The Journey Towards Universal Market Access

Defining the Purpose of Risk Labs Foundation and uLABS

UMA was inspired by the belief that financial markets should be universally accessible — unrestrained by censorship, pre-existing financial and social capital, or nationality. In our quest to achieve that vision we built the UMA protocol and the optimistic, priceless oracle solution called the DVM. We have launched multiple live contracts to test that framework and also experiment with liquidity mining. With the experience we’ve gained, feedback we’ve received and data on hand, we at the Risk Labs Foundation now ask ourselves — what will be our focus going forward and how can we collaborate with our community so that we can fulfill our mission together?

Risk Labs Foundation wants to focus on building and supporting the UMA platform. We want to create new and innovative contract templates under the UMA protocol, and we want to make our DVM more robust and even more secure. All the while doing this we want to support our UMA community to help us build.

We want our community to be the owners of their new and innovative financial products and we want them to have the freedom to design and brand their own creative front end dApps. The recent launch of our developer mining program starts us off on that path by distributing ownership of the protocol to those who help build good contracts on top of it.

uLABS

In order for UMA to succeed we believe the Risk Labs Foundation still needs to continue building financial products, but with a greater emphasis on inspiring ideas and demonstrating the many things the UMA protocol can do and how easy (and fun!) it is to work with.

To emphasize and clarify the foundation’s focus on the platform, our financial products will now operate under our new division simply named uLABS. In the coming weeks, Sean Brown, UMA’s Tech Evangelist, and Kevin Chan, UMA’s Treasurer, will drive uLABS to deploy new products onto mainnet with little to no help from our engineering team. They will document how anybody can take an idea and build on UMA. You will see this demonstrated soon when uLABS launches its first token, uGAS, which tracks Ethereum gas prices to allow hedging and speculation.

With regards to UMA’s developer mining rewards, uLABS will be treated the same as any other developer in the community. It will also receive its allocation of UMA tokens according to the same metrics; however, it will not keep any UMA tokens for itself, but instead will always have a plan to distribute them to the community either for liquidity mining or dApp development.

We would love the community to take ownership of any uLABS’ products and further improve and refine them. The vision is clear — our community owns the products and our foundation supports them in any way we can.

By Kevin Chan and Sean Brown

The Journey Towards Universal Market Access was originally published in UMA Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.