UMA

In December 2018, Hart Lambur and Allison Lu founded UMA, developed by Risk Labs; a $4 million seed round followed the same month, led by Placeholder with Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly, Bain Capital Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures participating.

In April 2020, UMA completed an early token sale on Uniswap, selling 2 million tokens at $0.26 for about $520,000; in May it launched ETHBTC, its first “priceless” synthetic, using dispute arbitration instead of constant price feeds—an early IDO experiment.

In late 2021, the UMA-based bridge Across launched with intent-based bridging; in 2023 UMA released Oval to help lending protocols reclaim oracle extractable value, shifting from synthetic assets toward data infrastructure.

In June 2024, amid the Barron Trump-linked DJT token dispute, Polymarket publicly rejected UMA's ruling and refunded unilaterally; in 2025 a Ukraine minerals market saw a single whale push YES with about 25% voting power. Both events put the question of who guarantees outcomes front and center.

On July 29, 2025, UMA's UMIP-189 passed, deploying the managed oracle MOOV2 for Polymarket and narrowing first-round proposers to an allowlist, going live in November; a $16 million UFO market still resolved YES in December without document release.

In April 2026, a US-Iran ceasefire market saw a $77 million dispute, and on April 9 the UMA 2.0 roadmap proposed staking rewards, redistribution by vote accuracy and dynamic margins; first-quarter protocol revenue of $520,000 was a record, with monthly prediction-market notional above $30 billion.

On April 9, 2026, UMA published the UMA 2.0 roadmap: introducing UMA staking rewards, redistributing rewards based on voting accuracy, and adding an unstaking cooldown; from June 15, voting-pool delegates no longer receive gas rebates, encouraging more independent voting participation. Q1 2026 protocol revenue hit a record $520,000.

Oracle demand is strong: Polymarket Protocol V2 began production testing on October 5 (full cutover targeted for November 2), with its OracleAggregator integrating UMA's Optimistic Oracle alongside Chainlink Data Streams; coverage of the CFTC's October 6 proposal for a crypto exchange licensing framework also cited UMA's settlement role. Over $3 billion of prediction-market volume during the 2026 World Cup relied on UMA's oracle for settlement.

Negatives: Binance removed the UMA/USDC margin pair on August 17 (effective August 21), and BloFin delisted UMA from spot copy trading on September 14. Dispute resolutions trigger UMA burns, creating deflationary pressure; as of October 7, UMA traded around $0.47 with a market cap of roughly $44 million.

On October 5, 2026 Polymarket's Protocol V2 entered production testing, with a new OracleAggregator supporting pluggable reporters that include both UMA and Chainlink Data Streams, and a full switch tentatively set for November 2; UMA's Managed Optimistic Oracle V2 continues to handle whitelisted proposals and dispute resolution, and community discussion on September 28 argued Polymarket may matter more to UMA than to its own token.

From June 15, delegates in voting pools stopped receiving gas rebates to encourage independent voting; Oval auctions liquidation-related oracle extractable value through MEV-Share and returns roughly 90% to protocols. On October 7 UMA traded near $0.474 for a $43.9 million market cap, with about 92.75 million of roughly 131 million tokens circulating; doubts over the neutrality of dispute rulings persist, with some users moving to alternatives such as Hyperliquid's HIP-4.

Future strategy and roadmap: The near-term milestone is Polymarket Protocol V2: UMA's optimistic oracle sits in the OracleAggregator as a reporter module alongside Chainlink Data Streams, with net-new markets moving to V2 from November 2, and UMA competing for settlement share on event-based markets. Medium term, the UMA 2.0 roadmap published in April adds staking rewards for UMA, reallocates rewards by voting accuracy and sets an unstaking cooldown, while research with EigenLayer explores next-generation oracles built on restaking.

Hart Lambur is co-founder and chief executive. With a computer science degree from Columbia and a background as an interest rate trader at Goldman Sachs, he founded the personal finance platform Openfolio in 2013 and led it as chief executive before co-founding this project in 2018.

Allison Lu is a co-founder with a bachelor's in economics and management from MIT. She spent six years as a vice president at Goldman Sachs and later led credit risk analysis at Tala, and co-founded the UMA protocol with Lambur in 2018.

Kevin Chan is an engineer with a software development background who previously worked at Google, contributed to the core optimistic oracle development and led engineering work on the Across bridge at Risk Labs.

Colleen Culbertson is legal counsel with a securities regulatory background who previously served at the US Securities and Exchange Commission and handles governance and legal compliance matters.

The four founders cover trading, risk, engineering and legal, with Culbertson responsible for governance and legal compliance.