Decentralized finance (DeFi) oracle Umbrella Network, which acts as a bridge between smart contracts and off-chain data feeds, is shifting its base from Ethereum to relatively low-cost smart contract platform Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
"Integrating with BSC offers Umbrella multiple advantages when compared to working on other platforms, including transaction fees that are over 90% lower than what is incurred on Ethereum," the company said in an announcement on Monday. "For example, while the Ethereum transaction to get a data point onchain might cost $50, that same transaction might only cost 50 cents via BSC."
So, with the BSC integration, Umbrella Network can run frequent data updates and provide the most current price for smart contracts using its feeds.
BSC has been on a tear of late, having surpassed Ethereum in daily unique active wallets and transaction count early this year. Ethereum has become a victim of its own success, with record activity leading to network congestion and high transaction costs and increased demand for rival blockchains, layer 2 sidechains.
On Saturday, BSC processed 7.3 million transactions, nearly six times greater than Ethereum's tally of 1.42 million, according to data source BscScan.com.
Per DeBank, PancakeSwap, the top BSC-based decentralized exchange, now has a total value locked of nearly $10.4 billion, making it bigger than the top three Ethereum-based DeFi protocols – Uniswap, Compound and DeFi.
"From our first product roadmap, we have planned to integrate into BSC, and the timing couldn't be better, given the platform's exploding ecosystem," Umbrella's founding partner Sam Kim said.
Some researchers have recently voiced concerns about possible centralization on BSC, as the smart contract platform relies on just 21 validators selected daily to approve transactions. Meanwhile, ether has more than 125,000 validators, data source BeaconScan shows.
Umbrella Network, however, said it is confident that the shift to the less decentralized BSC will facilitate faster decentralization of its own network.
"Lower operating costs on BSC will allow Umbrella to move faster toward its goals of full decentralization by giving more members of the community the opportunity to participate as validators almost immediately," Kim noted in the press release. "On Ethereum, that network's prohibitive costs required node operators to have large capital bases to operate effectively."
The oracle network plans to use the savings generated from the shift to BSC to deepen its data library. "The low-cost structure enables Umbrella to add more data points to the industry-leading 1,000+ data pairs already available via the Umbrella Network," Kim said.
The migration kicks off Umbrella's "BSC Month" event, during which the oracle network will announce new partnerships with more than 10 BSC-based projects, beginning this week with the first three: Smoothy, BlockBank and UnoRe.
In addition, Umbrella Network recently signed partnerships with cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, and Asia-based infrastructure provider HashQuark. In the future, the project envisions interoperability with other layer 1 platforms, including Avalanche, Solana, Polkadot and others, according to the press release.