Band Protocol April 2021 Community Update
Dear Band Community,
Band Protocol continues to grow with our major DeFi partners as the number of total oracle requests reach 4.5M — growing 55% from last month. As the total value secured by Band Oracles continues to rapidly increase, our team has been diligently and thoroughly working on BandChain Phase 2, codenamed Laozi, with a public testnet coming up next month.
BandChain Phase 2 brings more enterprise-grade data providers to support Band Oracles, enhancing security guarantees and the overall breadth of data available for all decentralized applications to reliably use in production. On the other hand, data providers will be able to monetize their data solutions and collect revenue automatically on-chain from decentralized protocols and developers.
We are excited to share a reflection of our significant developments in April.
Tech Updates
In April, the total number of oracle requests on the BandChain Mainnet has surpassed 4,490,530+ without incident or failure. This comes as the Band Standard Dataset has expanded to support more than 196+ symbols for digital assets, commodities and foreign exchange as well as more partners continuing to adopt Band Oracles to secure smart contracts and user funds.
Notable BandChain Update
BandChain has been patched to allow token transfer via IBC. We have also prepared v1.3.0-rc0 on guanyu version for exporting current state using in the lead up to the migration to Laozi — BandChain Phase 2. This includes testing on the current Mainnet state to verify integrity of the exported state.
Our team has also migrated the command for migrating exported state from the GuanYu version to the new genesis file for Laozi. An internal migration test has been prepared and we will launch a public testnet in the next month. Our team has been rigorously testing various request data scenarios and edge cases to ensure the upcoming version of BandChain works in a stable and expected manner.
The relayer program responsible for sending oracle requests and receiving a manipulation resistant result between chains via IBC has been optimized. The current program is currently in a beta version that is working on our testnet and under-development along Cosmos team. We will test and improve the robustness of the program in the testnet period. Find our development here:
Notable Standard Price Reference Update
We have implemented retry logic to resend transactions with a bump in gas prices in case of network congestions, ensuring that at all time new price updates can be retrieved by Band Protocol partners.
We have also added support for more symbols on Ethereum and BSC Mainnet. Find the full list of Band Standard Dataset symbols here:
Notable CosmoScan Update
CosmoScan now supports BandChain Phase 2 features for on-chain revenue collection for premium data sources and providers. This will be available on the Laozi public testnet available next month. Features includes displaying a premium data source’s:
- Fee accrual/Treasury amount
- Fee amount and treasury address on create/edit data source message
- Fee limit when request data to BandChain
Partnership Developments
During April, we shared the beginning of our long-term collaboration with Google Cloud after many months of ideation and implementation. We also cover 6 other significant partnership developments spanning from integration, partner mainnet launches with Band Oracle integration and joining one of the largest online hackathon and incubation programs of the year hosted by Delphi Digital.
Google Cloud Integration
Google has joined the cohort of leading companies and projects integrating $BAND oracles which are live on Google Cloud’s BigQuery. The integration and use-case of $BAND enables reliable price discovery mechanisms — crucial to all capital markets.
Google Cloud has shared insights on how analytics can be derived from financial time series data, in real-time, using Machine Learning. The financial data used comes directly from the Band Protocol public dataset available in Google BigQuery.
Together, Google Cloud and Band Protocol are empowering researchers and developers to use decentralized oracles for any external data source and type, whether the application is built on the blockchain or Web 2, through the flexible design of Band Protocol oracles.
Krystal Partnership
Krystal a new decentralized finance application consolidating all DeFi services including exchange aggregation, lending, portfolio management and launches with the integration of Band Protocol price oracles.
Built by the team behind KyberSwap, Krystal is a new decentralized application with an immersive and frictionless DeFi user experience designed to save users time, money, and effort by aggregating and integrating the best DeFi services.
We are delighted to work with Krystal to integrate the $BAND Standard Dataset supporting over 196+ price feeds for digital assets and foreign exchange which will be implemented on the DEX aggregator and lending services to enable users to create informed decisions.
With over 196+ feeds on the Band Standard Dataset, Band Protocol is the most widely used oracle on the Krystal platform and integration-ready to support new asset additions, custom token lists and future products with speed to market.
Band Protocol is proud to work with Krystal to provide secure, decentralized oracles upon launch and into the future as the platform scales to be a one-stop-shop for all things DeFi.
Next up for Krystal, a DApp browser and liquidity provision mechanisms!
ICONFi Partnership
ICONFi, a digital asset savings platform with over $75 million in AUM and designed to provide simple and intuitive products for all users, will support $ICX & $BAND staking and integration of extensive price oracles provided by Band Protocol.
ICONFi provides an intuitive gateway for staking and both, flexible and fixed savings products for the strongest digital assets, ICONFi automatically compounds interest earned 6 times a day — keeping savings and DeFi interaction simple for users.
