Band Protocol up more than 250% following Coinbase Pro approval

The Band Protocol (BAND) is a platform designed to connect decentralized applications to real-world data sources through the use of smart contract powered data oracles.

Coinbase Pro announced on August 6th it would be listing the platform’s native BAND token. The BAND Price soared by ~267% in the week prior to listing and currently has a market cap of ~US$305 million. Coinbase Pro began trading BAND at 9am Pacific Time on August 11th. Initial pairs are BAND-USD, BAND-EUR, BAND-GBP and BAND-BTC. Trading has been steady since launch with BAND up 16% in the 24 hours prior to 3pm PST on August 12th.

BAND will only be available on Coinbase Pro and will not be available via Coinbase’s consumer mobile apps or at Coinbase.com at this time.

Data oracles are off-chain third-party information sources that supply data to blockchains, which can then be used to trigger predefined actions in smart contracts. The project raised ~US$10.5 million in funding through a Binance Launchpad Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) and private sales.

The Band protocol [whitepaper](https://docs.bandchain.org/whitepaper/) states that “the majority of existing smart contract platforms, while supporting trustless executions of arbitrary programs, lack access to real-world data. This limitation hinders the maximum potential of such contracts. BandChain was created to solve this issue by connecting public blockchains with these real-world, off-chain information.”

The Band protocol operates on the native BandChain, a public blockchain that is built on top of the Cosmos SDK. It utilizes the Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm built by Tendermint to reach transaction finality. The BandChain was launched on June 10th, 2020. Network validators are required to stake BAND tokens and the network designates validators to provide data using an algorithm that randomly selects them based on weighted-stake.

The BandChain oracle system begins with data sources, these are pieces of code that describe the procedure to retrieve raw data points from a set of primary sources. These primary sources can either be a traditional API or any other source that returns the desired result. When a user requests data from BandChain’s oracle, they do not interact or call the data sources directly. Instead, they call oracle scripts. These are executable programs that encode the set of raw data requests to the sources it needs and aggregates raw data reports into the final result.

A blog post suggests that the reason the Band protocol uses oracle scripts that are decoupled from data sources is threefold. It reduces the amount of data required to be stored on BandChain, allows data sources to be reused for other scripts, and allows data source owners of permissioned APIs to collect fees irrespective of the oracle script or DApps that use it.

The Band Protocol’s native BAND token serves a number of purposes within its ecosystem. Holders can accumulate tokens in order to become validators, they can delegate holdings to another validator to earn a portion of their collected fees and inflationary rewards, tokens are also required to participate in the platform’s governance and validators set a fee in BAND for processing transactions which acts as their reward for performing their network role.

On August 5th, BAND and the Elrond network announced that they would be extending an existing partnership. The deal will involve a number of integrations including Creating off-chain price feeds for crypto prices, foreign exchange rates, and commodity trading price on Elrond apps and generalizing price feeds to make them available across shards on the Elrond network.

Benjamin Mincu, the CEO of Elrond, states that “Cross-chain data availability will accelerate DeFi and wider decentralized applications being built on Elrond, while off-chain data will open the door for a multitude of potent business applications. We’re impressed by the capabilities of the Band Protocol team as well as the increased security and scalability of their oracles — making it an obvious oracle solution for Elrond developers who are building with focus on scalability.”

On August 6th, Coinbase pro revealed that it had approved the Band protocol for trading on its platform. On Monday, August 10th, Coinbase Pro is accepting inbound transfers of BAND. The blog post announcing the launch explains that once a sufficient supply of BAND has been reached training on the BAND-USD, BAND-BTC, BAND-EUR, and BAND-GBP order books will launch in four phases, transfer-only, post-only, limit-only and full trading.

Prior to this, in July, the Band protocol collaborated with the Waves platform (WAVES) based Defi project Neutrino (USDN). The Band Protocol will provide price feeds for collateral assets such as WAVES/USD.

Neutrino is an algorithmic stablecoin, similar to dai (DAI) that allows users to use WAVES tokens as collateral to mint USDN, a stablecoin pegged to 1 USD. It is suggested that BAND was selected to ensure that Neutrino smart contracts do not query data that could be potentially delayed and susceptible to price fluctuations or manipulation.

As part of the partnership, Neutrino will be using Band Protocol to query the WAVES/USD price feed from five unique sources CoinGecko, Binance, OKEx, Huobi, Kraken, and CryptoCompare with verification on the BandChain. Price updates are pushed to the Waves blockchain by default every hour or when there is a 0.5% price deviation.