Omnia Protocol Whitepaper
Nowadays, access to blockchain infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. It is a known fact that these corporations are exploiting the metadata generated by the users that access the blockchain. The reasons are obvious - to gain financial advantages, either by directly selling the data to other parties or by using it to take decisions that ultimately lead to greedy profits.
Moreover, there are blockchain ecosystems (e.g. Ethereum) where almost 90% of decentralized applications and critical systems are connected to the same node provider, leaving them at a high risk of becoming unavailable. In November 2020, a bug within the node software used by the aforementioned centralized node provider caused an Ethereum outage, where major exchanges and wallet providers halted their operations.
Omnia Protocol is a decentralized infrastructure protocol for securely accessing the blockchain, so that no single point of failure will ever disrupt blockchain applications or wallets integrating with it. At the same time, it allows anyone to earn rewards by hosting and maintaining a node on a specific blockchain.
Omnia has a strong focus on privacy which gives you untraceable access to the blockchain.
Most of the privacy aspects in blockchains were addressed within on-chain solutions such as the use of Zero Knowledge Proofs or Ring Signatures. However, when it comes to accessing the blockchain, off-chain privacy concerns are not yet properly addressed with tailored solutions specific to this technology.
With all the decentralization that we witness today, we can definitely say that there are major advantages in different directions: cryptocurrency, trust, distributed applications, and even finance.
The main issue is the fact that the interaction itself with the blockchain is centralized through corporations that act as node providers (e.g. Infura ). This raises the question of hidden flaws and risks, because in the end the chain is as powerful as its weakest link. For example, what if the centralized provider goes rogue and serves you data that is not actually agreed by the chain's consensus ? The decisions that blockchain-connected systems take is based on data, which may be served by actors that act against your best interest.
Reading and writing to blockchain shouldn't be centralized or managed, but rather in a decentralized manner, in which every node (mining/staking or non-mining/staking) should be incentivized to help with the access to blockchain, in a trusted and decentralized way.
Privacy is very important and needs to be embedded in every solution or product, especially in overcomplicated markets such as DeFi.
Most of present solutions that suit the blockchain needs with respect to privacy, are all about the on-chain privacy which allows individuals to anonymously trade, swap, and transact assets on the blockchain. One missed spot and all the anonymity perishes, for example leaking the IP address when sending the transaction to a centralized node provider.
Privacy should be a priority, guaranteed at each phase of the interaction with the blockchain, even when reading or writing data to it.
One may say that the most simple method to connect dApps to the blockchain is to spin off a local node and use that as an entry point. In practice, ramping up such a node is difficult and often requires constant tweaking and maintenance (e.g. security updates) which has a high impact because it distracts innovators from building the actual value-added systems or it raises the costs associated with the extra effort.
The non-mining nodes have no reason or incentive to share their data for general purposes (e.g. accessing JSON RPC interfaces or peer-to-peer syncing). Moreover, in the majority of blockchains there exists the following bias: too many light clients and not enough full nodes to service them all. This has serious consequences to the network's state, and one way to mitigate this is to design the right incentives.
We think that every node should be a part of the Omnia infrastructure and rewarded accordingly for the services they provide.
Also, mining/staking nodes can earn extra revenue beyond block/stake rewards by coupling to Omnia infrastructure in the same way as the non-mining entities would do.
The requests to node providers can be tracked and monitored, creating FUD by exploiting the metadata of each pending transaction. This could also give advantages to traders who buy metadata from centralized points of interactions (e.g. wallets, node providers, etc.)
Omnia infrastructure consists of blockchain nodes and privacy relayers which act as decentralized API gateways for accessing the blockchain.
These roles are not mutually exclusive. However, if one entity is both relayer and node owner then any request to this specific relayer will be routed to another node owner to preserve privacy at the infrastructure layer.
Node owners can register their nodes through a simple-to-use web interface provided by Omnia. Consequently, these nodes are indexed by the relayers who leverage mixnets to protect privacy.
