RECAP of AMA with Founding Partner Sam Kim of Umbrella Network

Hello to our Global Microcap Gem Hunters Community! We bring the very first AMA with Umbrella Network conducted on our platform brought to you by microcapgemhunters! Our special guest was none other than Sam Kim, Founding Partner of Umbrella Network! Here is the RECAP of the AMA.

Admin Tim: Hi Sam Kim!

Sam Kim: Good morning from Los Angeles! So glad to be hear. Can't believe I'm the first AMA. I feel pressure

Admin Tim: I'm very excited to introduce Umbrella Network to our community. Lets get to it! We want to hear about the man Sam Kim. Tell us about yourself. What has your journey in crypto been like and how did you arrive here at the advent of an exciting project like Umbrella Network?

Sam Kim: I bought my first bitcoin in 2013 when one of my employees wouldn't shut up about bitcoin. Btw, he was a terrible employee. Brilliant, but totally consumed with Bitcoin.

But I didn't move into blockchain applications until 2017 when I first discovered Ethereum and smart contracts. But we can go into that more later.

I've been building highly performant, scalable platforms primarily in digital advertising for the past 10 years. First as Co-founder and COO of Gimbal, a buy side platform that recently acquired TrueX from Disney. And more recently, as co-founder and CEO of Lucidity, a blockchain based transparency solution for digital advertising. At Lucidity, we built a custom sidechain to run on top of Ethereum in order to handle the volume and scale of our clients Toyota, KFC and GroupM among others. And this architecture influenced and inspired the design for what we’re doing at Umbrella Network.

Oracles face some of the same problems and challenges we saw in digital advertising. Current solutions write one piece of data on chain at a time. Instead, Umbrella is able to anchor hundreds and thousands of data points on chain in a single transaction. This greatly reduces the costs of getting data on chain and thereby allows us to provide more types of data and update it more frequently.

Admin Tim: Your employee no longer works for you I suppose? He was in Bitcoin in 2013 after all.

Sam Kim: Oh yeah, he's long retired in some island. Proved he was smarter than me.

Admin Tim: Jokes aside, congratulations on the announcement that Umbrella will be conducting its TGE on Polkastarter! What was the reasoning behind this move? We have seen many projects do very well taking this route and we are excited to see Umbrella grow.

Sam Kim: I am extremely excited to be joining the Polkastarter community. It's really an incredible and thriving community of crypto enthusiasts and truly innovative projects that are leading the next generation of DeFi and blockchain applications. And really, that's what drove the decision. We had a lot of options with other IDO platforms or even running it ourselves. But we simply couldn't turn down such an awesome and diverse community. As for the projects doing well, that's really a function of them being great projects. And a function of the fact that they value their communities. And in that, we have the same ethos.

Admin Tim: I've been in Umbrella's TG channel, being a contributing member right from the start. For a community-focused project.. you certainly do walk the talk. Your gesture for a reward/airdrop for the early contributors was very well received!

But the response to the move to POLS has been slightly divisive, do you have anything you'd like to tell the community?

Sam Kim: Yeah, you were definitely one of the early ones. And very appreciate you and the others who stuck with us as we got things off the the ground.

Obviously in crypto and really anywhere, when something is as hot as Polkastarter is right now, there are bound to be some challenges. And for Polkastarter IDO, I understand the early community members' concerns about being crowded out by this large, vocal and passionate community. And let's just put it out there, there are bots trying to increase their chances of getting allocation.

But I've been learning almost every single day from the prior projects about how to conduct the IDO and whitelisting process. So we hope to build on top of what they've already done.

Last thing on this. For the early members who were active and contributing like you, you guys should know by now how much I value contributors. And so, you shouldn't be suprised if I've taken that into consideration. I'll leave it at that until the appropriate time.

Admin Tim: Great, I'm sure that the decision made was in the best interest of the project long term and believers/investors will see that pay off in time to come.

Are you able to share with us more on partnerships already established and some idea of what is on the horizon? We've noticed on Twitter that there will be a big announcement today.. any hints for those in here?

Sam Kim: Absolutely.

As you probably know by now, until maybe a couple of weeks ago, I was the only one on my team not writing code. So our content has been a little product focused so far. But we're changing that now. We'll be releasing more general content going forward including partnerships.

But today, we announced some details about our Polkastarter IDO. The dates and the process. We will open our first whitelist on 1 February. And the IDO will be on 9 February.

