Recap AMA Umbrella x Vietnam Coin Market Community

12 min readJan 10, 2021

Mr Hubert: Hello everyone,

Only 13 minutes left and the AMA event of UMBRELLA will be started

The representative for Vietnam Coin Market (VCM) is Admin Owner @taitan296 who will run AMA and UMBRELLA’s representative is @kimsamjoo.

Translator: @nguyetvcm

Vietnam Coin Market Group (VCM) will be locked to make the event convenient.

After Segment 2 of the Vietnam Coin Market group will be opened a chat so that the community can ask the project.
How’s everything going?

Again, it’s been my greatest pleasure to announce today’s special AMA session

“UMBRELLA”

Today’s AMA session is composed of 4 parts:

1 — Say hello, introduce the project

2 — AMA moderator asks the project 4 questions that will be selected first)

3 — Ask the community (unmute the channel and let the community ask questions freely on telegram. Then the guests will choose about 10 good questions to answer)

4 — Quiz — Give 5 quizzes to the community to answer

Please like, follow, and retweet this tweet: https://twitter.com/UmbNetwork/status/1347790462946471938

Please join the Umbrella Vietnam group:

https://t.me/umbrellanetVN

https://t.me/UmbrellanetVN_ann

and international group:

Telegram: @umbrellanet

Channel Telegram: @umbnetannouncement

Craving for the question rain ahead after I unmute the group.

Anyway, let’s get the curtain roll-up and welcome @kimsamjoo.

Mr Sam Kim: Xin Chao everybody. It’s my pleasure to be here with you guys

Thanks for staying up late and joining this group

Mr Hubert: Hello sir

It’s a pleasure to all of you who participated in the AMA today.

Mrs Nguyet: Hey Sir, Welcome to VCM Community ❤️

Mr Sam Kim: Thank you

Mr Hubert: Could you briefly introduce about yourselves as well as your project?

Mr Sam Kim: Thank you for having me today. I’m really excited to do this AMA with Vietnam’s largest telegram group because I spent 3 of my best years in Vietnam. And so it’d be very meaningful for me to build an Umbrella community here.

I’ve spent the last 10 years building highly performant and scalable products primarily in the digital advertising industry. I was a co-founder and COO of Gimbal, a buy side platform which recently acquired a division of Disney called TrueX. Frustrated by the lack of transparency in digital advertising while working at Gimbal, I decided to apply blockchain technology to build a shared ledger for the advertising industry. And so I started Lucidity where I was a Co-Founder and CEO. Lucidity currently works with traditional brands like Toyota, Hyundai, KFC and our largest client GroupM / WPP.

The underlying technology we used at Lucidity scaled to over 100,000 events per second easily. And so I sought to find other markets that could use the benefits of our technology. And I settled on the oracle market. Current oracles are not scalable, are expensive to operate and therefore they do not make enough data available to blockchain developers.

Umbrella uses a system of Merkle trees to aggregate thousands of pieces of data. If you’re not familiar with Merkle Trees, think of them as binary trees where each block (called a leaf in Merkle tree terminology) stores a key-value pair. So an example would be Key: ETHUSD; Value: 2000. It then rolls up each leaf in the tree via a system of hashing to create a single hash (called a root hash) that is a unique representation of all the data sitting on that tree. With this method, one tx on ethereum is equivalent to storing thousands of pieces of data.

In comparison, leading oracles today take one piece of data and write it on chain. So the cost of writing data on chain is massively more expensive. And in times when gwei is high, validators are bleeding money. This is why current oracles only support limited amounts of data.

With our cost advantage, we will make more data available to our network of developers. We will provide data on middle market cryptocurrencies; provide data on Indexes like the DeFi Pulse Index; options data like implied volatility, realized volatility, Skew and the Greeks; time weighted averages; real world assets like equities and much much more.

Mr Hubert: Welcome!

Looking forward to have our audiences to know more about the project and the views.

Let’s get to the first question we’d like to know from you.

What makes the Umbrella stand out more than the projects in the same direction at the moment?

Mr Sam Kim: Today, blockchain applications must choose between security of data vs liveliness / accuracy of the data. No oracle solution provides both. And that has led to flash loan + oracle manipulation exploits like we saw with Harvest and Compound.

With Umbrella, they will no longer have to make that compromise. They can build applications knowing that Umbrella takes every precaution to ensure the integrity and security of the data. At the same time Umbrella refreshes the data frequently and thus it is accurate.

Mr Hubert: Thank you, we could give some mins for our audiences to read more about the comment.

