Launching the Band Standard Dataset
By: Sawit Trisirisatayawong
Tags: Launch, Decentralization, Defi, Blockchain Development, Technology

As Band Protocol continues to rapidly scale our integration and partnerships across the various blockchain platforms and applications, we are proud to announce the official launch of the Band Standard Dataset — an exhaustive reference price dataset with frequent updates and comprehensive, customizable feeds. With expansive support for crypto assets, commodities and foreign exchange rates, the Band Standard Dataset covers a growing set of 100+ price feeds for any decentralized finance protocol to readily-integrate. Join the growing list of DeFi and dApps that are using Band Protocol standard dataset to enhance the security of your smart contracts.

👉 Build using the Band Standard Dataset today!

Price feeds underpin the majority of decentralized finance (DeFi) Protocols that exist today. The notional amount of value secured by DeFi continues to rise at an unprecedented rate, recently surpassing $15B among industry verticals such as lending, derivatives, synthetic assets, decentralized exchange, and stablecoins.

The all too common blockchain ‘oracle problem’ involves the reliability, security, and trustworthiness of third-party oracles and the trustless execution of smart contracts. Nevertheless, it is still habitual for many protocols to use bandaid solutions that come in the form of centralized or internal mechanisms which have the risks of ongoing maintenance costs, single points of failure, low-quality data, and lack of redundancy on both data source and validator layers.

For developers who prioritize performance and scalability, Band Protocol, a decentralized oracle network, has become the long-term solution to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in value locked up in smart contracts as seen in just Mirror Protocol and Fantom alone.

Before we shine a light on the Band Standard Dataset, let’s run through the two main requirements that a cutting-edge DeFi application needs:

Developers Require Comprehensive, Extensible, and Customizable Feeds

The critical aspect we have learned from our conversations with over 90+ projects, it’s that no two protocols’ data requirements are ever the same. However, the majority of the price oracle solutions today are still extremely restrictive with predetermined datasets or unscalable procedures to create a custom oracle including curating and auditing your own set of trusted validators.

In addition to the relatively small number of supported tokens, the popular feeds provided by many oracles are also meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution, with little to no room for customization in parameters such as update time, price deviation, or security.

The lack of token support is especially detrimental to any protocols looking to support relatively newer or less popular tokens including their own. In those cases, they would have to either have to request and wait for the third-party oracle to support the token, or use centralized oracle implementation for different assets — neither of which is desirable due to major risk factors.

DeFi Deserves Frequent and In-Time Updates

Another key pain point that we have identified is that majority of other oracles update very intermittently — this is with the possible exception of the few most used feeds such as BTC and ETH.

This shortcoming is due to the economics of actually pushing the price data on-chain combined with the associated transaction and network fees. While there are often percentage price deviation mechanics in place to aid with keeping the on-chain price updated, this is often unchangeable once the feed is live or requires a full redeployment where validators must be migrated along with underlying decentralized applications.

Introducing The Band Standard Dataset

With all of that in mind, we are thrilled to introduce the Band Standard Dataset. This dataset comprises a number of price feeds aimed at allowing developers to have the greatest diversity and flexibility in the price feed while maintaining the highest data quality and accessibility possible.