UMA x YAM Collaboration

We are excited to announce a collaboration with our friends at the YAM Finance team. The introduction of developer mining and the creation of uLABS have set UMA on the path to better focus on building a stronger and more robust protocol and oracle while supporting and promoting the DeFi community to build products on top of it. These initiatives have allowed us to more easily leverage off of talented individuals and teams in the DeFi space such as YAM. Our collaboration with YAM will show how developer mining can be used to create amazing partnerships that take ideas and convert them into innovative products and user experiences.

We at UMA have criticized ourselves for moving slow and at times being overly careful and thoughtful in our design. These are good attributes for a team who aim to build flexible and secure infrastructure for DeFi, but not necessarily the best for showcasing what can be created and for generating buzz and excitement. The YAM team brings creativity and fun to DeFi and are influential trendsetters in our space who have amassed a strong following. The collaboration of our two teams allows us to utilize our best strengths to build the ideal DeFi products.

YAM will own uGAS

The start of the partnership will involve uLABS passing over the ownership of uGAS to the YAM Finance team. YAM will manage uGAS and enhance the user experience by achieving the following goals by December 21st:

• Build a new, sleek user interface for creating, redeeming and managing uGAS positions.
• Develop and promote the uGAS brand with art and useful metrics
• Launch and manage a strip of uGAS contracts which will first include uGAS-FEB21 and uGAS-MAR21.
• Independently run liquidation and dispute bots to ensure uGAS is safely collateralized

Developer Mining

Starting with the uGAS-FEB21 token, all developer mining rewards earned from uGAS tokens will be transferred to and managed by the YAM community. For the first 3 months of this partnership, UMA and YAM have decided the YAM treasury will keep 10% of these rewards as a management fee. The remaining 90% will be distributed to the community with 40% of the rewards given to dApp mining (more details below) and 50% allocated to liquidity mining. The YAM community has the freedom to modify this split as needed. It is expected that the YAM treasury will hold their UMA tokens and establish a position within UMA’s governance, as traditionally this has been done with other governance tokens they have mined.

Developer Mining Reward Structure

10% YAM Finance Treasury

40% dApp Mining

50% Liquidity Mining

As a further clarification, once uGAS-FEB21 is launched, developer mining rewards allocated to uGAS-JAN21 will be divided the same way. We anticipate extending the end date of the current liquidity mining program from December 17th to December 21st. However, after this date liquidity mining rewards will be lower and both uGAS-JAN21 and uGAS-FEB21 will provide the same economics in terms of rewards to liquidity providers.

dApp Mining

UMA has hinted at dApp mining in previous posts, but this will be the first time it will actually be implemented. Token minting transactions will be tagged at the point of creation allowing UMA to track which user interface was utilized. With this information UMA can fairly reward developers for their work on creating front-end applications. We anticipate almost all the dApp mining rewards for uGAS to go to the YAM treasury at the start of the program given YAM will be creating the first user interface. However, we and YAM welcome others to design and develop new user interfaces that may include different functions, aggregations with other products and multiple languages. More ease of transaction and more options would allow more token creation which is beneficial to the entire community.

Future of UMA and YAM and more

We expect uGAS to be the very beginning of our collaboration with the YAM Finance team. We are excited to see YAM in the process of branding a fun product line called Degenerative (Degen Derivatives) which will house uGAS and other tokens they plan to build on UMA. UMA’s partnership with YAM makes sense in many ways, but it also provides a strong first example of how other talented developers in the DeFi space can work with UMA. Developer mining has led to many conversations in the last few months and we are hoping to announce more partnerships like this in the near future. With just an idea, UMA’s team and developer mining program will provide the support and financial resources so that any developer can create a token and have it trading in the market.

UMA x YAM Collaboration was originally published in UMA Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.