Everyone is probably excited about this project. We can learn more about the project’s achievements.

What are the memorable milestones of Umbrella in the research and development process?

Mr Sam Kim: 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. In the past couple of months, we hired 2 blockchain developers, 2 backend, 2 front end, an SRE, a UX and a Wall Street Quant. 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.

Mr Hubert: Great. I think a good team will do great things for the project.

Mr Sam Kim: They do the real work. :)

Mr Hubert: We will come to the final Q-A question:

What does Umbrella plan to do to attract more users in the upcoming time?

Mr Sam Kim: First, we have to get our name out there. Umbrella is a product focused project. In fact, one new team member was shocked that I was the only one who wasn’t actively writing code. But that means we haven’t spent a single USDT on marketing until now. So first, we have to introduce ourselves to the world and we’re doing that with AMAs like this around the world, rebuilding our website, announcing some of the great partnerships we have and actively, publishing content and building our community.

For us, community means token stakers, validators and of course the projects that use our system. We’ve allocated tokens to each of the communities and will incentivize participation.

Finally, we will show developers what they can do with Umbrella. Show them what kind of data they have access to and how it can help them innovate and advance the crypto and DeFi industry.

Oh, I should add, our goal is to also distribute our tokens widely so that we have a global community of Umbrella token holders who are our biggest advocates. And so we want to have a thriving community in Vietnam and all other markets. We will only be as strong as the community behind us.

Mr Hubert: Feeling quite excited about this project, sir. I think everyone will love it and support it as well.

The last question is already done. Thank you @kimsamjoo for bringing the above useful information.

Next, the Vietnam Coin Market team (VCM) will open a chat for the community to ask questions to the project. We will have 3 min to ask. The UMBRELLA will then choose 10 questions to answer.

Let’s go!

Now!

Let’s give some mins for @kimsamjoo to choose 10 questions to answer.

@kimsamjoo, you may proceed now.

Mr Sam Kim: OK. Hold on while I read all the questions and select the best 10

Wow, you weren’t joking about letting it rain.
Mr Hubert: Yes sir. It’s quite a question. :))

Question 1. If Umbrella can actually process thousands of transactions for the same price, what would a standard price be? The prices would not depend on the quantity?

So this was the last question. Sofia, we’re writing thousands of different data points on the merkle tree, not referencing thousands of data sources for a single data point. So for example, we will track the top 1000 crypto pairs on Uniswap and store that on the Merkle Tree. For each data pair, we might reference 2 or more data sources. For example, for ETHUSDC, we might look to Cryptocompare, Binance and Uniswap. We will make sure that the three are in line with each other. If there’s a large deviation, we’ll drop the one causing the deviation. Otherwise, we will take the average.

Question 2. What challenges has VietNam Coin Marketing overcome throughout this year since covid 19 has destroyed the economy, what do you offer us as a farming lending system to improve our lives?

First, I’m really sorry to hear that covid19 has hit the economy so hard there. I went to Vietnam many years ago to work for the World Bank hoping to help rural economies. I got to travel everywhere from Cao Bang to the Mekong Delta working with farmers in the sugar cane, rubber and coffee industries. I hope the economy recovers cause I think the spirit of the Vietnamese people is so strong and they will thrive in the future. In terms of what economic program we can offer, token stakers will be rewarded from our reward pool. Token stakers will also get a share of our user fees. Token stakers will participate in governance. And we’ll also choose community members to run validator nodes where they will benefit from the economics of the system.

Question 3. What are you focusing on at the moment? and what is your goals in this year 2021?

As I mentioned earlier, we have a great engineering team. And I am the only one that isn’t actively writing code. So our product is in a good state and on schedule. 2021 is really about shifting to building a community. And so we’re going to produce content, share information, release the product to be used, create bounty programs and build communities like this with leaders like you and everybody here.

Question 4. There are 3 core issues prevalent in crypto and blockchain: Security, Interoperability, and Scalability. How does UMBRELLA plan to overcome these issues?

My team and I started building this sidechain architecture 3 years ago primarily to address the scalability issue. We were operating at over 100K events per second with ease. So I know this architecture scales. For security, that is the benefit we bring as an oracle. For us, an oracle doesn’t just take data from the centralized world and make it available on chain. Oracles must take measures to ensure the quality and security of that data. And that’s why we use multiple data sources for each data we put on chain. We provide TWAP to prevent malicious attacks. And we have internal quality controls to make sure one data source doesn’t create a bad data point. For interoperability, we’re working with a number of partners to make this possible. We’ll be announcing these partnerships in teh coming weeks. So keep an eye out on those. There are great providers now for interoperability.