The users of Omnia can customize their own subscription plan, depending on their blockchain request rate needs. As a result, users receive access to secure RPC endpoints (either HTTP or WSS) for any of the blockchain networks that we support.
Mixnets are not a novel approach when it comes to building an anonymous overlay network. For example, Tor is leveraging a low-latency mix network to provide a 3-hop circuit that is designed to better protect privacy than a single-node VPN solution. However, this approach has one major fallback - does not obfuscate traffic patterns, which eventually leads to revealing the user's identity as relevant academic research activity has already proved (XZ21, LGMG17, MS17, CMMV17, RNZL17, BZN08, SZ12).
One of our technical objectives at Omnia is to leverage all our academic and security research knowledge to augment mixnets with state of the art methods for timing obfuscation and decoy traffic injection to guarantee the utmost privacy.
Another technical objective is to enhance the existing centralized directory authority used for routing in mixnets to a consensus based approach in order to mitigate the single point of failure in case of directory corruption.
By carefully designing the integration between blockchain nodes and privacy relayers with customer-centricity in mind, Omnia provides competitive incentives that have compounding effects to the entire ecosystem.
Omnia's competitive advantage consists in our ability to identify, extract and integrate value from state of the art research results, thus being able to drive the marginal costs close to zero when it comes to accessing the blockchain.
We are confident that in a not so distant future, Omnia will be the natural choice for accessing any blockchain in a trustworthy and failproof manner, regardless of the network.
We want to be an inspiration to the blockchain ecosystem, by pushing the envelope beyond its existing limitations so that others can innovate beside us.
Privacy is key, but not sufficient. That's why it's important to also ensure that nodes deliver the performance they signed-up for and don't act malicious.
A node verification protocol will assure that node owners do not act maliciously or against the user's interest. By staking an amount of OMNIA tokens, proportional with the blockchain requests that is actively serving, a node provider risks its stake being slashed in case of misbehavior. Therefore, by causing higher self-damage than the potential gain, any attack is economically unfeasible.
Q2 2021 - Research
- State of the art privacy solutions
- Discovering the gap between on-chain and off-chain privacy
Q3 2021 - Product Design
- Study on market needs
- Product conceptualisation
- Seed funding
Q4 2021- Omnia MVP
- Strategic and private sale
- Create HTTP endpoint only
- Endpoints will leverage privacy enabled gateway
- Nodes managed by Omnia in the first place
- Support for ETH, BSC, and BTC
Q1 2022 - Omnia Early Access
- Download and use lightweight relayer software
- Secure mixnets are enabled
- Support for more blockchain networks
- Access to private mempools
Q2 2022 - Omnia Public Launch
- Support for WebSockets
- Node verification protocol enabled
- Use OMNIA token for accessing services
- Staking and rewards for node providers and privacy relayers
- Support for more blockchain networks
Q4 2022 - Mastering performance
- Caching mechanism
- Request batching
- Support for more blockchain networks
2023 Onwards - Becoming Omnipotent
- Adding connectors for external node providers
- Use-case tailored node relaying (i.e. speed tailored, etc)
- CDN clustering
- Dynamic rewards
- All major blockchain networks supported
Although there are many solutions to offer privacy at TCP/IP level (e.g. Tor), none of these solutions focus on the blockchain interaction and use cases within the decentralized realm. Introducing monetization with homogeneous products is tough, as consumers always have the option to switch to another product that is free of charge, when the features are the same.
Omnia has the powerful advantage over its competitors that it's the first hero in line to close the privacy gap between on-chain and off-chain activity. With unshakable added value that differentiates ourselves from other centralized node providers, we expect users to choose Omnia's trustworthy services orchestrated by the token, thus giving utility to it.
For the initial phase, Omnia will collect a third of the subscription fees paid by every consumer of our solution. Subscriptions are paid in OMNIA tokens. Our research shows this to be an optimal ratio, but it may be subject to change - only for better incentives schemes, expanding the community and adoption. The other two thirds are used for rewarding node providers and deflationary token burn.
