Introduction

Hello to everyone.

Our topic this week is Blockchain Oracle. In his lecture, the professor gave a detailed lecture on ChainLink, one of the blockchain Oracle projects. Likewise, he asked us to process another Oracle project, and I will inform you about Band Protocol, a Blockchain Oracle project, in my post.

For those who have not read the professor's lecture before starting our assignments, I will first briefly talk about what is Blockchain Oracle.

Blockchain Oracle

Blockchains are growing on their own databases day by day. In order for data from any outside world to interact with a blockchain, data from the outside world must be entered manually. This manual process is very slow and prone to human error. Oracle, on the other hand, allows blockchains to interact in real time with everyday objects, including smart devices and other digital information.

Smart contracts can work with data in the blockchain, such as Bitcoin transactions or manually entered data. But smart contracts; results of football matches, temperature values, etc. It does not interact with events that take place outside the chain, and cannot work in harmony.

Oracle, on the other hand, takes real-world data that happens off-chain and makes it available in a blockchain system. For example, let's say that there is a presidential election, let's say that we use our votes with smart contracts. That's where an Oracle system comes into play, pulls digital data from websites for the Presidential election and can truly verify the election winner.

Why is Oracle Important?

We just gave an example of selection. Let's give an example of betting now; Imagine a football match and let's say you are betting on a football match. Imagine making use of smart contracts for this bet. Again at this point, the Oracle system comes into play; It can collect the data of the bet from sports websites, then it determines the winning bets and the contract is activated for the winners of the bet. The winners of the bet receive their winnings automatically. After the result is clear, the people you bet on can object to the announced result, but the winners will still receive their prize. This system is called the unreliable system, it is one of the principles of bitcoin.

Oracle also allows smart contracts to access a much wider information system, enabling smart contracts to be connected to APIs.
In ore, any user makes a request on the blockchain. Specific nodes are then selected to receive this data. This off-chain data is collected and then fed back to the blockchain. So Oracle; It receives the information that needs to be obtained from an external source, reinterprets this information and filters it with smart contracts in a way that the blockchain can understand.

Oracle makes smart contracts available in many ways. E.g; Stock Inventory; When the amount of products we have decreases, new goods can be ordered automatically thanks to the smart contract. supply chains; With the help of sensors, when a new product arrives, it can be informed that the product has arrived thanks to smart contracts. It can be used in many other areas such as the examples we have given.

Quesiton 1

History and Description. Does it have any token or cryptocurrency associated? Explain.

Although Band Protocol has been on the market for a while, it has switched to its own network in recent years. In this way, he established many new partnerships. Some of those; ICON and Elrond. It also has its own token called BAND and has started to be listed on famous exchanges such as Coinbase and Houbi.

It is normal for a coin to increase its value at high rates when the market is bull, but when the market is stagnant, a coin can increase its price by as much as 10x, which can greatly surprise investors. This has been the case for the BAND token, and it has managed to attract attention. Some investors have seen this as manipulation, but this is not the case for BAND. Huge steps have been taken towards the future and it has started to use its own network, so the sudden increase in its price should not be considered strange.

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Band Protocol Establishment

Soravis, a Stanford graduate, is a name that has managed to be included in Forbes' list of 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30. This project was born as an idea of ​​Soravis. Working with Boston Consulting Group before, Soravis gained a lot of knowledge and made many initiatives during this process.

In 2014, MIT distributed $100 worth of Bitcoin to students who filled out a survey. It was around this time that Soravis first met with cryptocurrencies and thus learned what Bitcoin is. After that, they met with a few of their friends and established the gambling platform based on the Bitcoin project. In this way, he started the construction of Band Protocol and we can say that he gained the necessary funds for this project from the cryptocurrency world. After quitting his job at Boston Consulting Group, he gathered his teammates and really started the construction of the project.

