Umbrella Network Launches Public Testnet

Decentralized oracle solution Umbrella Network has released its public testnet in preparation for its mainnet launch, scheduled for a summer release, the platform said in a press release shared with The Chain Bulletin on 15 March.

According to the announcement, the newly-released public testnet will help users experience Umbrella’s “much-needed” oracle solution for the current decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. The public testnet will not only showcase the network’s readiness to power a wide variety of DeFi applications, but also gather valuable feedback from the community on how Umbrella can incorporate more data points as rapidly as possible. A founding partner of Umbrella Network, Sam Kim, said in a statement:

“This is an important step in the process as we will be taking all of that community feedback and aggressively implementing the relevant parts of it so we can successfully get to mainnet by the summer.”

While still in the process of integrating, major validators HashQuark and InfinityStone will participate in Umbrella’s public testnet, which will offer four data sources and more than 750 data pairs. The testnet will also provide feeds to, among others, Polkacover, MahaDAO, YOP Finance, Bridge Mutual, Hedget, APYSwap and BoringDAO. Umbrella also claimed in its press release that its pricing data will be at the level of sophistication required by Wall Street traders.

Umbrella — a layer 2 community-owned oracle network — further said it is able to write multiple data points on a single on-chain transaction, thanks to its proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and its “Merkle Tree that is rolled up and anchored to Ethereum”.

Back in February, Umbrella was able to raise 72.5 ETH through its initial DEX offering (IDO) on Polkastarter, a cross-chain DEX designed to facilitate token auctions and pools. The IDO also showed the public’s interest in the Umbrella project, with around 110,000 applicants having signed up for just 1,000 whitelist spots. Umbrella said in a blog post that 2.5 million of its UMB tokens were sold out in just 4 minutes during the IDO.