UMA & Across: Optimistic Oracles & Intent-Based Bridges for Unifying Ethereum - Hart Lambur

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 backgroundUniversal Market Access, from synthetic assets to oraclesBuilding AcrossUMA’s optimistic oracleIncentivizing voters & resolving disputesDealing with invalid outcomesOptimistic security assumptionsUMA x Across dual token interactionsAcross’ intent-based bridgePricing mechanism & solver competitionZK settlementBridging fragmentationAbstracting & unifying cross-chain bridgingBridging between rollupsUMA & Across governance systems Episode links:Hart Lambur on XAcross Protocol on XUMA 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.ioChorus 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.