Date : 22nd October 2021
Host : HunterX & GemFlair
Guest: Umbrella Team (John Chen — President)
Hello! Spykefastians & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Umbrella, on 22 October at 1 PM UTC. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, if you missed the live session, this post will be a saver & a feeder of knowledge for you.
INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS — BY SPYKEFAST TEAM.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Q1. Kindly give brief introduction about yourself, Crypto experience and your role at #Umbrella Network Project?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
Sure. My name is John Chen and I’ve been an investor in the crypto space since 2017. I have mostly a finance and entrepreneurial background, having built businesses in consumer goods, digital media and marketing. I joined Umbrella Network back at the end of last year, a little after the project was originally launched. Initially it was to help my good friend Sam, the founder with some various aspects of marketing during the early days, but its grown now to encompass pretty much anything outside of actual product development. I’m currently the President and Head of Marketing at Umbrella, and am currently focused on overseeing all aspects of the project, ensuring we are delivering against our roadmap, as well as managing the growth of our ecosystem and community.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Amazing to hear.. Well I joined crypto space back in 17 as well.. 😇💯
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
I remember taking a udemy course on blockchain, and one of the bonuses was them giving you a free ether as part of the course.
when eth was around $1.50
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
😝😝
Well today its probably worth more than the course.. 😉
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
lol definitely
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Q2. Let’s talk in detail about #Umbrella Network project. What are the main features of the project?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
So Umbrella Network is a layer 2, decentralized, community owned data oracle. We bring off chain data unchain, so smart contract and apps can access it.
We have a few major features that differentiate us from other oracles on the market. Our main advantage is our ability to aggregate data via a Layer 2 solution using Merkle trees, which allows us to bring thousands of data points, even hundreds of thousands of data points, to the blockchain in a single transaction, whereas other oracles can only bring one data point per transaction.
So in other words, if a dapp wants all the stock prices of the S&P 500, most oracles would have to bring each price point on chain one at a time. We are able to take all of it, aggregate it together and bring it on chain at once. This obviously has major implications in terms of speed, costs, scalability, among others.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Pretty amazing stuff.. Umbrella Network ecosystem is growing.. ☔☔
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
So because of this, we can offer data at a lower cost than anyone else, are able to provide more data pairs than other oracles, and can also do a host of other things, like build out complex custom data feeds, or process data or transactions off chain.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Very true.
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
Right now we offer over 1800 data pairs to applications on ethereum and BSC, where we are already live on mainnet. from crypto price pairs to stock prices, commodities, advanced options data, and a whole slew of others. Compared to most other oracles today, which offer anywhere from 200–300 data pairs.
and we are ramping that up rapidly, looking to have about 10,000+ data pairs available by end of this year.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
This clearly speaks about Umbrella Network strength, when put in against other oracles.
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
yeah its relatively easy and virtually free for us to onboard new data, build out new pricing pairs, which isnt the case for most oracles. its why they don’t offer as much data.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Lets hope for the best. 🤞👍
Q3. What are the major utilities of holding the #Umbrella Network Native token? How does team plan to enhance it value so as to attract users onboard?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
The $UMB token is our native utility token that really sits at the center of the Umbrella Network ecosystem. Currently we offer some attractive staking programs for our token holders, with APY ranging from 75% up to 350% last time i checked. By Q1 of next year, we will be transitioning to delegated proof of stake consensus with our validator network, so token holders will then be able to stake their tokens with their validator of choice, and receive a share of the data usage fees from applications utilizing our oracles.
Overall, our tokenomics are also very community oriented, with 60% of our token allocation earmarked for our community of token holders, validators, partners, etc. and with half of that set into our rewards program, which runs for four years. its what allows us to offer such attractive APYs for long term holding.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Pretty handsome APY on staking 👌👌
Hi Ruben. You stake UMB on our staking portal and get rewarded in rUMB1 tokens.
rUMB1 will be redeemable for UMB tokens on a 1:1 basis after a period of 1 year from program launch on 15th February 2021, (that’s February 2022) or after Achievement 1, whichever is sooner.
