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UMA Joins Blockzero Labs DeFi Accelerator

February 26, 2021 March 3rd, 2021

If there is one thing the UMA Protocol has made clear since launching, it is this:

  • In April 2020, UMA became the first project to run a mass scale Initial Liquidity Offering on a DEX, paving the way for the emergence of a new liquidity framework for DeFi projects.
  • On November 10th of last year, UMA launched Developer Mining, a fresh take on the typical liquidity mining model. This incentivized ‘buidling’ on UMA by allowing devs to earn ownership in networks they helped bring to life.
  • On February 11th, 2021, UMA announced it would be airdropping over 2,000,000 $UMA tokens to help facilitate a new concept called KPI Options. KPI Options are synthetic tokens designed to align token holder interests with the collective interests of the protocol, by paying out more rewards as KPIs are hit by a certain target date.

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Fueled by their unique combination of innovative, yet seemingly unorthodox ideas, the UMA protocol has since reached over $94M in TVL, facilitated the creation of over $20M worth of synthetic tokens, and empowered the frameworks of over 9 different projects.

In March 2021, UMA will continue to push industry boundaries as they become the first ever project to join the Blockzero DeFi Accelerator program.

What is an Accelerator program?

In 2005, Y Combinator (YC) was born.

A startup accelerator based out of Silicon Valley, YC has helped launch over 2,000 companies into the world — including industry giants like Coinbase, Airbnb, Reddit, DropBox, Stripe, and Twitch — just to name a few.

As of January 2021, the combined value of all YC companies totaled over $300 billion dollars.

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Instead of being the creator of innovation, YC found exponential growth by being the catalyst for innovation.

Although the model has helped grow some of the most successful companies of this generation, the model simply does not align with the decentralized world.

  • Instead of focusing on traditional equities, DeFi projects are primarily token based — with value captured internally within their native ecosystems.
  • Instead of working with centralized teams, DeFi projects are often times 100% remote or distributed individuals.
  • Instead of needing to physically go to Silicon Valley and wait months to acquire capital to jumpstart your company, in DeFi, funds can be raised almost instantly.
  • In DeFi, raising capital is just one part of the equation. Protocol education, onboarding, and community building forms the other crucial piece of the puzzle, and traditional incubator models aren’t currently built to solve for this.

These are just a few of the reasons why we’ve created the Blockzero DeFi Accelerator — a catalyst to help blockchain projects reach escape velocity.

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What is the Blockzero Labs DeFi Accelerator?

With that mission in mind, whenever a project joins the Blockzero DeFi Accelerator, there are three primary goals we set out to achieve.

1/ Educate

Education is the core building block of mainstream adoption. We help users learn about projects through explainer videos, walk-through tutorials, and interactive AMAs.

2/ Incentivize

We believe the best way to engage new users with new projects is through strategic, mutually-aligned and hyper-targeted token reward opportunities.

Example Case Study: $5,000 Token Ideas Tournament

3/ Onboard

With the proper education and incentives in place, projects are able to efficiently onboard new users into their ecosystems to meet specific growth KPIs.

Focused on quality of users, Blockzero Labs has a community of over 7,800 passionate DeFi users from around the world that we call Citizens.

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View more Citizens: https://dropzero.io/community/

The Index (Business Model)

In return for all of our provided acceleration efforts, projects accepted into the Accelerator are expected to offer between $10,000 to $250,000 worth of tokens to the Blockzero Index.

To ensure that assets are securely locked and incentivizing Blockzero Citizens to support projects/protocols for many years to come, the Blockzero Index utilizes a deflationary distribution model. The only way to remove tokens from the Index is by burning $XIO tokens.

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As the first project to enter the DeFi Accelerator, UMA will be offering $50,000 worth of UMA tokens to the Blockzero Index and Accelerator Program.

For a more in-depth at how the Index works, check out this video.

What does this mean for UMA?

So what will UMA actually get out of all of this? After talking with UMA, we identified three primary goals:

  1. Increase understanding of the potential for synthetic assets
  2. Increase UMA overall Total Value Locked metrics (TVL)
  3. Increase engagement and usage of projects built on UMA protocol

While the exact flow of these events is going to be finalized in the coming week, these is a sneak peak of some campaigns you may see unfold throughout the duration of UMA’s participation in the Accelerator.

  • Synthetic Tokens Ideas Competition
  • Synthetic Mining of UMA Assets
  • UMA Project Utilization Contest
  • Blockzero Labs ($XIO) KPI Options
  • Interview on Around the Block with Lea Thompson
  • Host UFO for UMA on Flashstake.io
  • UMA Overview/Explainer Videos

Closing

The decentralized world is mostly a land of uncharted territory. As such, it should be explored, expanded, and traversed together with projects and protocols who share a common vision.

We could not be more excited to explore these lands with UMA Project and help push forward the next generation of decentralized projects.

Blockzero Labs Links

UMA Protocol Links