by. And as a result, there were limited uses for the internet, and your mobile phone. We need to get to the age of Wifi and 4G, where data is plentiful and cheap. Now you don’t think twice about your data consumption, and applications have thrived in this environment. Uber, Netflix, Fortnite, etc, those applictions would not have existed without the advent of cheap and plentiful data.
And in terms of our team, we are about 22 members currently, with the engineering team being about 17-18 of that 22, as we are development heavy. But we are growing rapidly, and looking to hire more blockchain engineers, more marketing, BD, community managers, etc. So if you guys know anyone who’s qualified and interested, please come to our our community and ask our mods about the opportunities.
Q8.There are investors like me who like to invest in tokens for the long term. Can you explain why we buy your token and keep it for the long term?
We have very attractive staking programs currently that incentivizes long term token holding. And when our DPoS consensus launches in Q1 of 2022, token holders will be able to participate in the profit sharing of the data validation when they stake their tokens with elected validators who will be verifying the data. Additionally, we have been very execution focused on our project, having set aggressive milestones, and meeting those deadlines. We also have over 40+ partnerships already forged, all within the past 6 months, and we expect many of them to start to integrate after our Ethereum mainnet launch by the 29/30th of this month. And as we begin to roll out additional features, many that are industry firsts, as well as expand to support additional blockchains, our inherent value to the blockchain ecosystem will inrease substantially.
And finally, one area that has massive potential is our entry into the enterprise big data market, which is currently underserved by blockchain projects and holds immense unlocked value. So we are overall very optimistic about future prospects.
Q9.Umbrella collects data feeds from various sources to calculate the most accurate pricing in the market. But, it also uses a Proof of Delegated Proof of Stake consensus model. How does this consensus model help maintain data security? Why use DPoS instead of PoW, PoS or others?
We chose to use DPoS vs PoS or PoW because it is more efficient, less energy intensive, and more democratic than other alternatives. Ultimately, as a community owned project, it made more sense to allow token holders to be able to vote with their tokens and elect / delegate the validators who would be able to represent them in the PoS consensus mechanism.
Q10. Do you have AUDIT certificates? Or Are you working to AUDIT your project, to make it more secure and reliable?
Yes all of our smart contracts are fully audited by slowmist. And future enhancements and releases will also be audited. We are an engineering focused project, so we take code security very seriously. We are launching out own internal token bridge next week, to bridge between ETH and BSC as we are already live on BSC and will be live on ETH by month end, and that will be audited as well.
And this was the end of our AMA with Umbrella Network.
If you have any other questions you can ask here:
ℹ️ℹ️ Useful links ℹ️ℹ️
Website :- https://umb.network/
Medium :- https://medium.com/umbrella-network
Twitter :- https://twitter.com/umbnetwork
Github :- https://github.com/umbrella-network
Reddit :- https://www.reddit.com/r/UmbrellaNetwork/
Discord :- https://discord.gg/G9x4TsHSd7
Facebook :- https://www.facebook.com/UmbNetwork/