Glossary

This serves as the glossary for words casually used in Umbrella products and documentation to help new developers up to speed with this side of world.

DeFi

DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance, the group of applications being built on mostly Ethereum and other upcoming blockchains which offer a parallel stack in Finance like lending, trading, borrowing, etc on decentralized infrastructure. Popular DeFi apps are Uniswap, Compound, and Aave.

Oracle

Oracles are the source of truth in DeFi world. They bring the data from the outside world to the blockchain world. Data such as the price of oil barrels or the price of stocks can enable building decentralized applications which leverage such data.

ERC20

The ERC20 is a standard on which most of the tokens are built and distributed on the Ethereum blockchain. There are new and more advanced standards that are still ERC-20 compatible. Umbrella Network's native token: UMB is ERC20 compatible token.

Staking

Staking is the process via which Umbrella holders can delegate their tokens to Validators to earn rewards. Tokens can be staked anytime or unstaked anytime.

Validators

Validators bring outside world data and submit it to the Consensus algorithm of Umbrella to earn fees. The financial rewards are aligned such that Validators earn UMB tokens by providing correct data. i.e. the data which is in consensus with other validators and finally accepted.

Slashing

Slashing is the process via which the Validators who are behaving incorrectly may get penalized to ensure that they are acting correctly. Behaving correctly implies that their data is in sync with other validators.

Kovan

Kovan is one of the Ethereum's testnet.

Ropsten

Ropsten is one of the Ethereum's testnet.