Developer Mining Retrospective and the KPI Options Grant Program
Tl;dr: Risk Labs launched the developer mining experiment late last year. This program expanded the suite of products and range of developers building on UMA.
In the spirit of continued experimentation and learning from the successful experiments of other protocols such as Aave, Uniswap, and Compound, Risk Labs will transition to a grants program in the future to replace it. Grants will be paid in KPI Options.
Developer mining will end the last week of July, and UMA’s own liquidity mining on the yield dollars will end on June 30th.
A Retrospective on Developer Mining — Did it work?
UMA’s developer mining program paid out 50k UMA weekly based on total minted synthetic assets by each developer. This saw an influx of builders making things on UMA, including Degenerative.finance, Domination.finance, Perlin, mario.cash, Umanji, and others. From a sheer effort to attract developer bandwidth and build relationships, this program was a success.
Developers participated in the “always on hackathon” to build what they thought would be most effective to encourage minting. It resulted in a healthy developer community in UMA’s Discord, and was responsible for UMA’s recurring high rating in Santiment’s DeFi Protocol development ratings.
The program was successful at increasing development and helping the protocol mature. It helped UMA build long-term relationships with development teams and we only expect them to grow.
Changing Needs
Developer Mining focuses on the total value minted (TVM). This particular metric does not work equally across all product types. Products like uGas have a higher volatility and are traded more, but may have a lower TVM than a stablecoin-type product.
There are other product types that are finding product-market fit, especially non-liquidatable products like KPI Options. Value minted is not the important metric for these products.
Furthermore, UMA’s own KPI Option program has created a vibrant community of “Super Umans” who have acted as something of a distributed sales force. This helps bring more developers into UMA who have a natural use case for UMA without any added incentives.
Finally, there are a range of products that UMA would like to see experimentation with that may not have the same risk profile. Developer mining rewarded every dollar minted as equal in value as any other, which worked well for stablecoin-based products and less well for higher risk products.
For these three reasons, Risk Labs has been exploring a grants program like other protocols have used, with an UMA twist. This program would replace developer mining.
Grants Program
The objectives that motivated developer mining remain unchanged: the foundation behind UMA still aims to distribute ownership of the protocol to those who help build it. We have watched as other teams such as Aave, Compound, and Uniswap have launched grant programs with independent grant committees and wish to create something similar.
This twist will be that we will award KPI Options to these grant applicants. This means they will receive their payout scaled by hitting certain on-chain metrics. Grants can be given out more liberally than with other projects, and will pay out a considerable amount if the project successfully achieves its objectives.
We are exploring the exact mechanism for issuing these grants, including the possibility of creating a grant committee like Aave et al have done.
This proposal has been reviewed with a handful of UMA’s development partners, and we thank them for their feedback.
UMA’s Liquidity Mining Program
UMA has also run liquidity mining on the ETH and renBTC backed yield dollars. Those tokens will not be reissued after they expire on June 30th. However, there will be an additional month of opportunities for farmers across other products. Farmers can find them on the community maintained dashboard.
For the 30-day period when dev mining is still operating but after liquidity mining has ended, developer mining payouts will be adjusted to maintain a somewhat consistent payout as before the disappearance of the liquidity mining program. This is being done to avoid additional funds rushing into other programs shortly before they close.
The Coming Months
This program transition is being done in part to support a suite of new products. We will be releasing information on them over the coming month.
UMA is a proud sponsor of the upcoming Hack Money hackathon with ETHGlobal. This product suite launch will correspond to this hackathon, to enable developers to create more novel financial products on UMA protocol.
Please join discord.umaproject.org to discuss how you can be involved.
UMA is always seeking uniquely qualified candidates. Come join us on our journey to making financial markets universally fair and accessible.
Below are our currently open roles with UMA:
Senior Software Engineer: An engineer to work on our entire Ethereum-based web 3 stack
Smart Contract Engineer: An engineer who’s expert in solidity and smart contracts
Launch Engineer: An engineer who can take internal and external products from ideation to mainnet (supporting external engineering teams to interact with our contracts and technology).