With the $BAND integration supporting all savings and staking products with real-time reference price data, ICONFi users will be empowered to utilize a verified spot price for digital assets to make informed decisions increasing both reliability and transparency.
ICONFi will also be supporting $BAND staking natively on the platform, this means that users will be able to stake and participate in securing the BandChain decentralized oracle network without having to interact with block explorers, hardware or manually re-staking rewards
Band Protocol is excited to join ICONFi’s mission to bring DeFi and blockchain technology towards mass adoption through a consolidated simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use platform. We are thrilled to contribute further to the growing ICON ecosystem.
Graviton Partnership
Graviton, a universal cross-chain liquidity protocol for wrapped assets, has partnered with Band Protocol to integrate decentralized oracles to provide real-time cross-chain event updates and price feeds. $BAND also joins as a Graviton multisig signer alongside 1inch, WAVES, Binance Smart Chain working together to unlock inter-chain liquidity.
Built by VenLab, the team behind Neutrino, an algorithmic stablecoin with $700M TVL, and Gravity Protocol, a blockchain & token agnostic oracle and cross-chain bridge infrastructure.
Graviton aggregates multiple cross-chain bridges to provide seamless access to multiple chains with Ethereum mirror accounts and a reward-based economy around wrapped assets.
To mitigate any points of failure, Band Protocol oracles will work alongside Gravity Extractors to broadcast the updates in deposits and reserves to maintain stable inter-chain communication between the Treasury contract on Ethereum and the farm smart contract on Fantom. Using $BAND ensures the highest security guarantee and reliability through redundancy in oracle-based components within Graviton.
Integrating Band Protocol enables Graviton smart contracts to receive information about lock events which will be transmitted to the Graviton LP rewards on Fantom to rebalance the allocation of rewards tokens.
The scalability and low-latency updates provided by Band Protocol is crucial to maintain a healthy cross-chain liquidity protocol.
Band Protocol is thrilled to join Graviton on their mission to enable a fully decentralized cross-chain liquidity solution to enhance overall reliability and responsiveness of their inter-chain oracle infrastructure. As a technical partner and multisig signer, the collaboration with Graviton will span into the long-term with Band Protocol supporting on all fronts alongside key DeFi leaders.
Yieldwatch Partnership
Yieldwatch a smart yield farming dashboard for monitoring and analytics with over 80,000 daily users, has integrated $BAND oracles for over 15+ fiat currency price feeds to enhance user experiences, reliability, and product scope.
👉 With yieldwatch, DeFi users and enthusiasts retrieve all the relevant information at one glance including analytics on liquidity pools, yield farms, token staking on a user-friendly UI optimized for desktop and mobile use.
👩💻 To create a robust analytics platform, applications must be able to display information from external sources in a constantly available, timely and accurate manner.
yieldwatch users can now consume data from up to 14 institutional-grade data sources supporting $BAND.
⛳️ We look forward to collaborating with yieldwatch to implement Band Protocol oracles for crypto assets into their dashboard for the accurate and reliable pricing liquidity provider tokens and more to be revealed!
Injective Partnership Update
Injective Protocol, the first layer-2 DEX for decentralized derivatives and borderless DeFi, is expanding their partnership with $BAND by operating a BandChain node. Band Protocol has also become a genesis validator on Injective’s Equinox Staking.
Previously, Band Protocol alongside Injective, Terra and Mirror Protocol launched the world’s first decentralized stock futures trading for traditional stocks such as Tesla, Airbnb, GameStop, Twitter, Amazon, and more.
With the enhanced alignment in interets, Band Protocol looks forward to supporting the Injective ecosystem through secure and scalable decentralized oracle technology as they ramp up towards Mainnet launch and expand
Delphi Digital Hackathon
Band Protocol is proud to have our CTO, Sorawit Suriyakarn, and Technical Integration Lead, Tansawit, join Delphi_ Digital and IDEOcolab as a key mentor and oracle partner for #DeFi Connected — one of the largest online hackathon and incubation programs.
With up to $60,000 USD in prizes for successful teams moving into the incubation program, #DeFiConnected is uniting the best technical, design and business talent to bring #DeFi products towards mass adoption.
Closing Remarks
June will mark a major month for Band Protocol as we work with our existing institutional-grade partners to support the launch of BandChain Phase 2 with premium oracle scripts while also expanding our cohort of providers to utilize data monetization.
Moving forward into the next few months, our focus will revolve around enterprise and institutional integration to unlock all the data on the open internet for blockchain and decentralized applications to securely utilize.
About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts. Blockchains are great at immutable storage and deterministic, verifiable computations — however, they cannot securely access data available outside the blockchain networks. Band Protocol enables smart contract applications such as DeFi, prediction markets, and games to be built on-chain without relying on the single point of failure of a centralized oracle. Band Protocol is backed by a strong network of stakeholders including Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms in the world, and the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
Website | Whitepaper | Telegram | Medium | Twitter | Reddit | Github
