Interview | Barney and Oscar Chambers, Co-Lead developers at Umbria DeFi platform

Barney and Oscar Chambers, can you tell us about Umbria and what it hopes to achieve in the DeFi space?

Umbria is an opensource project on a mission to demystify and simplify DeFi and get people earning income on their crypto. The accessibility of current DeFi platforms is limited to those with expertise in cutting edge cryptocurrency technology, which means beginners entering the space and those without a high level of technical expertise are mainly precluded. Our aim is to change that by removing barriers to entry and creating a user-friendly experience so that decentralised finance is open to anyone.

One of the initial features of Umbria is that it will allow users to deposit cryptocurrency as liquidity in automated market making pools (AMM) to earn fees/interest from token swapping and earn additional Umbria as an incentive for providing liquidity.

What will set you apart from other DeFi platforms?

We’ve partnered with Polygon (formerly Matic), which is a great first step for solving many of the issues in DeFi. Polygon provides scalable, secure and instant Ethereum transactions. It is one of the most active layer-2 Ethereum scaling solutions in existence today. This means fast, low-cost transactions for the end user.

We have UK publicly listed company Online Blockchain plc (LON:OBC) acting as our coordinator, administrator and advisor. This means the project couples the innovative spirit of the DeFi universe with the expertise and credibility of a well-established tech company. As a stock market listed company, Online Blockchain provides a level of transparency rare in the crypto and DeFi space.

You recently launched your governance token. Can you tell us more about that?

The Umbria utility governance token will allow users in the network to take control over decision-making and have voting power over the development of Umbria's protocol. It went live on UniSwap on January 25th so now anyone can buy UMBR on the Uniswap platform and add liquidity to the UMBR-ETH liquidity pool to earn fees. We’re delighted with the response from the community so far.

The Uniswap pool marked the first dispersal of the currency with an initial limited supply of 500,000 tokens (the maximum total supply of is Umbria is capped at 10,000,000).

The second dispersal of Umbria is coming up soon with our first airdrop.

When is the airdrop and how many governance tokens will you be airdropping?

Our first airdrop of 100,000 UMBR is on April 2nd, 2021. It’s a very exciting time and a great way of rewarding our early supporters.

Anyone holding UMBR or UMBR-ETH Liquidity Pool tokens (minimum 100 UMBR or 2 UMBR-ETH LP) on March 1st, 2021 will be able to participate in the airdrop. They simply have to visit airdrop.umbria.network and press the “Claim Airdrop” button to get their share. The tokens will then be distributed directly into their Metamask wallets on April 2nd. The airdrop will be on chain facilitated by Ethereum Smart Contracts.

What next for Umbria?

Users of Umbria will soon be able to swap tokens and earn interest on their cryptocurrency positions on the Umbria website itself with other facilities coming online (via developers and community initiatives) which will utilise the Umbria protocol and its utility token.
The next step for Umbria is to release the staking portion of the DeFi platform. We plan to have a fully released system with staking, liquidity mining, swapping and more by the end of 2021. Keep an eye out for further airdrops and lucrative bounty programs along the way.

View the Litepaper DEFI LIGHTPAPER V1.2.1.pdf or head over to the Umbria Discord channel, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages to find out more about the project.