Band Protocol was founded in 2017 by Soravis Srinawakoon, Paul Chonpimai and Sorawit Suriyakarn.

Soravis Srinawakoon, the current CEO of Band Protocol, is a former software engineer at Ericsson and management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Paul Chonpimai, on the other hand, is Band Protocol's CPO, and a former web developer at Turfmapp and engineer at Tripadvisor. Lastly, former software engineer at Dropbox and Quora Sorawit Suriyakarn is Band Protocol's current CTO and a gold medalist competitive programmer.

In addition to the founding team, the Band Protocol LinkedIn page currently lists a total of 20 additional employees, most of which are scattered throughout Asia, and include designers, developers and engineers. The platform is also supported by major global investors, including Sequoia Capital, Dunamu & Partners, Spartan Group and Binance.

Band Protocol is designed to be faster and more efficient than competing oracle solutions and is also compatible with most blockchain and smart contract development frameworks — ensuring reliable data can be fed to and from multiple different blockchains.

To achieve its cross-chain data transfer, Band Protocol plans to leverage Cosmos' still in-development Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. It remains unclear how long it will take until the IBC is operational and ready for use.

Band Protocol is designed to offer permissionless oracle creation, allowing anybody to start servicing data requests. It also offers extremely simple smart contract integration, allowing developers to begin using data from Band Protocol oracles with just a few lines of code by calling on a predefined interface.

Band Protocol originally released the BAND token following an initial exchange offering (IEO) on the Binance Launchpad in September 2019. A total of 27.37% of the total supply was sold across three token sale rounds (seed, private, and public sale).

The total supply of BAND is capped at 100 million tokens. Of this, just over 20% (20.49 million tokens) were in circulation as of November 2020.

Overall, a total of 20% of the BAND token supply is allocated to the team, plus a further 5% to its advisors. 25.63% is allocated to the Band Protocol ecosystem. Based on the projected emission rate, a total of 100% of the total supply should be in circulation by 2025 at the earliest

Though BAND tokens were previously based on the ERC-20 standard, they were recently relaunched as native BAND tokens on the Band Protocol mainnet (known as BandChain).

Holders of the older tokens are able to complete a 1:1 swap by depositing their ERC-20 BAND tokens to Binance, and then withdrawing them as native tokens. This will be necessary to participate in BAND staking — which is only available for mainnet tokens.

Based on the Cosmos' SDK, BandChain is secured by a Byzantine fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm, which protects it against attacks. This works in combination with a delegated proof of stake (dPOS) setup, which secures the network’s oracles and allows BAND holders to earn staking rewards for delegating their stake to nodes.

BAND was first tracked on public exchanges by CoinMarketCap in September 2019. Since then, it has been listed on a wide range of platforms, including several tier 1 exchanges — like Binance, Coinbase Pro and OKEx.

The vast majority of BAND trading pairs are against Tether (USDT) and Bitcoin (BTC), but BAND can also be traded against several fiat currencies, including GBP, USD and EUR on Coinbase Pro. For more information about buying cryptocurrency as a beginner, read our comprehensive guide.

Read about Chainlink (LINK) — a competing Oracle provider built on Ethereum.

Learn about Cosmos (ATOM) — the blockchain which Band Protocol is built on.

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