The features and advantages for the node providers and privacy providers are going to be free.
Due to the way Omnia is built, every onboarded node and privacy relayer increases the privacy and the performance of the entire system. Therefore, the larger the pool of nodes gets, the stronger the value offer for the user builds. These counterparts are complementing each other, as the increase of users who pay for the services will deliver higher rewards to the nodes.
We have built the user acquisition strategy systematically and sustainably to capitalize all the potential of organic growth. We have also designed growth-hack schemes that help igniting the momentum for growth in key moments of the project.
We consider the developer community to be essential for our growth as they are the torchbearers for adopting a specific technical solution in the companies/projects they work. This being said, it is clear that our growth strategy includes participating in hackathons and competitions to sponsor projects that use Omnia services.
This section explores how the four main pillars of our user acquisition path - Affiliate Programs, Influencer Marketing, Community Angels, and Alternative Reward Systems. These are expected to gradually drive users to the infrastructure we are building.
We have seen that affiliate and referral programs have proven to be one of the most successful market penetration strategies in years - both in fulminating DeFi & NFT segments and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. In other words, the popularity of the DeFi & BFT fields has surged mainly due to the carefully planning and implemention of affiliate marketing activities. We learned from that.
Omnia will aim to combine these best practices that have clearly proven to be effective in delivering user growth. After the launch, Omnia's Affiliate and Referral Program will swiftly follow and can be described in 3 easy steps:
- 1.We will vet and approach influencers and media channels (such as popular blogs) that have high and active following and an unblemished reputation in the crypto community;
- 2.The influencers and other selected affiliate partners will promote Omnia on their platforms to spread awareness and refer their audience to join;
- 3.Affiliates will be compensated based on their performance: 30% of the fees paid by referred users will be transferred to the influencers in OMNIA tokens as a reward.
We believe that when executed strategically and attentively, influencer marketing is still the main way to build a well-known and respected brand in the crypto space. We will execute the influencer marketing strategy by inviting a few people to become Omnia's brand ambassadors-long-term partners raise awareness of our news and plans.
In addition to directly influencing user growth, Omnia also hopes that influencer marketing can help instill trust in products by connecting our brand with the brands of respected opinion leaders in the community. This is why when choosing our influential partners, choosing like-minded people to work together, coupled with the highest reputation is crucial. After all, not doing so may have adverse effects and reduce the credibility of joining the platform.
Therefore, by linking their personal brand with our personal brand, influential people will become brand ambassadors and Omnia's long-term valuable assets. This relationship will allow us not only to benefit from the recommendations of influencers, but also to gain the trust of the target audience we want to reach.
The community angels will be used to further spread information about Omnia on social media, forums and discussion channels.
Angels will serve as an extension of our team in the community and assume multiple responsibilities. For example, they will answer Omnia users’ questions on the main forum, explain new features or updates on their social media accounts, or manage Omnia's official social media group. As compensation for their time and effort, the community angels will receive OMNIA tokens as a fixed fee.
We are aware of the potential risks of such programs-lack of clear roles, representative standards, and excessive behavior or spam. In order to prevent these risks from the Omnia community angels, we will carefully monitor their activities to comply with our values and conduct regular audits to ensure compliance with all rules. There will also be an opportunity to directly report any abuse of angel privileges to us.
In order to further consolidate Omnia's position as the preferred off-chain privacy transaction partner, we will explore unconventional ways to expand our user base. Omnia's reward system will include incentive plans, encrypted airdrops and gifts for inviting users.
As discussed, we put user growth at the top of the priority list because it increases the node's space, including added stability and performance. Therefore, in order to maximize the incentive to recommend others to join Omnia, existing node users will be rewarded from the registration of new users they recommend who will acquire subscriptions.
Based on our market research, we estimate that the total addressable market (TAM) is at least $1 Billion, with a double-digit annual compound growth rate (CAGR).
