Adding price identifiers

Hi all,

I have come to know UMA a few days ago and the quality and inherent safety of the protocol is impressive, especially things like PoC and CoC.

Comparing it to other related projects such as Mirror one point in common is: the process to add price and collateral identifiers is manual, and subject to a review.

A very basic question is: why can’t UMA just rely on selected sources, and wants to verify the specific tickers instead? Like for example: a price identifier could be anything on Bloomberg, or any dataset column on Quandle. So: once a source and its related channels are approved and added, any symbol may be added.

In particular: if I look at this pullreq, it is quite some work to add just one single index - and a pretty unknown one too - when anything with an ISIN is trackable. The uSTONKS pullreq instead mentions for example looking up prices of listed stocks via Google Finance, which sounds odd in some sense.

What is the UMAns’ rationale behind a manual process? :slight_smile: And basically why there’s no “hot” or “meme” stocks altogether in the approved price identifiers, is it a regulatory concern e.g. STOs etc.?

Thank you,

UMA works a little differently from most other oracles because our financial contracts are priceless, so we do not require an ongoing price feed, but simply a time at settlement. This gives us added security and protection against flashloans.

Having said that you are correct and the individual additions of price identifiers is onerous, and we are looking at ways of cutting down on the number of UMIPs that are required through the inclusion of ancillary data in our financial contracts.

We have no “hot” or “meme” stock in our PIs as no-one as yet has proposed building a financial contract using them, but you are very welcome to build one :slight_smile: .

Hi @Mhairi , thank you for this answer, very appreciated!

The “lazy eval” approach of UMA - you never need an oracle until you need one, so when a dispute is (opportunistically) triggered is very clear to me.

In general there could be a host of things one could try to replicate, and some are more useful than others.

I see there is some movement around the protocol, like for example the Jarvis team introducing sponsor-only minting.
Next to your UMA developers program, which is described very well in the wiki, what’s the financial incentive one has in creating and publishing a new contract, what is the business model basically?

Thanks in advance,

Thanks for your reply.

There should be an announcement out shortly on contract development incentives, I dont want to steal anyone’s thunder tho so I’ll just leave you hanging in expectation. Do watch our twitter and medium for announcements tho.