Update: Developer Mining and Grants Program

Tl;dr The developer mining program will continue to run until September 30th. There will be some changes to the program as we explore here. Teams may also submit proposals for KPI Option grants.

The developer mining program has run for about 3 quarters and has been responsible for a range of novel products built on UMA. The related liquidity mining program has attracted tens of millions of dollars of capital. It gave incentive for people to join the community and learn how UMA works, as well as pressure test contract security and the oracle voting system.

Developer Mining 2.0

Developer mining was successful but did have some certain weaknesses that we explored in our previous post on the topic. In order to adjust the types of products it favors, we have designed some new qualifying criteria.

Developer mining will change in the following ways, effective August 2nd and applying to the August 9 payout:

• Rewards will continue at 35k/$UMA per week as they have been in July.
• Developers must pass on a minimum of 90% of their rewards as liquidity mining. These rewards need to be distributed evenly across participating liquidity.
• Developer mining will be calculated based on the total value locked in the contract (previously based on total value minted)
• Liquidity mining will function in largely the same way as before, with developers responsible for passing on their rewards.
• In order to maintain healthy products, developers need to maintain well-funded bots. If it is revealed that there are not well-funded bots running, we may reevaluate a product’s inclusion in the program.
• Pools must either be 50/50 pools or have less than 2% slippage when purchasing 1% of the TVM (Total Value Minted). There needs to be a sufficiently liquid way to trade the synth.
• Qualifying contracts must have at most a 125% collateral requirement.
• LSPs can also be included on a case by case basis. In these cases, the liquidation bot, liquidity pool and collateralisation ratio eligibility requirements will not apply.

This design should resolve some of the concerns that arose with the previous design. Namely, we saw most liquidity flowing towards lower risk products, without any special compensation for higher risk products. Paying out based on the value of the collateral means that rewards will more directly compensate for the cost-of-capital.

This program is set to expire on September 30th. However, based on its success by that time we may decide to continue it. We will share this information by September 15th.

Developer mining excludes uses of the LSP for treasury management products.

Grants

Developer teams are invited to submit proposals for products to UMA. These proposals should outline the product they would like to build and what kinds of support they need, as well as a proposed KPI they’d like the KPI Options to measure. This grants need not be related to developer mining or even specific products, but should be sufficiently aligned with the foundation’s strategy.

As always, please join us in discord.umaproject.org if you have feedback or questions about these changes.

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