Here’s the tweet:

The next few days will be heavy on the IDO information. But we will also be adding announcements about partnerships with other projects and validators. We’ll introduce the team and really do some deeper dives on oracle comps, our tech, and our vision. Partnerships with other applications will be heavy on the new wave of DeFi projects building innovative solutions that require more data than currently available.

Admin Tim: Great, everything must be ramping up real fast and growing at an exponential rate! Your hour here with us is greatly appreciated.

Sam, you've stated that Oracles should be more decentralised, which is a main spark for Umbrella.

Tell me, why is a centralised Oracle a problem and why should the average crypto user be concered about this?

Sam Kim: What drew me to crypto 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 to build DECENTRALIZED application on top of 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? Instead, we have a centrally controlled oracle that determines who gets to be a validator on the network. They determine what data feeds will be provided and where the data is coming from. And on top of that, they run a Proof of Authority consensus which means there's no economic incentive for good behavior nor dis-incentive for bad behavior. We have to trust the executives running this oracle.

Look, I am not suggesting they've done anything wrong to date. But the risk is there. And as a blockchain application, I don't want to "Hope". I want to build in a trustless system.

Admin Tim: So you've identified (in your opinion) a risk factor in centralised oracles. How would Umbrella then be the catalyst for this change and paradigm shift? How will Umbrella be truly decentralised and community focused/owned?

Sam Kim: After the IDO, we're going to begin our long path to being fully decentralized.

For us, that means implementing a Delegated Proof of Stake system. I think it's unreasonable for thousands of people to be informed enough to serve like a board member. But that's the role we expect our validators, developer partners and delegates of the community to do. And that is why we're aiming for 2/3 of tokens to be distributed directly to the community.

Also, I've brought in Adam Levi, the CTO of DAOstack, to help us in the process.

I'm currently setting up our Discord channel where we will be organizing this DPoS system. So stay tuned.

Admin Tim: Got it! Diving deeper, can you explain how Umbrella has an advantage over the other oracles specifically with reference to DeFi? What is Umbrella's USP versus competitors?

Sam Kim: Yeah. We believe that data needs to be cheap. Cost of data must approach zero in order for DeFi to be truly competitive with centralized finance. And the fact that we can store thousands of data points on chain in a single transaction gives us a massive advantage over the competition. Wheter we are running on Ethereum, Polkadot or other chain, we will always be that much cheaper.

Admin Tim: So from the perspective of a partner project or potential client, other than cost-savings, what other benefits would they gain from working with Umbrella?

Sam Kim: The key isn't just that we're cheaper. The key is that we are both secure and the data is up to date, what we call liveliness of data.

Chainlink doesn't update their prices very often because it costs a validator $50-100 sometimes to get a price on chain. So you can see why the price of DAI for example is so infrequently updated. So the by product of expensive data is that you get "old" data.

Projects are choosing to be secure or live / up to date data. Projects like Compound and Harvest Finance chose COINBASE Pro and Curve as their oracle in order to get more up to date prices. And they did that at the risk of being less secure.

And that's why they were exposed to flash loan + oracle hacks.

With Umbrella you can have both. So no need to compromise. You can have secure data that is also live and up to date.

Admin Tim: Right, so up to now, it's mostly been an 'either or' choice. Cost.. safety.. speed etc. Umbrella is here to shake it all up! ?

Sam Kim: We got you covered

Admin Tim: Haha these puns weren't prepared guys!

Sam, through our conversations, I'm sure this has crossed your mind as it is a necessary trait of any good thinker/leader, and I have to ask it.

Do you see any parts of the project that can be improved/better as we ramp up towards launch and the long journey ahead?

Sam Kim: Documentation.

If I had to point out one thing, it is documentation and communicating with technical teams at our validators and developers.

We need to move from internally developing and testing with a couple of very close projects to being more broadly available. And that means we have to document and communicate extremely clearly in order to make the integration seemless.

And this isn't as easy as it sounds. It take a real commitment and a great team to effectively communicate technical details to a broad, global audience.

But I am super confident that we've taken the right first step.

I'd be surprised if anybody thought that would be my answer.

running out of memes

Admin Tim: Meme competition ongoing yeah? We have some great memers (is that what we call them?) here

Sam Kim: yeah, some grat ones. i think a couple of these are from the competition

competition is still open btw

Admin Tim: Indeed. Send me a github and I'm as lost as a sheep. The challenge is to make it accessible to the general community at large and not just for coders to understand.