Even if only 0.71% of the world's population (65 million people) use blockchain technology at the moment (Source: 8-bit.io, Statista), this is actually an indicator for huge upside potential as blockchain technology is set to become even more mainstream in the upcoming years.
This trend is confirmed by the recent boom in DeFi and NFT market segments accelerated the adoption rate, and this can easily be observed if we look for example at the Ethereum unique addresses growth chart - 171 millions of unique addresses.
However, blockchain is much more than Ethereum which only accounts for ~25%:
With these facts in mind, we think that is reasonable to assume that 10% of unique addresses are active with a medium usage of 4h/day. For the Ethereum network, this translates to 2.85 millions active wallets per day, resulting 18.6 billion daily requests for Ethereum nodes only.
If we extrapolate these numbers with the market distribution we see that at the moment there are around 73 billion daily requests to blockchain nodes, with a double-digit CAGR.
Pricing these requests at what existing node providers are charging we can easily estimate TAM to at least $1 Billion.
Our direct competition is represented by the node providers who currently serve the access to blockchain infrastructure.
Bware Labs is a player that approaches this need of accessing the blockchain infrastructure from a decentralized point of view, by allowing full node owners to put their infrastructure to work for others.
Indirect competition mainly consists of other privacy infrastructure providers, ranging from Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers to solutions similar to Tor.
All these indirect competitors generally solve the privacy aspects at the infrastructure layer in a generic way, without any specific domain being targeted, such as blockchain. We are confident that fruitful collaborations can emerge by partnering with some of them.
As with any product, its success depends on many external factors.
The team behind Omnia Protocol believes that by identifying possible risks, the chances of success can be increased. We want to address several risks by explaining how we intend to minimize them based on different market conditions.
The node performance can depend upon each party that decides to join the network, therefore request serving performance can be subject to change.
To address this risk, we randomly send requests to nodes to check their performance, and if by chance their performance is degraded as compared to what they initially committed to, that specific nodes will have their reward reduced, according to the percentage of performance decrease.
In this manner, we motivate the nodes to operate at the best of their ability in order to earn the highest rewards. Also, there will be a minimum performance threshold to meet in terms of speed and latency.
To encourage node providers to join the network, we have a real-time reward boosting mechanism so that node owners are more motivated to onboard if the number of nodes drops for any reason.
The performance is not the single thing to be aware of, but also the correctness of each response as a consequence of serving a request.
We are making sure that every nodes will behave as intended by running a constant verification protocol to see if the data returned by the nodes reflect the reality agreed by consensus.
Node providers will stake OMNIA tokens in order to join the network. This stake will be slashed if nodes are misbehaving beyond agreed rules/metrics.
The bigger the pool of relayers, the harder is for rogue parties to interfere with our network. Attacks could occur in various forms: from denial of service across a large number of relayers to active adversaries that do not follow the protocol.
We mitigate this risk by leveraging economic incentives and the real-time reward boosting mechanism, so that every privacy relayer is rewarded to join and act accordingly, otherwise risking its stake to being slashed.
Privacy relayers will stake OMNIA tokens in order to join the network. This stake will be slashed if they are misbehaving beyond the agreed protocol.
Because the smart contracts are transited by most of the funds, there will be audits with multiple entities and also bug bounty programs to assure that all on-chain subcomponents do not perish the whole security of Omnia Protocol.
First of all, it is important to understand the difference between privacy coins (Monero, ZCash, etc.) and OMNIA - which is a utility token that only gives access to OMNIA Protocol services. These services that OMNIA Protocol is providing are off-chain and offer privacy guarantees at the network level, in the same way Tor or Nym, for example, is providing privacy for generic network traffic.
While privacy coins such as Monero, ZCash, etc. achieve varying degrees of anonymity by obfuscating the transacted amount and wallet addresses, OMNIA services do not facilitate in any manner the anonymity of the aforementioned parameters.
Using OMNIA services helps users protect their privacy between the application layer (wallet, decentralized exchange, dApp, etc.) and the blockchain nodes which actually implement the consensus mechanism.
