Connect with UMA and earn prizes at ETHOnline hackathon

tl;dr: ETHOnline is a month-long hackathon in September with a total prize purse of nearly a quarter million dollars, including $8,000 in prizes for those who build the best projects on UMA. To prepare, check out our Hacking on UMA page and our Ideas Bank, which includes some great concepts including: building a decentralized bonded news service; an optimistic market maker and an optimistic paymaster.

UMA’s community of developers is growing and strengthening and we want you to be part of that

One of the best opportunities to connect with UMA is via the upcoming ETHOnline hackathon, which takes place Sept. 2–28. The month-long virtual event will feature relevant, insightful summits and ETHOnline’s largest group of hackers ever.

The event is expected to attract more than a thousand hackers who will battle it out for more than a quarter million dollars in total prizes. It’s the ideal venue to meet new people, connect with mentors and find your next web3 job to push the ecosystem forward.

Don’t miss this chance to build and develop your own bright idea, or one of ours using UMA’s optimistic oracle and/or Outcome.Finance’s DAO governance and fundraising tools like KPI options and success tokens.

Core members of UMA will be available to support and guide hackers through the competition that will include USD$8,000 in prizes from UMA for the best use cases with UMA’s optimistic oracle. The winners could also be eligible to receive a further grant if you continue building using UMA.

The prizes from UMA will break down like this:

• First prize of $5,000
• Second prize of $2,000
• Third prize of $1,000.

The event will also feature a 30-minute introductory workshop focused on building with UMA’s optimistic oracle, hosted by UMA smart contract engineer, John Shutt. This workshop takes place Wednesday, Aug 31 at 5:30PM UTC.

Why you should build using UMA and its tools

UMA is an optimistic oracle (OO) that can provide and verify any arbitrary data on-chain. Web3 is increasingly going to rely on optimistic data verification and DAO tooling, and that’s exactly what the OO is bringing to the table.

UMA’s optimistic oracle has been called a human-powered truth machine. Data from UMA secures markets and smart contracts across web3, expanding the developer design space. The OO tells smart contracts “things about the world” so they can enforce real-world payout conditions.

UMA’s OO provides super flexible data dispute resolution between smart contracts. Rewards can be earned by proposing answers to a data request, and that’s the lifeblood of the protocol. Proposed data will not be scrutinized unless it is disputed, and disputes are rare. That’s what makes UMA’s oracle optimistic.

The Across bridge, Polymarket prediction markets, and Outcome.Finance DAO tools are three of the many great use cases for the OO.

The opportunities for the OO are limitless, but here are a few ideas that hackers can develop for ETHOnline or at any point. Please take a look at our Hacking at UMA page for key resources to get you started and check out our regularly-updated Ideas Bank for more details on these ideas and other concepts that might inspire.

A few ideas from the UMA Ideas Bank

• Build a decentralized, bonded news service that would let anyone publish a news story but would require the reporter to post a bond. If the reporting was ultimately found to be inaccurate via the optimistic oracle, the writer could lose the bond. This system would require journalists to be accountable for their reporting with facts and sources clearly cited and verifiable. Journalists could also be assigned a “truth score” that represents the number of factors like articles not disputed, disputed unsuccessfully, and disputed successfully.
• Build an Optimistic Market Maker — a smart contract system with pooled ETH that accepts bonded optimistic prices for various tokens from any proposer and uses those prices to buy tokens for slightly less than that price, and resell those tokens at slightly more than that price. The sellers would be willing to sell for less than the global price because the OMM price may still be better than those available on AMMs on that particular chain (and takes CEX prices into account). The buyers would be happy to buy at a price lower than the global price, either to hold or to execute some cross-chain arbitrage. This also allows for tokens to accumulate from multiple sellers and then be scooped by one buyer when it’s worth it.
• Use UMA to build an optimistic paymaster compliant with EIP 4337 and other paymaster systems. In this case, a paymaster could be loaded with ETH to pay gas on users’ behalf, while taking their fee in arbitrary ERC20 tokens. That would be passive liquidity. Active participants would report on the current ETH/ERC20 exchange rates, lock ETH as a bond, and take a cut of the fees. That would be better than using DEX prices, which limit you to ERC20s with deep enough liquidity to get a good on-chain price and cost more in gas to obtain. The active exchange rate bonder could update all of the exchange rates in a single call, and since they are bonding in ETH, which is also what the paymaster is paying out in gas, the passive liquidity providers are protected.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to register for the hackathon. Reach out with any questions and tell us more about what you want to build via Twitter, or join us on Discord and keep an eye on UMA’s channels for more details throughout ETHOnline.