Welcome Polkastarter Community! Umbrella Network’s Got You Covered
We announced this morning that Umbrella Network will be joining Polkastarter’s thriving community. I couldn’t be more excited to contribute as a member of this group of incredible projects and global network of crypto enthusiasts.
Umbrella Network has undergone a lot of changes lately. We’ve been focused on developing our product and forging new partnerships, so I thought now would be a good time to properly introduce our project to everyone at Polkastarter. Over the past few months, the Umbrella team has been hard at work building a great product and closing a number of deals with assorted DeFi projects and validators.
At the same time, our private round was far more oversubscribed than we would have ever imagined. And, I believe we were successful in sticking to our plan to only work with investors with a long term vision and outlook for Umbrella - Investors willing to wait 18 months before getting their full allocation.
We are excited for what the future holds: more product release updates, additional partnerships, further innovations in the pipeline, AND of course the upcoming IDO on Polkastarter.
But first, some background.
Umbrella is a community-owned Layer 2 based oracle. It currently runs on Ethereum, and we plan to support Polkadot and other chains in the near future. Umbrella has a significant cost advantage over other oracles on the market, so it can support emerging, rapidly growing DeFi markets. This includes decentralized derivatives, options, indexes, synthetics, and more.
Umbrella furthermore believes that, just like Layer 1 chains, oracles are critical infrastructure that belongs in the hands of the community at large instead of a few powerful players — we covered this in detail in a previous post about over-centralization of DeFi oracles. Umbrella therefore aims to distribute nearly two-thirds of its tokens directly to the community. We are running on a Delegated Proof of Stake system in order to put ownership directly into their hands.
Oracles provide the critical data that popular DeFi projects require to operate, including Synthetix, Compound, Aave, Celsius, and yEarn. They are used for rebalancing automated market makers, pricing options, managing the risk on debt, as well as managing other data-driven DeFi functions. An oracle provides the foundational data for a functional DeFi ecosystem.
Umbrella’s belief is that “the oracle problem” is stifling innovation — and therefore growth — in the DeFi market. Yes, we’ve hit $18 billion of total value locked, but that’s surely just the beginning in light of the fact that the S&P 500 is a $30 trillion market on its own. Today secure oracles provide very few types of data and they refresh infrequently, sometimes just once a day. The lack of data here severely handicaps DeFi projects from innovating and moving the industry forward.
At the same time, oracles that provide more up-to-date information are sacrificing security for speed. They use a single data source with less-secure consensus mechanisms. It is precisely these types of oracles that led to the recent wave of flash loans and oracle hack exploits that compromised Harvest Finance, Compound, and so many others in the space.
Umbrella Network is able to provide developers with data that is simultaneously secure and up-to-date. DeFi projects will no longer need to choose between data availability and security.
Umbrella uses a system of Merkle trees that lets us put thousands of data points into a single blockchain transaction. This delivers both a significant cost advantage as well as a processing efficiency, allowing significantly more frequent data updates that the DeFi ecosystem needs. What’s more, we do this with the highest security standards in the industry.
We look forward to sharing more news with you as we have it. We announced our recent partnership with Linear Finance just yesterday, for example, and we’re excited to share more details about our pending Polkastarter IDO over the coming days.
Thank you for joining our community!
-Sam
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