In Case You Missed It #4

Mhairi McAlpine
UMA Project
Published in
3 min readMar 6, 2021

Week ending 5th March

UMA joins the XIO Accelerator
A few weeks ago, BlockZero founder Zachary Dash announced the establishment of the the XIO Defi Accelerator to educate, incentivize and onboard the next 1,000,000 users into the world of decentralized finance. Speculation about which project would be the first to join the program was reaching fever pitch until BlockZero unveiled its collaboration with UMA to inspire and support crypto users by introducing them to Universal Market Access, with some hints to the kinds of activities to come.

Hart Lambur on Bankless
The Bankless newsletter, podcast and YouTube channel does an amazing job of levelling up people’s crypto skills and introducing DeFi projects to the wider Defi community. This week our founder Hart Lambur joined David Hoffman and Ryan Sean Adams for an AMA on UMA.

YouTube synths?
Inspired by some of the chat in the Bankless broadcast, some of our community developers are working out how to build synthetic assets on YouTube metrics. Acting as an incentive for fans of a content creator to grow the community and promote the channel, content creator synths can also provide a platform independent means of monetization, lessening the control that centralized platforms have over content. Come on over to our Discourse Ideas forum and help thrash out the details.

Decentralized Forex Trading from Jarvis
Jarvis Network have launched Jarvis Exchange on Synthereum, a decentralized synthetic foreign currency exchange, where you can mint jGBP, jCHF and jEUR backed by USDC, allow you to trade, speculate and hedge on prominent European currency pairs. More details of how Synthereum works under the hood can be found on in The Synthereum Manifesto.

Excitement at the DVM
UMA’s Optimistic Oracle design means that contracts are usually settled without formerlu determining a price, which is what makes UMA’s contracts “priceless”. Every so often however, a dispute is brought to the DVM when a liquidation is queried. Last week, a contested dispute created a flurry of activity as community members all got their calculators out to determine the price of XAU/PERL, with three different prices proposed. An ambiguity in the relevant UMIP meant that decisions had to be made around intermediate rounding and close vs open price. Clayton, our Community Lead, gives a guided commentary in this video round up.

and finally ….uLabs investigates Call Options
Following on from the announcement of KPI Options and Decentralized Structured Products, uLabs has been exploring more forms of financial wizardry in the form of Call Options. A call option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy an asset at a specified price (strike) and a specific time period (expiry). Building options on the UMA infrastructure is relatively simple and token builders can easily custom tailor an option for any asset with any strike and expiry, but there are still challenges in terms of how to provide liquidity.

Part 1 of a series, this blogpost gives an overview of how call options operate, and how they can be built in a decentralized, permission less and priceless manner. Part 2 will announce actual live options on main net and further explain why it is beneficial for DeFi projects to consider creating their own options market and to distribute call options to their community.

Late News!! KPI Airdrop Recipient Address List Published
The list of recipients of UMA’s airdrop of the uTVL KPI Options tokens has just been published with 120 tokens dropped to those who voted in UMA governance or minted an UMA synth; 60 tokens to holders of >10 $UMA; 100 tokens to the top 50 participants on the UMA Discord, and 90 tokens to selected Defi Governance communities.

The options expire to between 0.1 and 2 $UMA on 30th June 2021, dependent on the Total Value Locked in the UMA protocol on that date. Read more details of the airdrop and ideas for how to achieve $2bn Total Value Locked to maximise the value of the TVL Options in the Airdrop Address List announcement.

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