Recapitulation of Umbrella Network AMA event held at AMA LOVERS CLUB

Venue: https://t.me/amaloversclub
Date: Tuesday, 12th January, 2021
Time: 18:00 UTC

The Umbrella Network team was represented by @kimsamjoo. He judiciously shared with us detailed knowledge and information about the project.

1st Segment: INTRODUCTION

Q1 : Can you please introduce yourself and your background, also introduce the project Umbrella Network

Ans : I grew up in Brooklyn, NY. I had the good fortune of getting scholarships and financial aid in order to attend some schools that would otherwise be unattainable for a kid like me. I initially worked for The World Bank in Vietnam helping with rural development and state owned enterprise restructureing. I’ve since focused my career building highly performant, scalalbe products primarily in the digital advertising industry.

I served as the Co-Founder and COO of Gimbal, a buy side platform which recently acquired TrueX from Disney. Frustrated by the lack of transparency in digital advertising as the COO of Gimbal, I decided to apply the breakthroughs in blockchain technology (i.e. Ethereum) to solve this problem. And so, in 2017 my friends and I started Lucidity where I was the CEO. Lucidity is an L2 / Sidechain that utilizes the distributed ledger and smart contract system to create a shared ledger for the entire industry. Lucidity currently works with traditional brands like Toyota, Hyundai, KFC and our largest client GroupM / WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency.

And of course, we launched Umbrella in 2020 using some of the concepts we learned and applied at Lucidity into the oracle space. Some of the folks at Umbrella have worked with me for many years. And in fact, some of them have been with me for all three companies.

Until last week, I was the only member of the team that did not write code fulltime. However, we’ve since added a writer. So now we’re two. The team consists of 2 blockchain engineers, 2 front end, two back end, a wall street quant, a data engineer, a UX person and our VP of Engineering who comes from DAOstack. We’re going to introduce the team in the future, so please join our Telegram channel to stay in touch.

Q2 : What critical problems does Umbrella Network solve that existing solutions are not solving and what’s the competitve advantage

Ans : Today, oracles require DeFi apps to make a choice between security of the data vs accuracy / liveliness of the data. That compromise is necessary because existing oracles write one piece of data at a time. One data equals one transaction. This compromise is why we’re seeing so many Flash Loans + Oracle manipulation hacks like Harvest, Compound and many more.

Umbrella uses a system of merkle trees to greatly reduce the cost by aggregating a thousand pieces of data onto a single blockchain transaction. Therefore, we no longer have to compromise between security and liveliness. We can have both. And that’s what will drive DeFi forward in the future.

Q3 : Can you briefly describe the Top milestones you have achieved and your target milestones with timelines

Ans : I’m really excited about a number of things we accomplished in 2020. Launching a project is always exciting. Building a proof of concept and an alpha product is exhausting but so rewarding. Signing up developers and validators and raising money is such a validation of the project. But I don’t think anything beats putting together a good team. It’s a proven team that loves working together, loves our product and is really committed to the mission at hand. We’ll be adding to the team, but having this core group really positions us for success.

As for the roadmap, we released our alpha a little while back. We’ll be releasing our testnet at the end of the month. And, we’ll begin to onboard external validators, onboard some of the projects who are integrating with us now and of course we’ll have the token sale and open up staking and rewarding. Our stretch goal is to launch decentralized governance this year.

2nd Segment: LIVE Questions

Q1 : In addition to the partnership Umbrella Network has established with Genesis Volatility (GVol), do you plan to include any other encryption options analysis platform to make your system even more robust in terms of volatility data?

Ans : Surprised there’s only one. There were so many good twitter questions. But yeah, this is a good one and very topical

So our partnership with Genesis Volatility is really exciting. It’s really our first step in providing the complex data required for proper decentralzied options pricing and thus trading. We will have a lot more news on this front including work our wall street quant is working on now.

We will continue to add other providers of this type of data besides GVol. And the reason this is so topical is that today we announced our partnershp with Hedget who will be using the data for their options market. So it’s exciting to see that the new types of data we’re able to make available using our technology has demand for it so quickly.

Here’s a link to the announcement: https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-network-announces-partnership-with-hedget-1f718d932e90

#UmbrellaNetwork is very interesting name Why do you choose the name of your project?