Achievement 1 will be based on data volume, the exact details will be announced soon.
You can trade rUMB1 on Uniswap at:
or hold them until they are redeemable for UMB tokens on a 1:1 basis at a future date as mentioned above.
In addition, the rUMB to UMB conversion module will be released in November 2021, which is just the module, UI and functionality to convert but it doesn’t mean the conversion will happen then, it may happen at a later date.
Something I found regarding the staking as well.
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
and in terms of enhancing value, we are just focused on continuing to build and grow our ecosystem, releasing solutions that add value to our partners, continuing to broaden and expand our overall project. this we believe is the best way to enhance value for the project, our community, and our token as we increase market adoption.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
☂ ☂️💰💰Staking your $UMB at https://staking.umb.network/ is as easy as they come!!☂️
🎥Check out our step-by-step tutorial below (~2 min) and get started 🤑
Staking $UMB is easy… ☔
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
yes our staking distributes our rewards token the rUMB, which redeems 1:1 for umb in the future. its another strategy we have in place that helps to promote long term holding.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
That helps. 👍☔
Q4. How has the development been so far with #Umbrella Network Platform? Are things proceeding ahead right on track?
There is a recent update as well regarding this, which I thought would ask.
☂️☂️🔥 🗣 Sam Kim explains why we acquired Lucidity 😍
“As $UMB incorporates Lucidity, the UMB community will gain exposure to the benefits of Lucidity’s work with leading brands such as Hyundai, KFC, Dentsu, Xandr and more.” 🔥
☂️Read the full post here👉
Regarding acquisition of Lucidity…definitely gives more exposure to Umbrella Network ☔💯
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
So we are still a fairly young project, having just IDO’d in Feb of this year, but overall i think we have put together an ambitious roadmap, and, for the most part, have been able to meet most of our milestones and deadlines. So far we have already managed to go live on BSC mainnet in May, went live on Ethereum mainnet at the end of September, launched our community validator program in the summer.
We also just released our advanced arbitrage free options pricing models earlier this week, which is bringing the most advanced, wall street level options pricing data to the defi market. And will be launching on Polygon next week.
And we are also releasing our verifiable random number generator by end of this month as well, which is going to be a very useful solution for the growing blockchain gaming sector.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Yeah.. The main focus is to keep BUIDLing
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
And yes, we also managed to make an acquisition of Lucidity back at the end of Aug, which is another major acheivement for us.
we’ve still got a very aggressive roadmap ahead of us. we are planning to be live on 8 to 10 blockchains by mid 2022
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Found this.. ☔
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
we are looking to be multi-chain interoperable so that we can provide data across the broader blockchain multiverse, wherever there are apps with data needs, and also be able to support cross chain functionality and messaging.
Look for an update from us next week as we will be revising our roadmap and adding some more milestones to an already packed Q4 and 2022
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
Sure.. Looking forward to hearing more updates.
Q5. How is Umbrella Network project different from other competitors?
We talked a bit earlier about this.
Let’s hear some more.. 😀
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
Yes, so like i mentioned a bit before, our unique merkle tree architecture allows us to aggregate all of our data before writing it onchain. This brings about several major benefits.
1) we can bring much more data at scale and at a significantly lower cost. 2) we can provide much more frequently updated data. most oracles today, because of the high costs, sometimes only update their price feeds once a day, or when a certain % change occurs. We don’t need to do that and can update every few minutes, or even more frequently should there be a need for it. 3) we are able to provide a much larger assortment of data, not just major crypto pairs, but mid and low cap crypto, almost any sort of financial data whether thats equities, commodities, derivatives, synthetics, to healthcare, sports stats, real estate, you name it.
Another area that makes us different is that we run on a layer 2 sidechain, so it allows us to natively be able to do more complex off chain computing before putting anything on chain. this is something that we can also provide dapps and smart contracts, as it can be cost prohibitive to try to run everything on chain. We see this being a major area of value for blockchain gaming as it will be challenging for more sophisticated games to try to process everything on chain, especially if there are like 200,000 concurrent users.
