IBC-Enabled Umee Blockchain Integrates Chainlink Oracles for ATOM Pricing

We’re excited to announce that Umee has integrated Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle service provider, making it Umee’s official oracle.

Umee is a cross-chain DeFi hub that connects with the broader Cosmos and web3 ecosystem through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) standard. This capability allows liquidity and functionality across Cosmos SDK DeFi to flow from multiple other chains through Umee, opening up a wide range of potential dApp use cases.

By integrating Chainlink Price Feeds, we’re providing our users with highly secure and reliable ATOM price data to help ensure that DeFi functions execute according to premium, aggregated market data. This strong data security layer helps to make numerous other DeFi capabilities secure, even when they move across IBC-enabled blockchains.

To expand upon just how critical Chainlink Price Feeds are to the Umee platform, think about the potential for IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication). Umee is built as a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain, allowing any IBC-enabled chain to communicate with other chains seamlessly. Chainlink provides a secure, decentralized method to provide aggregate market data to all chains involved, acting as an oracle of record when smart contracts across chains need agreement. In addition to the availability of Chainlink price oracles for Umee DeFi, as Umee is a base-layer blockchain, any future apps that build upon our infrastructure will also benefit from Chainlink Price Feeds!

Blockchain applications that need data from outside of a blockchain require blockchain oracles because smart contracts can’t access that data on their own. Developers face a connectivity issue when deploying their selected smart contract because the smart contract cannot connect to APIs and off-chain data. This structure also presents a potential attack vector when apps rely on data from off-chain to transfer value. To address this, Chainlink provides a decentralized oracle network model where hundreds of prices are aggregated by numerous independent nodes and are then aggregated further into a single tamper- and outlier-resistant market price. This also leads to a reliable system highly resistant to any downtime.

After reviewing other blockchain oracle solutions, we made Chainlink our recommended oracle because of numerous features, including:

• High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that’s aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and suspicious volumes. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates more precise global market prices that are resistant to API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation attacks like flash loans.
• Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises with a strong track record for reliability, even during high gas prices and extreme network congestion.
• Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or the oracle network.
• Transparency — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical performance of node operators and oracle networks, as well as check the real-time prices being offered.
• Economy of Scale — Chainlink Price Feeds benefit from an economy of scale effect, where increasing adoption allows multiple projects to collectively use and fund shared oracle networks to fetch commonly required datasets (e.g. ATOM/USD). This allows DeFi projects to get premium data quality and robust oracle security for a fraction of the total cost.

Brent Xu, Umee founder and CEO, echoes the necessity of Chainlink and what it means for Umee’s future: “Chainlink is the most reliable price oracle provider in the crypto space. With Umee’s vision to be a base-layer cross-chain DeFi hub, we expect to have a full-scale integration with Chainlink to enable us to connect multiple blockchains together, and integrating the ATOM Price Feed is just the first step on our roadmap.”

As Umee lays the foundations for making our cross-chain DeFi hub as accurate and secure as possible, we cannot wait for all of our users to experience it. The eventual goal of Umee is to connect the $100 billion worth of value built on Cosmos with the broader DeFi ecosystem. Exciting times!

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or read the documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.