Q2 : Where on this name derived & any inspiration behind the name of the project

Ans : We chose Umbrella Network because we believe oracles have more responsiblity than simply shuffling data from a centralized database to the blockchain. Oracles must ensure security and accuracy of the data. Blockchain and DeFi in particular are very different than traditional applications. There are far greater security implications as we’ve seen with all the hacks. And therefore, Umbrella uses a Network of validators, data providers and stakers to protect dApps from would be hackers

Q3 : Why did you decide to use the Merkle Trees system on the Umbrella Network platform? What are the benefits and advantages of this system?

Ans : There was also another question about learning more about the Merkle Tree. In our Product Demo, there is a deeper dive about the technology. You can find it here: https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-demo-guide-a38671447c7

If you’re a little less technically inclined, we’re working on a more casual explanation. So once again, follow our channel for more info when that comes out.

But basically Merkle Trees are an efficient and quite honestly elegant way to store large amounts of data and transactions on a block. Just ask Satoshi and Vitalik who use it in their blockchains.

For us, it’s simply a way to store large amounts of data offchain while ensuring the integrity and immutability of the data on chain. So with a single blockchain transaction, I can store the representation of thousands of data points.

Q4 : Why UMBRELLA allocates 66.7% of $ UMB tokens to the community. So What are the benefits of this allocation for both the community and the project? Where does project revenue come from?And How is it distributed?

Ans : We are a community owned oracle. And thus it’s important that tokens, governance and rewards are distributed to the community. We believe oracles are too important piece of the DeFi infrastructure to let it be centrally owned.

There will be a small public sale to the community. Then nearly 40% of the tokens will be distributed to the community via rewards. Those token holders will not only receive rewards, but they can stake in order to share in the user fees, participate in governance and ultimately even become a validator themselves

Q5 : What mechanism has Umbrella put in place to help ensure that validators on the system are not misbehaving for their own benefit? Are there incentives to help encourage long term participation and holding?

Ans : This is a critical difference for us. Current leading oracle uses a Proof of Authority. So you must trust the validators to not misbehave or collude. We use a Proof of Stake system where validators must stake their own tokens. If they are found to vote incorrectly, they will be slashed. If they vote correctly, they get a share of the user fees. So there is economic alignment.

Q6 : Recently Umbrella announced partnership with Hedget. What will the benefits from this association?

Ans : The Hedget partnership is important in many ways. First, it demonstrates that there is massive demand for new types of data like implied volatility. It’s a validation. Second,

it demonstrates that our low cost merkle tree based product works for our potential developer partners. And finally, it’s important confirmation of our business strategy to focus on these new emerging data needs like options data, indexes, synthetic forms of real assets (equities), and much much more.

Q7 : How will the selection process be done on Umbrella Network to elect nodes to serve as representative governing bodies over the Oracle service?

Ans : So initially, we will work with experienced node operators. And we’ve signed partnserhips with some of them already. Their experience will help us to optimize our code and design the system for low cost operations. Once the system scales and we’re able to onboard new validators and generate real economic return for them, we will open up to other validators including from within our community. And since we are running a Delegated Proof of Stake system, validators will ultimately be chosen by the community.

I suspect but cannot be certain that validators will be represented across different geographic regions based on language, time zone and culture.

Q8: why we should invest and hold long time $UMB, Their is a lot of fake project in market so why we believe $UMB is best for long term invest for Big investor.?

Ans : It’s too bad that this is an important question that I should address

These are the times. But first, I would ask that nobody buy more than they can reasonably afford.

But if you look at our tokenomics, it’s design so that there is no "rug" to pull. At launch, almost all of the tokens are held by the community. Second, the public sale is quite small. Rewards are designed to promote long term holdings of the UMB token. The reward tokens are not redeemable for UMB until a year from TGE or after certain business milestones are achieved. We are not an anonymous project. In fact, I am quite public about who I am. And I am focused on realizing a much bigger opportunity than a small rug pull could provide. And finally, our product will be usable as soon as we launch.

CONCLUSION

Great share all useful links please

Ans : Thanks for your time everybody. Please join us on telegram, twitter, etc.

https://t.me/umbrellanet
https://t.me/umbnetannouncement
Website: https://www.umb.network/
Medium: https://medium.com/umbrella-network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UmbNetwork

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