Question 5. Since Umbrella Network is a community owned platform what are the contributions that I can do in Umbrella Network?

Rahul, I don’t know your background, so I’m not sure I can answer specifically for you. But in general, we have developers, validators and stakers. We have allocated tokens for each group and so there are many ways to participate. For developers, please help test our product, give feedback and join our network. For validators, much the same as developers, but you will hvae to run a node and lead in governance since we’re DPOS. For stakers, be our biggest advocates and let the world know what Umbrella can do to help their project. Also, be active in the governance. Today, I posted a question that our developers and I have been contemplating. It’s great to have a community to help us think things through

Question 6. As community is the trump card for any project to succeed, how will you ensure that community gets its share in governance? Do we need to stake our tokens to get vote or we need to run nodes?

It’s a Delegated Proof of Stake system. So you would stake with one of the validator nodes. We’re bringing in a new team meber next week who is an expert on governance. And our first advisor is Adam Levi, CTO of DAOstack. So we are committed to decentralized governance.

Question 7. How do you finance your project? Did you get enough income? For example, if you had more sources of income, would you go further?

Feranno, We’ve been very careful about where we take money from. The project was initially bootstrapped. That means we self funded. We recently took on capital from a few funds that I know personally and trust or have great reputations. We also gave them an 18 month linear lockup. So they have to be committed to Umbrella for the long term. Finally, we designed the rewards system with a secondary token called rUMB which is redeemable for UMB after 1 year. So folks buying our tokens have to have a long term vision to make sense.

Question 8. I am a big fan of UMB . My question is how UMB will stands tall in such competition of new technology and platforms ? How you impress and attract new investors in Umbrella Network world?

Thanks Lore. We are the only community owned oracle. I think this is our greatest advantage. I believe in community. And I believe the combination of our great product and technology with community ownership will ultimately lead the project to great success

Question 9. Can you give me more information about Layer 2 Merkle Trees? How does it really work and is it safe enough to trust?

Merkle Trees are an incredibly efficient and elegant way to store large amounts of data and transactions on a block. You can 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. At the same time, I can prove whether a Key Value Pair is on that block or not. And I can do this very cost effectively. For a deeper dive, read our Medium post: https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-demo-guide-a38671447c7

Data will ultimately move towards a zero cost environment. Meaning that the true economic cost of a piece of data should approach zero in the long run. And the Merkle Tree gives Umbrella Network an advantage in achieving that goal.

Check out this Medium post for more details: https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-demo-guide-a38671447c7

Question 10. Q.1-Increasing Token price

2- make Token Valuable

3-Building Community Trust

From 3 aspects above,. I want to ask,. Which one the most important for you?

If all above are important for you,. Which one that Will you do first?

Wow, a lot of questions about community. I love that. Building Community Trust comes first. Blockchain is still very early. And there will be many bumps along the way to success. Being transparent and working together with the community will make it possible for us ultimately build a great product, onboard users and together increase the utility of the token. I don’t worry about token price because great product with users and an awesome community will win.

Mr Hubert: Thank you @kimsamjoo for replying to the community.

Mr Sam Kim: cam on nhieu everybody. Was a pleasure being here with you.

Mr Hubert: We will go to Segment 4, the UMBRELLA will ask the question. The person with the fastest correct answer will win.

Each person can only answer 1 time / 1 question

Please join this group to join the Quiz segment: https://t.me/umbrellanetVN

Quiz 1. What is the name of the reward token?

-UMB

-tUMB

-rUMB

-sUMB

Quiz 2. What system does Umbrella use to increase scalability?

-Polkadot

-ETH 2.0

-ZK Rollup

-Merkle Trees

Quiz 3. What consensus mechanism does Umbrella use?

-Delegated Proof of Stake

-Proof of Authority

-Proof of Work

-State Channels

Quiz 4. How many tokens will Umbrella issue?

-100 million

-500 million

-1 billion

-Unlimited

Quiz 5. What is Umbrella’s implied volatility data used for?

-Asset swap

-Index market

-Insurance

-Decentralized options

So the AMA UMBRELLA at Vietnam Coin Market (VCM) is also coming to an end. Hopefully in this direct exchange, the community has a basic understanding of the UMBRELLA. I am the moderator today. Congratulations to the UMBRELLA.

Thanks @kimsamjoo for joining AMA with the VCM community today. Wish you much health and success.

Again, don’t forget to join the UMBRELLA community for further assistance. Thanks everyone.