UNO, Duo, Tre... I mean UMA 🦄 A $0 CMC project?!

Hey seafood, we got something new today. A gambling opportunity one could say, but it's not as trivial as it looks. Let's go!

The gambling pot of today is UMA.xyz 🌈 A protocol that enables users to create synthetic tokens (ST) through overcollateralization. A synthetic token tracks the price of some predefined reference asset or index, like gold or the S&P 500. Here is a great TL;DR I stole content from: https://twitter.com/tokenterminal/status/1255237984783384581.

It's actually a pretty cool thing if you look deeper into it. Synthetic assets, fully running on ETH and not its own chain. It got a lot of ETH enthusiasts' attention in the past few months. The team presumably audited contracts with OpenZeppelin. Interesting use cases and integrations can be done with this, including the creation of new weird stablecoins. Look into it if you like DeFi!

Mr. Lobster, I just want to lose money!
- Glad to hear this, my fellow degenerate. So let's talk about this UMA token thing.

UMA tokenholders = the oracle. They charge fees for voting how much any given ST was worth upon its expiry or liquidation (if the liquidation was disputed). They also charge a periodic % fee of all the value locked in the system (= mgmt fee). The usual staking value accrual model. It works if there is usage, sure thing. So the narrative works. But for speculation purposes, it's fine as it is now.

UMA will have initial Uniswap Listing today, at 15:00 UTC.

At that time, the Risk Labs Foundation will deposit 2mm UMA tokens and ~$535k of ETH into a newly created liquidity pool. This represents an initial listing price of ~$0.26/UMA, which implies a fully diluted market capitalization of ~$26.67mm. This is the same valuation used in our initial seed investment. https://medium.com/uma-project/umas-initial-uniswap-listing-afa7b6f6a330.

Now to the fun part which is confusing and is a bit rekt if you look closer...

1. Are they really locked? They have some cool backers who are supposed to be locked until 2021 [muh VC sir] like Placeholder: https://umaproject.org/about.html. Yes: team, foundation, all backers - as the text states: Approximately 48.5mm UMA tokens are held by Risk Labs’s founders, early contributors, and investors. These tokens are transfer-restricted until 2021, and all individual token grants are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule. ⭕️ However, it's not in the smart contract and it's also said a bit vaguely.

2. Future token sales...how soon? 35mm UMA tokens will be distributed to developers and users of the UMA network. The mechanics for this distribution have not been finalized and will be put forward to the community for discussion and approval. An additional 14.5mm UMA tokens will be reserved for future token sales. Here is the thing, they are talking about it pretty vaguely again. The next token sale might even happen next week, who says it's not possible? ⭕️ Next to that, they already did a few small rewards, so that might be a burden for the price too.

1/2 UMA -> t.me/blockchain_lobsters/823