Umbrella Network is a scalable, cost-efficient, and community-owned oracle for the DeFi and blockchain community.

Today we have Sam Kim as Founding Partner of Umbrella Network joining us to answer our questions

I’m Sam Kim. For the past 10 years, I along with the key members of Umbrella Network have been building highly performant and scalable products, primarily in the digital advertising industry. I first served as the Co-Founder and COO of Gimbal, a buy side platform that recently acquired TrueX from Disney.

Question from the CryptoRank team

#1. Can you tell us about Umbrella Network ? What problems do you solve, both in the space and for the community?

Sam: –  Today, it simply costs too much to get data on chain for decentralized applications to use. And because it’s so expensive, there simply isn’t a lot of data available. And the data that is available, it isn’t updated very frequently.

That makes it really hard for developers to do their jobs. And makes it nearly impossible to give us great applications that are secure enough for us to use and put our hard earned money into. We should be confident that when we put our money into a smart contract, it is secure. What drew me to buy my first Bitcoin in 2013 was really the power of decentralization. I think that’s probably the case for most of us. What got me to switch my career to focus on crypto was the draw of building Decentralized applications on Ethereum.

Oracles are one of the crucial pieces of infrastructure for blockchain developers. They are the gatekeepers to the valuable data that we all need to run our applications. Shouldn’t that be “trustless” as well? We’re working to address those two key issues with Umbrella Network

#2. Could you shortly describe the milestones Umbrella Network have achieved, and about your upcoming plans?

Sam: – I believe we’re releasing a roadmap this week in addition to all the other content. But basically, we hit a public alpha / demo stage back in November 2020. And we’ve been in a semi-private testnet since January. So we’re pretty far along given that our IDO is on Tuesday 9 February.

We’ll move into mainnet in Q2, expand into an EVM compatible parachain Q2 / Q3. And we’ll constantly be working towards decentralized governance. And I am hopeful we can achieve it this year.

Questions from Twitter

#1. Umbrella will make 36 most commonly used crypto data pairs & more than 40 of the most common data pairs on chain updated every 5 mins free to all developers. How will Umbrella ensure that these privileges aren’t abused by developers for various projects?

Sam: – We’re actually going to make more data available for free than 36 and 40. On chain, it’ll be around 40 or 50. this is what we call our First Class Data. From our L2 sidechain, we’ll offer 84 pieces of data for free. My hope is that developers will use it as much as they need. We think more data, more cheap data is going to benefit Umbrella and the entire blockchain ecosystem. So we welcome this challenge.

#2. Most people think that a successful blockchain or crypto project is measured by the price of their token. Then what about the UmbNetwork project? What success targets will soon be achieved apart from the price side?

Sam: – I used to watch the business news channels. And I’d see CEOs say they don’t watch their stock price and focus entirely on the business. Obviously, nobody believes that. So I’m not going to say that to you guys. However, token prices in the long run should reflect the underlying bussiness of our project. How much adoption it’s secured and it’s growth. And so for us, that means how many new projects we sign up on our platform and what is the acutal amount of data being requested through our system.

#3. What is the plan to ensure sufficient liquidity on exchanges to fill market orders, especially as adoption increases and clients begin multiplying year-over-year for your project?

Sam: – After the IDO, there will be a Uniswap AMM pool for UMB / ETH. And we plan on adding a sufficient amount of liquidity there in order to increase stability. We’ll also be launching a liquidity pool reward system. I can’t talk about CEX plans at this time. I believe my legal has advised against that. So, I’ll just say that I recognize the importance of CEX.

CryptoRank community questions

#1. Umbrella network is not relies on any single data Provider. They will use multiple data provider for every data feed. But how will you sanitize them and make sure that they are consist with one another?

Sam: – We look for anomolies in the data. Let’s say incredibly large spikes from one data source. We look at data from multiple providers so we can identify outliers and then drop them. We also look for reasonable ranges that a token should trade at. For example, stable coins should not deviate much from $1. Oil should not trade at $1000 per barrel. And the Korean Won should not trade 1 KRW for 1 USD. This last one is a reference to the hack that SNX experienced due to a bad oracle.

I wrote an oped in Cointelegraph covering some of this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-data-manipulation-is-too-easy-and-current-oracle-solutions-aren-t-helping-much

#2. Umbrella Network will conduct IDO on the Polkadot platform. So why did you choose IDO on Polkadot over other platforms? What do you see the potentials and benefits that the Polkadot platform can bring to the Umbrella Network?

Sam: – The community and the ecosystem of projects. Pretty much that simple.The Polkastarter community has the potential to rival those of YEarn and other leaders in the space. The community of crypto enthusiasts are unparalleled if you ask me. The quality of the projects that are launching here is superior to any other launchpad we’ve seen in the market. Just look at the list: from YOP Finance, Bridge Mutual, MahaDAO, etc, etc. These projects are the future of DeFi. So how could I turn down an opportunity to join and sit in a room with them. And of course, the focus on Polkadot. While we’re built on Ethereum currently, we have every intention of moving over to Polkadot in short order. The advantages there are just too obvious.

And I believe the Polkastarter community and its ecosystem of projects are really what’s going to drive Polkadot to realize its full potential. And Umbrella Network looks forward to providing the underlying oracle infrastructure for this amazing group.

#3. What roles are there in the Umbrella Network for our community members? How can we improve our well-being and contribute to the development of the Umbrella Network?

Sam: – We’ve had a lot of discussions in our telegram group about this. There are those who want to favor engineers and other technical folks who undertand Umbrella from the lense of an engineer. While we think that’s important, we want to give everybody a chance to be contributing members.

So we don’t want just product and engineers. We want artists and designers to help us create fun, engaging materials for us. We want marketers to help educate and evangelize. We want researchers to help us design a security system around our validator network. We want local representatives. So really, there are endless ways to contribute.