The past year has been a big year for UMA. With growing community involvement, the Risk Labs Foundation and development company have built out the best in class financial infrastructure for Ethereum. To recap, here’s an incomplete list of some of the bigger wins:
- UMA technology powered the USStocks token, an ERC20 token that gave crypto-users the ability to purchase an index of the 500 largest US equities.
- Sempo & Grassroots Economics used synthetic tokens as part of its mainnet Community Inclusion Currencies initiative to facilitate payments in local currencies.
- Community members deployed 500+ custom testnet tokens using the Token Builder and came up with some fascinating new ideas.
- We converted into a Foundation and transitioned to decentralized, community-led governance via UMA improvement proposals.
- We announced the $UMA Community Distribution program to support users and developers who were building on top of our tech stack (still open for comments).
- We deployed our v1 decentralized oracle to mainnet (!!!).
2020 will be an even bigger year. Here’s what we have ahead of us. Our development has been and always will be done in the open — now with even more community input.
Governance
We have already initiated the transition to a decentralized governance structure. $UMA-holders are invited to actively participate in fulfilling price requests and controlling key system governance parameters (learn how to participate here).
Our work has been and always will be in the open. UMIPs are the primary way by which new features and protocol upgrades are developed. We invite the community to take an active role in contributing.
Priceless Infrastructure Program
Additional financial infrastructure is needed to make all kinds of risk transfer universally accessible on the blockchain. The Foundation will announce RFPs to development teams to tackle R&D on new designs (details TBD).
Synthetic token adoption
Later this month, we are launching a “Testnet on Mainnet:” the first Priceless synthetic token. The goal is to validate the Priceless contract mechanism with real money behind it.
Later in Q2, we are launching infrastructure for perpetual synthetic tokens in partnership with Balancer Labs.
Throughout Q3–4, and with the help of our many partners, additional synthetic assets and indices will become available across exchanges and wallets.
With mainnet synthetic assets are more broadly available, we will launch our Community Token Distribution Program: a way to bootstrap adoption of synthetic tokens, and allow the system’s users to capture the economic value arising from it.
