We’ve had an amazing year, says UMA Protocol

As 2021 comes to a close, Mhairi McAlpine, UMA’s community manager, looks back on the year and how it played its part in UMA’s growth.

Established in 2018, UMA (Universal Market Access) defines itself as a ‘decentralised financial contracts platform’ that produces synthetic assets based on the Ethereum blockchain that allows its users to imitate almost any other asset available on the market.

In a year where UMA had launched its ‘Across Protocol’, a fast and cheap L2->L1 bridge as well as forming partnerships with Ondo Finance and Fei Protocol, it’s been a fruitful year for the UMA team.

UMA community manager Mhairi McAlpine says its been an amazing year for the team and they’ve received positive feedback on the back of the launch of its Across Protocol.

“The launch of the Across Protocol, the fastest, cheapest L2->L1 bridge using the Optimistic Oracle to secure hundreds of millions of transfer volume is a fitting high to end the year on,” she expressed.

“We’ve received some recommendations for improving on [the] user interface, but most people seem to really enjoy the experience of using the bridge.

“The excitement has caused people to get really excited about the future potential of Across.”

Just last month, Ondo Finance, a DeFI protocol that provides decentralised investment banking products and services, and Fei Protocol had partnered with several DeFI protocols, including UMA, with $100m secured in capital as they look set to launch a liquidity service.

McAlpine explains why this partnership was formed and how it will affect UMA positively.

“FEI and Ondo are creating a sustainable ‘LaaS’ Liquidity-As-A-Service program, which will help deepen UMA token liquidity as well as help build DAO partnerships,” she said.

“UMA has a track record of focusing on building relationships with other DAOs in the space because we believe these synergies will allow the entire space to be more adaptive.”

The UMAverse future is an exciting one according to McAlpine who says “Turning our community into a DAO will be an awesome experiment” will be a project to watch in 2022 as well as other plans on the horizon the community manager disclosed to Coin Rivet.

“The new SuperUMAn DAO will lead DAO-DAO relations particularly focusing on KPI options,” McAlpine announced.

“Spinning out a “sub-DAO” with a particular focus is something that is both novel and necessary as the UMA ecosystem grows.

“There’s some interesting development work being done on protected tokens which can reduce the impacts of hacks or rugpulls, [which is] still in the development phase, but you can get a sneak peek in the team internal learning session where UMA senior engineer John Shutt presents the concept.”