UMA Update — October

October has been an exciting month, with team presentations in London at Token2049 and at LisCon in Lisbon; the finalisation of the Across bridge Protocol due to launch next month; integration with the Sherlock Protocol and KPI options launched on Volatility Protocol and PieDAO.

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Risk Labs has launched the Across Protocol, the fastest, cheapest and most secure bridge between Optimism and Arbitrum to the Ethereum Mainnet. Secured by UMA’s Optimistic Oracle, it bypasses the wait period for withdrawals to mainnet by insuring the transaction, meaning that transfers can be made in a matter of hours, rather than days with modest fees. The protocol is currently in beta, and more details are contained in the Litepaper with the full public launch scheduled for 8th November.

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UMA’s KPI options continue to attract considerable interest and attention across the Defi landscape as protocols explore how to motivate and engage their communities. This month has seen the launch of KPI options on Volatility.com and PieDAO, with many more teams in design discussions.

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Sherlock protocol, which offers Defi exploit protection by allowing users to buy coverage and sell protection, has integrated with UMA’s Optimistic Oracle. If a coverage holder believes the initial claims decision is incorrect, they can escalate to the oracle where UMA tokenholders will evaluate the claim and return a final decision, eliminating bias from the claims process by offering a composable adjudication service with economic guarantees.

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This month also saw UMA’s founder, Hart Lambur participate in a panel discussion at Token 2049 in London exploring the mechanics of building Defi protocols and the new paradigms emerging in Web 3.0, while Clayton Roache, Community Lead at UMA, presented on the economics and psychology of community building and incentivisation.
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FEATURED GUEST CONTRIBUTOR — Mike, Developer with UNISX

Mike is a developer with UNISX, which is building synthetic indices on the UMA protocol

What first drew you to develop on UMA?

We did not immediately choose the UMA protocol for the development of our synthetic tokens. During the design process, we compared several protocols — Syntetix, Opium and UMA. Moreover, we returned to the UMA protocol twice and eventually chose it. The main argument in favor of UMA was that it is a dynamically developing protocol with a growing community of users and developers and a lot of implemented synthetics.

What are the aspects of our products are you most excited about?

The most important aspect of UMA products is placed on the main page of the protocol website: “UMA enables anyone to build decentralized financial products”. Indeed, UMA products allow developers to apply many solutions “out of the box”, which ensures reliability, verifiability and efficiency of the projects being developed. At the same time, this allows developers to pay more attention to the market characteristics of the created synthetics, marketing, development of the user community, integration with other DeFi products. In other words, pay more attention to everything that creates the growth potential of the DeFi market as a whole.

What are the key strategic benefits that an active developer community brings to defi protocols?

Any decentralized project faces “The chicken or the egg causality dilemma”. In the absence of demand, do not create a supply and vice versa. The solution to this dilemma is to create an active community of developers, who often become the first users and give impetus to the development of a new market. It is the self-sufficiency of the developer community as a driving force for the formation of supply and demand that is a strategic advantage that allows us to look at DeFi protocols as a phenomenon with a broad perspective