UMA at ETH Global HackMoney Hackathon
In the most recent ETH Global HackMoney Hackathon, the UMA team had a front-row seat to see some of the most exciting hacks coming out of the mid-year event.
Hackathons are great opportunities for developers to test their skills, projects to test their products, and the community to see what’s coming up in their space. The HackMoney Hackathon was 3 weeks of the latest ideas coming onto the decentralized stage.
As a sponsor, we also managed to reward some of the efforts of hackers using UMA’s stack. These are a few of our takeaways from the event.
DeFi is growing
DeFi summer may be over, but it is by no means winter yet.
The HackMoney Hackathon put the vibrancy and interest in the DeFi space on full display. The 46 sponsors showed off how much investment there is in finding, growing, and encouraging those bringing their skills to DeFi, and there was no shortage of talent either.
A total of 1100 hackers participated, bringing their expertise and interests to this collective effort to expand the boundaries of this space.
Projects like the Long Short Pair (the unliquidatable token)
The UMA team wanted to use the event as a launching pad for the new Long Short Pair (LSP) token creator. The LSP creates synthetic tokens and is a building block for bigger use cases (like range bonds). In the recent bear turn, treasuries and token portfolios felt the reminder that being liquidated is a painful experience.
The simple idea behind the LSP is to make sure that any synthetic token or derivative product cannot be liquidated.
This is achieved by doing two things:
- The gains and losses are bounded.
- Instead of minting just the synthetic, minting with the LSP creates both long and short exposure at the point of minting. Both these allow for the market to never be under collateralized.
The LSP was well received at the hackathon, with teams creating hedging products. After all, how useful is it if the product you are using to hedge risk creates more risk for you?
To learn more about the LSP, you can head over to this article.
KPI options create community alignment
UMA’s KPI options also got their time in the spotlight, with teams using it as a rewards 2.0 mechanism.
An example that a hack team decided to do was to do a community airdrop, which would usually result in a dump on tokens, locked the underlying reward behind a metric that would payout more tokens to the community if the protocol’s goals were met. A win for the protocol, since there is no token sell-off, and a win for the community since they have the upside of unlocking more rewards if the project succeeds.
The winning prizes
Teams created a variety of products, from creating deep liquidity to a stabilized yield maximizer.
These are the teams that won the UMA prizes:
Polynomial Protocol wins the $3,000 prize for the best use of the LSP. The team created a series of call and put options using UMA’s new contract type.
Wicked take-home the $2,000 prize for the most creative use of the Optimistic Oracle. The team made use of using Forex rates to create derivative products that allow users to protect against FX movements. The team plan on developing a UI that allows users to deploy an LSP contract and for users to be able to easily use and manage their positions for whichever LSP product they make use of.
2pi.finance snatch the $3,000 KPI Option prize. The 2pi will be launching their idea in the upcoming months and part of their launch will be to create a KPI option based token distribution.
Ready for the next one
These events are the breeding ground for the next great ideas in DeFi. UMA is already looking forward to the next hackathon.
We plan to incentivize hackers at the next event and future hackathons with more than just prizes. We are launching a KPI grants program that acts in the same way a traditional grants program would work but with a KPI spin to it. Hacks that have an interest in carrying on their program are welcome to apply for a KPI grant.
Find out more about it here.
