Universal Market Access (UMA)

Universal Market Access (UMA) - A fast, flexible, and secure way to create synthetic assets

UMA, is a protocol for the creation of synthetic assets based on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. Synthetic assets are a class of assets that represent different, underlying assets and have the same value. UMA specifically enables its users to design and create self-executing, self-enforcing financial contracts secured by economic incentives.

Overview
⦁ UMA was co-founded by Hart Lambur and Allison Lu. Lambur is also the CEO and co-founder of Risk Labs, the company in charge of developing the Universal Market Access protocol. He has also founded and headed Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform which he sold to Stone Ridge Asset Management in 2017. Lu worked as the VP of credit & risk analysis at the financial services mobile app Tala. She was also an advisor at One Daijo, an Ethereum-based peer-to-peer lending platform.
⦁ The Risk Labs Foundation initially created 100M UMA tokens. The token distribution is as follows:
⦁ Risk Labs Foundation deposited 2,000,000 UMA tokens into a Uniswap liquidity pool
⦁ 35,000,000 tokens will be distributed to developers and UMA users. The mechanics of this distribution have not been finalized.
⦁ 15,000,000 tokens were allocated to investors
⦁ 33,500,000 are held by Risk Lab’s Founders and early contributors. All individual token grants are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule
⦁ 14,500,000 are reserved for future token sales
⦁
Governance: Users can earn inflationary rewards by participating in governance
⦁ Disputes: Tokens are used to properly incentivize price requests during disputes
Burns: All financial contracts using UMA pay a tax that’s used to buy and then burn the token, driving value to UMA and scaling economic guarantees as protocol activity increases
⦁ UMA is traded on multiple markets, including Coinbase PRO that allows all U.S. based residents to legally obtain this coin. This gives institutional investors a direct access to UMA.
⦁ Grayscale have registered a trust on UMA, but have not opened it yet.

Details:

UMA stands for Universal Market Access. UMA is driven by a shared belief that financial markets should be free, open, and fair. The economic freedom created by a free and open market enables everyone equal opportunity to pursue prosperity and build financial independence.

UMA's goal is to enable anyone to attain or transfer any form of risk seamlessly and securely through UMA protocol to empower everyone to participate in a universally accessible financial system. docs.umaproject.org/

Unique technologies:

UMA is open-source infrastructure for deploying and enforcing synthetic assets on Ethereum. UMA enables developers to quickly and easily build synthetic tokens that track the price of anything.

UMA enables developers to create synthetic assets via two core components:

⦁ Priceless financial contract templates docs.umaproject.org/...ted/synthetic-tokens
⦁ Decentralized Oracle Service docs.umaproject.org/...tting-started/oracle

Together, these two components enable the creation of fast, efficient, and secure synthetic derivatives on the Ethereum blockchain.

How UMA Works: docs.umaproject.org/...tarted/how-uma-works

UMA offers priceless financial contracts. Priceless financial contracts are smart contracts that only require an on-chain price feed in the event of a dispute.

Economic guarantees and network incentives ensure network actors will act honestly most of the time, but in the event of a malicious actor or an ad hoc market event, a dispute can be raised to call UMA’s dispute resolution system known as the Data Verification Mechanism (DVM).

There are five main network actors on UMA
⦁ Token sponsors
⦁ Liquidators
⦁ Disputers
⦁ Data Verification Mechanism (DVM)
⦁ UMA Tokenholders



From coinmarketcap:
Total value locked $198,317,787
Total supply: 102,089,750 UMA
Max: 101,172,570 UMA
Circulating Supply: 60,078,660 UMA (59%)

Exchanges:
Coinbase Pro, Binance, Bitstamp, Poloniex, Gemini, Bittrex, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer,


How synthetic assets are secured on UMA
Token sponsors are individuals who lock collateral in a smart contract to mint synthetic tokens. Token sponsors are responsible for making sure their positions always remain overcollateralized or else their positions will get liquidated.

The value of the collateral in the smart contract is continually monitored off-chain by a robust network of Liquidators. Liquidators continuously monitor if a position is properly collateralized by referencing off-chain price feeds. Liquidations can be configured to automatically search for positions to liquidate (through Liquidation Bots) or manually by anyone holding the synthetic asset and collateral currency of the position they are liquidating. Liquidators are incentivized with rewards to identify and liquidate undercollateralized positions. If a position is liquidated by a liquidator bot there will be a 2-hour delay before the liquidation is finalized.

During the 2-hour delay, Disputers are incentivized to monitor contracts using UMA’s priceless financial contracts. Similar to Liquidators, Disputers can be in the form of a Dispute Bot or executed manually. Disputers reference their own off-chain price feeds to determine if a liquidation was valid or invalid. If invalid, the dispute bot will dispute the liquidation which will call UMA’s oracle known as the Data Verification Mechanism (DVM). The liquidated position will be pending until it is resolved by the DVM (48 hours later). Contracts that wish to receive a price faster than 48 hours can use UMA's Optimistic Oracle.

The DVM will resolve the dispute by proposing a vote to UMA Tokenholders to obtain the price of the asset at a given timestamp. UMA Tokenholders will reference off-chain price feeds to report price information to the DVM. The DVM will aggregate UMA tokenholder votes and report the price of the asset on-chain.

If the Disputer was correct, the DVM will reward the Disputer and the Token Sponsor of the effected position. If the Liquidator was correct the DVM will reward the Liquidator, penalize the Disputer, and the Token Sponsor will lose the funds in their position.

Best regards EXCAVO