ICYMI #18

Week ending 11th June

Introducing the Long-Short Pair — A new financial primitive on UMA

UMA has introduced a new financial primitive, called a “Long-Short Pair” allows for the creation of unliquidatable capped-payout financial contracts. Minters can lock a unit of collateral in return for a pair of “long” and “short” tokens, and then market make or take a long or short position by selling the long or short token. Other users can go long or short simply by purchasing the tokenized position.

This primitive allows for a variety of products to be built, including Binary Options which can facilitate insurance products and prediction markets; linear payouts, for example speculating on the ratio of DEX to CEX monthly volume, covered call options, which can offset downside risk, while obtaining upside exposure and range tokens, a crypto native implementation of convertible bonds which can be used for the treasury management of DAOs

KPI Grants Programme

Last year, UMA instantiated the Developer Mining programme, which provided incentives for teams to build products on UMA. The programme was a great success, paying out 50k UMA weekly and drawing in a range of developers to build on our contracts. This programme is now coming to an end, and will be replaced by a grant programme at the end of July.

This is, of course, a Grant Programme with an UMA twist. Payments will be made in KPI options and the payout will be scaled based on certain on-chain metrics. This means that grants can be given out more liberally than with other projects, and will pay out a considerable amount if the project successfully achieves its objectives. The exact mechanism will be published in the coming weeks.

Hack Money Hackathon

UMA is a sponsor of the Hack Money Hackathon, which takes place later this month with $8000 in prizes available. A new range of products are available to build on UMA and participants are encouraged to explore these new products through the Hackathon. Those who wish to take their hackathon idea to the next level and build full scale products are welcome to apply for our Grant programme.

Some ideas of what can be built with the new products are available on this tweet thread, and there is a wealth of ideas for developers to mine in our ideas bank. Potential participants looking for a team are welcome to contact UMA on Discord indicating their area of interest

And finally….SpaceX Insurance goes live

The decentralised SpaceX insurance product developed by Opium using UMA’s Optimistic Oracle has now gone live just in time for the next launch planned for 24th June. This binary options contract allows the purchase of decentralized insurance against a failed launch and pay a premium to the derivative seller while the seller offers insurance coverage against a failed launch by locking an amount of money as collateral, earning a premium in the process. The settlement date is 8th July to allow for potential delays.

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UMA is always seeking uniquely qualified candidates. Come join us on our journey to making financial markets universally fair and accessible.

Below are our currently open roles with UMA:

Senior Software Engineer: An engineer to work on our entire Ethereum-based web 3 stack
Smart Contract Engineer: An engineer who’s expert in solidity and smart contracts
Launch Engineer: An engineer who can take internal and external products from ideation to mainnet (supporting external engineering teams to interact with our contracts and technology).

ICYMI #18 was originally published in UMA Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.