OMNIA Protocol complements the on-chain privacy with the off-chain privacy - meaning that it's impact is at the network layer from the user's device to the blockchain node that is mining a specific transaction.
We are aware that full anonymity is sometimes abused for illegal activities such as tax evasion, money laundering, and other non-financial crimes. With respect to these concerns we are fully committed to implement strict measures at the privacy relayers dAPI gateways that act as entry points to blockchain networks by automatically rejecting submission of transactions that are linked to ilicit activities or part of any bad lists.
Omnia uses a tier-based fee reduction for token holders:
- 20,000 tokens will equate to a 10% fee reduction
- 80,000 tokens - 15% reduction
- 200,000 - 25% fee reduction
Each client will acquire a subscription using OMNIA tokens.
The subscription can be parametrized by a time window and a request quota. For example, one can choose a 1-month subscription with a 1000 RPS quota. RPS quota can also be increased afterward.
Each node and relayer will be paid in OMNIA tokens: starting from ⅓ of the client fee. Dynamic pricing will temporarily boost node rewards when there are very few available.
Node providers and privacy relayers will stake OMNIA tokens in order to join the network. They commit to some specific performance metrics and their reward is decreased if conditions are not consistently met.
A third of the fee amount of each request is collected by us and burned.
A part of Omnia's features will be limited only to those holding OMNIA tokens. For example, token holders may be able to generate and use much more endpoints, or their request rate will be higher.
Beta testing will be available only to token holders.
Contributing the tokens to the DEX liquidity pools will ensure that OMNIA tokens can be traded when needed.
Therefore, we want to reward users who help solve the liquidity problem on the decentralized liquidity provider platform. With respect to this, we will send half of the fee to the person who pledged the ETH/OMNIA pair on Uniswap. Of course, this will be distributed in proportion to the amount pooled by the user.
As an important feature of our growth strategy, recommendations will become another important use case for OMNIA tokens.
Layer 1 Users, Wallets, influencers, social media accounts, blogs, or news media will all receive their referral rewards in the form of our tokens.
In addition, airdrops that provide liquidity to the wallet will only be sent in OMNIA tokens.
The present document is dedicated for marketing purposes only, meaning it is not intended to be legally binding and is delivered “as is”. Nothing in this document shall be deemed to constitute a prospectus of any sort, or an invitation, or a solicitation for investment, nor does it in any way pertain to an offering, invitation, or solicitation of an offer to purchase any security, ownership right, stake, share, future revenue, company participation, or other equivalent rights in any jurisdiction. Information in this document also does not constitute a recommendation by any person to purchase tokens, currencies, or any other cryptographic assets; neither the Issuer has authorized any person to provide any recommendations of such kind.
You may lose all money that you spend purchasing Omnia Protocol tokens. In the event that you purchase tokens, your purchase cannot be refunded or exchanged. There is no guarantee that the utility of the OMNIA tokens or the project described in this white paper will be delivered. You are waiving your rights by agreeing to these terms and conditions and participating in the OMNIA token sale. By participating in the OMNIA token sale you are agreeing to have no recourse, claim, action, judgment, or remedy against Omnia Protocol if the utility of the OMNIA tokens or if the project described in this white paper is not delivered or realized. If you are uncertain as to anything in this white paper or you are not prepared to lose all money that you spend purchasing OMNIA tokens, we strongly urge you not to purchase any OMNIA tokens. We recommend you consult legal, financial, tax, and other professional advisors or experts for further guidance before participating in the OMNIA token sale outlined in this white paper. You are strongly advised to take independent legal advice in respect of the legality in the jurisdiction of your participation in the token sale. OMNIA tokens are not shares or securities of any type. They do not entitle you to any ownership or other interest in Omnia Protocol company. They are merely a means by which you may be able to utilize certain services on a platform that is yet to be developed. There is no guarantee that the platform will actually be developed.
Last modified 1yr ago