$UMB AMA Recap: 68 Trading Community Asks John Chen Questions on Decentralization and Oracles
Umbrella Network’s Head of Marketing, John Chen, was recently invited for an AMA by 68 Trading to answer questions from the community.
Umbrella is a scalable, community-owned oracle that securely brings external data on-chain. It is the first decentralized oracle service to empower the community with the scale and security that modern DeFi applications require.
The transcript is almost entirely in its original AMA form, mildly edited for punctuation and readability only.
*** AMA Starts ***
PART ONE:
Q1. Let’s begin with part 1: First of all, Could you briefly introduce yourself and Umbrella Network?
Yes sure. My name is John Chen and I’m the head of Marketing at Umbrella Network. I currently live in Singapore with my wife and 2 kids, where I have been residing for the past 6 years. I originally grew up in the New York City area.
Umbrella Network is a community-owned, decentralized, Layer 2 data oracle. We are the bridge that brings real-world data onto the blockchain. We are the lowest cost, highest scale oracle in the market today.
We’re able to do that because we aggregate the data to bring it on-chain, unlike other oracle solutions which bring data one by one. The challenge currently is that when you bring data on-chain one by one, every piece of data is a single write to the chain, so on chains like Ethereum, it becomes very expensive.
Umbrella Network currently has 1,200 data pairs available as price feeds, and all of that is brought on-chain at once. We are also rapidly adding to our list of data offerings.
PART 2
We are moving on to Part 2, with 5 pre-selected questions from our community!
Q1. The first question from @Daniel_rew: Due to the previous Chainswap hack accident, Umbrella Network was one of many projects suffering terrible damage for the user fund. From a marketing perspective, do you have any comments or insights about that?
We certainly learned a lot from what happened in the Chainswap hack. Luckily, none of our smart contracts were hacked or impacted, but our third-party bridge partner Chainswap was. Some of the important lessons we learned from the hack were:
1) to react quickly and decisively
2) to be openly communicating and transparent with our community, regardless of whether the news is good or bad
3) try to put ourselves in the shoes of the community members, and think from their perspective
By doing this, we were luckily able to minimize the negative impacts from the hack and move quickly to implement appropriate measures and response to the situation to ensure that our community was minimally impacted and that we could emerge from the hack hopefully stronger and more resilient.
I hope everything is going well with Umbrella Network after the inevitable accident
Yes, it was a busy month or so dealing with the hack. We are still handling some final issues but are glad to have been able to get through it.
Q2. Next question from @lucianQ19: How did Umbrella Network compensate users/holder for their asset loss after the Chainswap hack and what solutions would you guys implement to prevent a similar accident in the future? @chen225
So after the hack, we enacted several plans to reduce the impact:
1) We set up an internal fund (of 110 ETH) to buy back from the public the same amount of tokens that the hackers dumped into the market
2) We set up bonus programs to give back to the community on both ETH and BSC so that they could earn more bonus rewards for just holding our tokens.
3) We froze our UMB token on BSC to prevent the hackers from selling additional tokens that they had minted on BSC and subsequently replaced everyone’s tokens with a new token contract 1:1
4) We stopped using any third-party token bridges and will be releasing our own fully audited token bridge in early September, to minimize any potential for external situations that may be beyond our control in the future.
I bet your team has worked hard to fix the problem.
Yeah, definitely a special shout out to our team for handling the hack as well as they possibly could. And also to our community for being understanding and coming together in support during this time.
Q3. The next one from @tuanbeo1505
What do you think about the future potential of the Oracle sector? What are Umbrella’s outstanding features to become the best oracle solution for every Blockchain project?
We’re very curious about the potential of the Oracle sector. Please help us learn more @chen225
I think the future of DeFi is dazzling. We are still in the early days of the blockchain, and oracles are a vital component of the ecosystem. Without oracles, the blockchain would be like a mobile phone without a data plan. You can compute and process things, but without any connection to the outside world, your utility would be extremely limited. What good is Uber, your mobile banking app, or probably 90% of the apps on your phone if there is no data connectivity?
Like I mentioned earlier, one of our key differentiators is our ability to aggregate thousands of pieces of data into a single transaction. This brings about a couple of major benefits. First, this allows us to have the lowest cost of data available in the market for on-chain data.
Not just a small difference, but hundreds to thousands of times cheaper. Recently, we are seeing on Ethereum, costs of around $50+ for a single transaction, and therefore the same to get a single piece of data on-chain. In comparison, we are at around $0.30 per piece of data, and that figure will continue to go down steadily as we scale.