And finally, being a layer 2 project also allows us to be able to be truly chain agnostic, and support a variety of different layer 1 protocols.
LIVE AMA QUESTIONS
Andy:
There are several sites where cryptocurrency asset values are presented and these values are slightly different from site to site. How does Umbrella take this data? Does it come from more than one of these sites or from a specific one? What elements are taken into account to choose the final value of the assets?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
We pull our pricing from multiple data sources, some of which are premium, professional data aggregators, others are cryptocurrency exchanges or aggregators of crypto exchange data. Most of the aggregators themselves have already gone through and sanitized their data, removed outliers, etc. But once we have these data sets, we once again have our validators run consensus on these values to arrive at a final data point. outliers are removed, and a median price point is taken to ensure accuracy and reliability. So there are several layers of data checks and validations before a final value is derived that our users will be able to trust.
Hendra sico:
Hi mr. @chen225
UMB is already in 2 networks, namely ETH and BSC, will it be added to other networks in the future? Like Polygon and SOLONA which are popular these days
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
So in addition to BSC and ETH, we will be launching on Polygon by next week, and after that we have plans to integrate and support Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, Moonbeam, Plasm. and we are in the midst of assessing and adding a few more chains to support on our roadmap for the next few months. we will be announcing these additions next week so stay tuned.
Joly:
As a community owned project where Stakers, Developers, Validators and the Foundation together govern how the network is operated. By working and govern together in Umbrella Network how does it gives result to your network?What will be the role of the community in your platform?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
As a community owned project, this is a major focus for us. We aren’t there yet in terms of total decentralization and community governance, but this is an area we will be working on later this year and early part of next year as we transition to full DPoS. We are currently working on structuring out a governance framework that will more heavily involve our community, which will ultimately vote for and elect a community run governance council, which will then decide on the future of Umbrella Network. We currently already have a community council of community representatives that vote on key governance related issues. Our lucidity acquisition, for example, was voted on and approved by the community. And we recently had another vote on some key directions that Umbrella will be taking as it relates to GameFi and the growing blockchain gaming sector, which Umbrella is investing heavily in as another future area for growth. We will have some more details around these developments very soon, so stay tuned to our announcement channels.
Rashed:
Currently most investors only care about profits at the moment 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?
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
We think that the oracle market opportunity is going to be huge. Almost every blockchain application is going to need data from off chain, or potentially some type of off chain computing. And as market segments like DeFi, Gamefi and new emerging areas continue to grow, oracles will undoubtedly grow alongside them. And right now, its still super early in the game. If we are to compare this to the mobile era, we are now at 2G mobile data. where the data is still expensive and limited. But once the bandwidth increases and a lot more data becomes available and at a much cheaper rate, there will be an explosion of continued innovation in terms of the types of applications that can be built on the blockchain. We believe that we are well poised to capitalize on this upcoming growth, as one of the few oracles that is well positioned to be able to provide data at incredible economies of scale, so as the industry continued to mature, we will be able to capitalize on this.
CLOSING REMARKS.
HunterX | Spykefast (@realsch1- twitter):
We wish you and your team the very best in the future endeavors 🚀🚀🔮
John Chen | Umbrella Network:
thanks so much!
Akoin:
Thanks for the AMA 🤗
Gem Flair:
Thanks @chen225 for taking time out and answering all important questions about #Umbrella network.
峰 海:
Amazing project buy buy buy
Andy:
what an impressive project !!
I love the professionalism of the developers. It is evident that it is a serious project with solid foundations. is going to be a sure hit in the crypto world. thank you both for this spectacular AMA.
Gem Flair:
Wish you and your team all the best for timely achievements of all milestones as per the roadmap.
IMPORTANT LINKS
👥 Join Social Media Links
📌 Telegram: @umbrellanet
📌 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Umbnetwork
📌 SpykeFast Telegram — @spykefastofficial
Contact Spykefast Group (TG Members — @realsch & @Gem_Flair) for promotions and AMA!!
