We caught up with the founders of the London-based multi-chain bridging project Umbria Network, led by brothers Oscar and Barney Chambers.
Umbria recently entered the Polygon Accelerator program in a vote of confidence for the its unique liquidity-based bridging solution – its Narni protocol, which you can read more about in the third part of this interview on blockchain interoperability and much more.
This is the second of a three-part series of interviews. below we discuss with the Umbria founders making implementing bridging solutions a single line code solutions, DEXs, centralisation and regulation, the rise of Binance Smart Chain and keeping a close eye on Solana.
You can read more about Binance Coin (BNB) and Binance Smart Chain in our article on the 12 most promising cryptocurrency to invest in 2022.
Winning plaudits from the Polygon community for keeping it simple
Oscar: “We have a referral scheme right now where if you integrate our widget onto your website, any volume that goes through the bridge the entity that integrates the widget get 0.1% of that volume.
“Copy and paste one line of code into their website and the iframe will pop up for their users.”
Cryptoassets are a highly volatile unregulated investment product.
Barney: We think the iframe is definitely a very underrepresented as far as integrations are concerned. It seems like the standard way for APIs and integrations is to go to a website, get a referral key and then build and API and interface from scratch.
We think if you can remove all of that – get the developer fluff out of it – just give someone a very simple html iframe, then copy-paste that in and it will work, that is definitely a very powerful technique. It is not really used that much.
So why don’t most projects use this iframe plug in approach – it is so easy.?
“I think there are some technical limitations when integrating an iframe when compared to building your own customisable solution. So for example an iframe is not very brandable.
It would be easier to brand if the developer could just integrate the API in some way that they wanted to do it. So I guess there is a trade-off between how much customisability do you want and how much ease of integration you want.
Oscar: We just want to provide our own user experience that we think is really good and refine it and make it amazing and then give it to other people.
A lot of people in the crypto space, who are deploying NFTs, deploying crypto, they’re actually not that technical.
They are just trying to integrate crypto into a broader picture to solve a specific problem and don’t necessarily want to be bogged down by something that’s super technical. Especially with NFTs.
A lot of people out there who have deployed NFT projects, they are not particularly interested in the technical side of things
Moving on – you are building a relationship with QuickSwap, which is essentially the UniSwap of the Polygon network
Oscar: We are trying to build a partnership with QuickSwap and to get them to integrate our widget.
Because what we’ve found is that as we have expanded to more and more partners, the ones that are the most beneficial for the community and the most fruitful for everyone involved, seems to be the DEXs and the DeFi.
They are the ones that are moving large amounts of volume between tokens. We are focused now on building partnership with big DEXs and DeFi platforms.
Barney: When we were in the earlier stages of this project and we weren’t very well known, for some of the bigger players we might have seemed a little but risky for them to implement us.
However, now we have expanded – especially on Polygon where we have about 60 different partner – we are definitely starting to feel like some of the larger more well established well funded platforms are looking at us and starting to say, ‘oh this might be interesting for us’.
For information on where to buy Polygon read our beginner’s guide.
DEXs have overtaken CEX in on-chain transactions. What part does Umbria want to play in making is easy for consumers to onboard to DEXs and other Web3 applications?
Barney: The great thing about DEXs and decentralised finance is it’s all public on a blockchain, so there’s no – or there’s not as much – manipulation on the values.
And [centralised] exchange can quote easily wash trades and things like that, to make their volume look incredibly high.