According to Soravis, as a community grew, its quality decreased. The reason for this was that the spread of false information very easily and quickly and the limited accessibility were among the main reasons for this. Therefore, the Band Protocol was first developed to provide the correct flow of information. The first version was built on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017, and the Ethereum ERC-20 token called BAND was created at the same time.

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Band Protocol's CEO, Soravis Srinawakoon, is a former software engineer at Ericsson and a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Paul Chonpimai is the CPO of Band Protocol and a former website developer at Turfmapp and an engineer at Tripadvisor. Finally, the former software engineer at Dropbox and Quora Sorawit Suriyakarn is best known as the current CTO of Band Protocol and a gold medalist competitive programmer.

In addition to the founding team, there are more than 20, many of which are scattered throughout Asia; It has employees that include designers, developers, and engineers.

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Band Protocol is also backed by major global investors such as Sequoia Capital, Dunamu & Partners, Spartan Group, and Binance.

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Question 2

Functionalities and real-life applications.

Over time, the focus of Band Protocol has been Oracle. In order for DeFi and Dapp systems to develop, they had to be connected to the outside world and needed to receive data from the outside world. If decentralized systems were not connected to the outside world, they would be too closed off and it would be impossible to say anything positive about their future.

Band Protocol has started to create a new Oracle Protocol based on exactly these issues we mentioned. This protocol was designed to be fast, secure and low cost. As a result, BAND emerged as part of the Cosmos Network.

Band Protocol describes itself as a "cross-chain data oracle". Band Protocol creates APIs to retrieve real-world data. Thus, it makes it possible for decentralized applications and smart contracts to collect data. This collected data; data such as weather, stock prices, cryptocurrency prices, flight records. The term “cross-chain” means that it can be used in other projects, not just within the given Ethereum network.

They can be applied in many ways in real life. There was an example of sports betting that we gave before, the real life version of it, the Augur platform is a good example.

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Question 3

Pros and Cons.

Band Protocol Pros

• It creates a bridge between decentralized applications with the outside world and allows them to exchange data. The protocol is compatible with many smart contracts and blockchain developments.
• Band protocol has also been developed to be more efficient and faster than other oracle projects.
• It is resistant to all kinds of attacks and is safe.
• Since it is decentralized, all processes are transparent and traceable.
• Users with Band Tokens have a say on the platform. Also, Band Token holders can earn rewards by authorizing validators they trust.

Band Protocol Cons

• Blockchains do not need third parties or intermediary institutions due to their general structure, and this is what they aim for. However, Oracles projects require 3rd parties to collect data.
• Any manipulation is likely. Decentralized systems therefore prefer to work with more than one Oracle platform.
• In any way, they can be hacked at the stage of data collection and malicious people can use it for their own benefit.
• As DPoS algorithm is used, system performance depends on validator nodes.

Question 4

Future developments and new projects

There is https://medium.com/bandprotocol address where we can follow all developments and new projects about Band Protocol and BAND token.

Example: We can easily see a news on 12 August 2021 on the platform.

“We are excited to collaborate with Crypto.com to bring Band Protocol oracles to Cronos – this marks a significant improvement in existing infrastructure and tools for developers to build highly secure and reliable applications using decentralized oracles.”
Band Protocol CEO and Co-Founder Soravis Srinawakoon.

We can access many news and informative articles about the projects on this platform.

• We can also see many events and updates about the community from this address, as we can see in the screenshot above.

Conclusion

In this post, we shared a lot of information about Blockchain Oracle with you. Later, I made a detailed research about Band Protocol, one of the popular Oracle projects, and tried to share all the details with you.

We all know that the blockchain system is an emerging technology. We are also aware that it has many shortcomings. As time progresses, these deficiencies gradually begin to close. One of these shortcomings is the connection with the outside world and the inability to collect data. In this sharing, we have seen how these deficiencies are tried to be overcome with oracle projects and they are eliminated in terms of many issues.

Thank you very much to professor @allbert for this nice lesson. Also, thank you to everyone who read my post. I wish you all a healthy and beautiful day.

CC: @steemitblog @allbert