Today’s guest is Chris Maree, a senior engineer at UMA protocol. Chris got into crypto several years ago and is a wealth of knowledge on solidity development, DeFi, & cryptoeconomics. In this episode, we go deep on engineering at UMA, and got to ask Chris a ton of questions about smart contract design patterns. We discuss the cryptoeconomics of UMA’s optimistic oracle, the low level design of UMA’s Across bridge, gas optimization, security, and Chris’ long term vision for the space.

If you’re an engineer interested in smart contract development & DeFi, we think you’re going to love this one.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
3:10 How Chris got involved in crypto

6:50 UMA’s optimistic oracle

11:39 Examples of long tail data usage in web3

13:45 Walking through technical examples of how the optimistic oracle works

23:00 The use of ‘ancillary data' to turn the optimistic oracle into a ‘Turing complete’ oracle

27:31 Behind the scenes on the Optimistic Oracle design

31:53 What is Across: bridging as a lending problem vs bridging as a swapping problem

34:00 The Across Hub & Spoke Model For Liquidity

38:00 Can you pass call data across chains with Across?

39:30 The use of ‘bundles’ in Across

49:20 Favorite UMA design patterns

52:03 UMA engineering design practices 

58:04 Chris’ approach to security and engaging auditors

1:00:06 Trends Chris is excited about (Cross chain MEV, NFT derivatives)

1:02:50 Chris’ long term vision for the future of crypto

Links: https://docs.umaproject.org/
Chris on Github: https://github.com/chrismaree