The Progression of Technology with Sam Kim, founding partner of Umbrella Network

Today we’re talking to Sam Kim, founding partner of Umbrella Network. In 2013 Sam started a mobile ad tech company called Gimbal where he had a brilliant employee that stopped being productive. All he wanted to talk about was bitcoin. Sam was curious to know about what was drawing his employee away from work, and so he attended a meet-up to learn more. Everyone there was so passionate that Sam went home and immediately did more research. Sam says he loved the idea of decentralization but didn’t see a career in it for himself, especially with Gimbal doing so well, so he put it in the back of his mind. In 2017 Ethereum came on the scene and a friend introduced him to how smart contracts work. Sam realized it could solve a lot of problems in the digital advertising space. He thought they could create a shared ledger and so Lucidity was started. Lucidity is blockchain-audited media for greater transparency. Fast-forward to his newest endeavor, Umbrella Network, which collects data from multiple sources to calculate the most accurate price in the market. Umbrella Network is a community owned decentralized oracle. Blockchain apps can’t pull data directly from API’s like traditional apps. Oracle provides that tool of on-boarding data from traditional sources and making that available on blockchain, securely. Sam says it needs to be scalable and data needs to be current and accurate. They anchor data on the chain, and you can be confident the data is what was agreed on during consensus. By doing this, they drastically lower the cost of on-chain data. For one blockchain transaction, instead of a one to one, they’re doing thousands to one. With low-cost data they’re also able to update more frequently, getting the most accurate, current, and secure data. Outside of Umbrella, Sam says he’s excited about the progression of technology. He says it’s like in 2012 when mobile was all 3g, data was limited, and band length was slow, then came LTE. Data was made much cheaper, it was an explosion of innovation. More and more apps took advantage of LTE and the cheaper data. Sam says we’re in a similar time frame today when it comes to blockchain. He’s excited to see what app developers come up with. To learn more, visit www.umb.network. They can also be found on Telegram and Twitter.