What is UMA?
UMA is the governance token for Universal Market Access (UMA) Protocol, a decentralized ecosystem and oracle service enabling users to transfer any form of risk and create synthetic derivatives markets using priceless financial contracts that are self-enforcing and universally accessible. Synthetic tokens are collateral-backed tokens whose values fluctuate based on the tokens’ reference indices, utilizing features of prediction markets, futures markets, and collateralized loans. Users can mint synthetic tokens for real-world assets and commodities (gold, Tesla stock price), non-tradable indices tracking, and synthetic cross-chain crypto-assets among other use cases. UMA provides an open-source protocol for any two counter-parties to design and create their own financial contracts. Priceless financial contracts only require writing a price on-chain in the event of a dispute (which is rare in occurrence) to minimize reliance on oracles and reduce vulnerability to attacks. Each UMA contract comprises of five separate components: Public addresses of counter-parties, margin accounts for each counter-party, economic terms to calculate price values, smart contract functions to maintain the margin balances, and an oracle to provide secure and verified off-chain data. UMA token holders are granted voting rights in community governance proposals.