Second, this gives us an additional advantage in having way more available data options to offer than our competitors. Other oracles have maybe 100 to a few hundred data pairs available. We currently offer around 1,200 data pairs including the entire S&P 500, and will be looking to have close to 5,000 pairs of data available very soon, and around 10,000 pairs by this year’s end. Unlike most other oracles, we have virtually no upfront onboarding costs to bring new data on-chain, so we will be able to continue to increase our data pair offerings conveniently and at a consistent rate.
We also offer the widest selection of data, not just raw quantity, so this means not just the major crypto pairs like BTC, ETH, but also mid to small-cap crypto data, stock prices, commodities, more complex calculated metrics like TWAP, IVOL, and various yields, and a whole lot more. Ultimately, we want to drive the cost of data to as close to zero as possible, because we believe only then will applications truly be able to thrive fully and innovate.
Q4. And here is the 4th question today
What are some of the major achievements that the Umbrella Network has accomplished? Any product features or milestones coming up that make you feel excited? @BTWingsVentures
We are still a fairly new project, having IDO’d back in Feb of this year, but overall I think we have been fortunate enough to have made some significant progress in the past 5 to 6 months. We went live on the BSC mainnet back in May and will be going live on the Ethereum mainnet by the end of September. We are currently in the midst of rolling out our community validator program, allowing us to give almost anyone in our community the opportunity to operate a validator node and help with validating data on our network in a decentralized and secure manner.
As of the upcoming milestones, we have an incredibly full pipeline of things planned for the near future. Our plans range from expanding to other blockchains like Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, and many more, to rolling out new product features such as advanced options data and pricing model feeds, a verifiable random number generator, among others, and also some other major developments we have in the works that will help propel Umbrella into new market segments and verticals. So stay tuned for a lot of exciting stuff from us!
Q5. And here comes the last question before we come to our main event tonight:
As an individual user, in what ways can I contribute to the development of the Umbrella Network? Do you have Ambassador programs and what are the benefits? @ElaneArndt
Umbrella aims to be a fully decentralized, community-owned oracle. So we always welcome individual members of our community to contribute and be a part of our growth. We do have an Umbassador program. We launched it a few months back and are continuing to expand it. Benefits to those who join include the opportunity to receive monthly incentives including UMB tokens, exclusive Umbrella swag, direct access to the team, and the ability to be a part of a community of passionate, like-minded individuals with the full support of the Umbrella Network team and community.
Those who are interested can apply here -> https://forms.gle/bJqZiHhoAZukfn4A9
PART 3 live Q&A
Q1. What companies are you partnered with or seeking to partner with in the future?
We have forged about 40 partnerships so far with several projects, with a lot of them in the DeFi space. We will be continuing to forge more partnerships across the various blockchain ecosystems as we add more support for additional chains. But in addition to just DeFi, we also see the broader need for oracles to act as the bridge between real-world data and enterprises as well as the blockchain ecosystems, so we will be seeking to broaden our potential partnership opportunities and also look towards other market segments, both across enterprise/ corporate opportunities as well as cryptonative applications.
Q2. Many projects are just projects that make deceptive promises created by cloning existing ones and are similar to existing ones. Do you have features that are unique to you, that you have developed, and that make you special?
We are not a fork or a copy of any other project. Our technology was designed and built up from scratch, and we spent several years battle testing it and improving on it. Our engineering team that built the core platform continues to build upon it every day.
Q3. What are your plans for global expansion? Is Umbrella focusing on the market at this time or on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships?
We have several plans for overall global expansion. One is our continual focus on product and platform development, including more products/features enhancement, continuing to add more data sources and improving security, and increasing the number of data feeds including custom and novel ones that may not be available elsewhere. Another is to continue to focus on market adoption, specifically adding more meaningful partnerships and expanding into more industry categories and verticals, both cryptonative application support as well as the broader enterprise market.
Q4. Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and keep the project/company running. What is your way of generating profit/revenue? What is the income model?
We are still in an early phase of our project, so currently we are offering all of our data for free. However, as we start to gain broader adoption, we will be charging for our data on a SaaS-based model based on volumes of data consumed, and it will be far multiples less cost-wise than other leading oracles.
Q5. Currently, most investors only care about profits but ignore the long-term benefits. So can you give them some reasons why they should buy and hold your token in the long term?
We currently offer various rewards/staking programs to incentivize long-term holding. Our staking programs offer very competitive yields, so you can check out staking.umb.network for more details. And overall, as we continue to add more value to our project, we expect that value to be shared among our community of token holders.
***AMA Concluded***
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