Universal Market Access (UMA) was founded by 2 ex Goldman Sachs traders that wanted to make global markets universally accessible through financial smart contracts that used synthetic assets on Ethereum. However, this was taking place long before the massive boom of DeFi summer of 2020. As a result, UMA shifted to building an optimistic oracle to power prediction markets as a decentralised ‘truth machine’, thus expanding oracle use cases. Through game theoretic models, UMA managed to properly incentivise its token holders to act as voters, rewarding them for good predictions & disputes, and vice versa. Later on, Hart Lambur also co-founded Across, an intent-based optimistic bridge that set out to create a seamless UX for unifying EVM chains. Through their solver network, Across managed to achieve fast (as low as 2 seconds) and cheap bridging, abstracting away crosschain complexities, without any security tradeoffs.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Hart’s background
• Universal Market Access, from synthetic assets to oracles
• Building Across
• UMA’s optimistic oracle
• Incentivizing voters & resolving disputes
• Dealing with invalid outcomes
• Optimistic security assumptions
• UMA x Across dual token interactions
• Across’ intent-based bridge
• Pricing mechanism & solver competition
• ZK settlement
• Bridging fragmentation
• Abstracting & unifying cross-chain bridging
• Bridging between rollups
• UMA & Across governance systems

Episode links:

• Hart Lambur on X
• Across Protocol on X
• UMA Protocol on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.