Okay now, I have a few questions asked by users on Twitter. We had a great response and it was a tough time only picking these!

1st one comes from @Nohope49320791:

Umbrella collects data sources from multiple sources to calculate the most accurate market price, but how do you ensure that the data collected from these sources are of quality and represent reality faithfully? What mechanisms do you use to ensure this?

Sam Kim: Good question.

So we collect data from multiple independent sources. We then go through a sanitizing process. For example, we'll look to see if there's an outlier. If so, we'll drop that one. We also look to see if there are large moves in price in any one data feed. For example, a USD stable coin shouldn't be too far or too below $1. So we put range caps that would basically flag any large moves.

I actually wrote a Cointelegraph op-ed about this topic: https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-data-manipulation-is-too-easy-and-current-oracle-solutions-aren-t-helping-much

Feel free to read that for more in details. 

Admin Tim: I actually did read the op ed and I like this particular bit where you said this.

"Each DeFi project faces a unique and distinct set of variables. Therefore, not all of the

proposed solutions are suitable for each project. A project should consider its unique data

requirements and what compromises are suitable for their needs."

It truly shows you understand what DeFi moving forward needs and I'm full of confidence in you and your team at Umbrella will help to solve these issues.

Sam Kim: TY

Admin Tim: Ok, next question is by @Shabbir30260554

Can you describe about governance model of Umbrella Network ecosystem? Who is in charge of governing the system, what is needed to be eligible for being authorized? On what kind of decisions can they vote on about the Umbrella Network project?

Sam Kim: Obviously the decentralized governance isn't live yet. We haven't done the IDO yet. So that's the first step. Getting the tokens in your hands.

After that, as I mentioned, we'll begin our long path to decentralized governance.

In our system, there will be a committee that is selected by token holders. Basically, whoever you stake your tokens with will be your representative in governance.

You might choose your validator because they perform the best financially for you. Or because of their primary language. Or because you align with them on issues of governance.

Ultimately that council or what we call The Commission will serve as a board to make decisions ranging from financial, product roadmap, data sources and much more. Just about everything

Admin Tim: A commission. Now it really does remind me of the Netflix show, Umbrella Academy

Sam Kim: There's a slightly different reason for calling it the commission. My profile pic is a bit of a clue

Admin Tim: heh. Ok I picked this last question because it honestly made me laugh when I read it. I'd like to have the last question before we open the group up for community questions to be one that puts a smile on our faces.

By @Anurag34887658

Where does the name come from? Does it have any inspiration? or it help to solve problems in crypto like umbrella help to avoid rain

Sam Kim: hahaha. Yes, umbrella does protect from acid rain.

Honestly, we think an oracle must do more than just move data from one source to the blockchain. It must serve as protection by ensuring the data quality. Making sure the data isn't manipulated or corrupted.

And we do that with our network of validators and community members. And that's what the nodes that make up the frame in our logo represents.

Community Member: As crypto users we don't want to lose our assets to some scam projects that run away and disappear with our money so why should we invest in the Umbrella as a long-term investment?

Sam Kim: I think this is important to answer given we're about to do our IDO on Polkastarter.

This is the thing I hate most about crypto. I hate the rug pulls, the scams and the people who lie to all the great members of our community. That's simply bullshit.

So to mitigate this, my team and I paid for the initial costs ourselves. That includes lawyers who are incredibly expensive and initial software development. Only after we were confident did we take external money. So you will see, and Tim can attest, that we've been doing this for a long time and our product has been progressing. We're on a private testnet that we will open up externally in the very near future.

I am very public about who I am and will not jeopardize my reputation.

And finally, we are doing a very small IDO in order to keep your risk to a minimum. But if you stick with us, your UMB holdings will increase because over 30% of our tokens will be distributed via staking rewards.

Community Member: Give me the strongest advantage if an investor decides to invest in this project?

Sam Kim: I'm going to rephrase that question a little bit. Why should you buy our tokens and hold it?

So data is or will be the largest market in the world.

And so oracles will continue to grow for a long long time. In blockchain, we're just starting to see the value of oracles and the services they provide. Umbrella is an opportunity to get in early on this incredible wave and momentum we will see.

This was sent to me this morning by a community member.

You would be getting in on the ground floor, accumulating more UMB via rewards and watching it grow in value as our usage increases. That's all the time i have right now. But please join our telegram where we can answer any additional questions