UMA’s uTVL KPI Options — A Retrospective and the Next Launch

Tl;dr: The uTVL campaign was successful in creating an incredibly tight knit community working for UMA adoption. However, the KPI itself, TVL, ended the period around the same amount as it started.

The community success has prompted UMA to launch a new KPI Options program for Q3, 2021: the uDAO campaign with DAO integrations as the KPI.

Retrospective: Was uTVL successful?

In Q2, UMA announced a KPI Options program focusing on the TVL locked in UMA. The TVL climbed from 80M to 200M at one point, but resolved at $110M.

The announcement of the airdrop was coupled with a campaign to gather and organize those who were motivated by the airdrop. Hundreds of people joined and gained the moniker of “Super Uman”, and the campaign channel had over 10x the message activity of any other channel in UMA’s discord.

Super Umans ran social media and governance blitz campaigns into other communities with the aim of attracting new partners. These communities included BadgerDAO, Harvest, Sushi, Aragon, 88mph, PoolTogether, Index Coop, and Indexed Finance. A “campaign” was a social coordination across Discord, Discourse, and Twitter, and often involved weeks of lead generation and follow up.

Why TVL did not climb higher

This experiment was designed with the idea that the options were given to the people who could help increase TVL. While UMA did see use increase, the TVL did not climb above that 210M mark. Market activity was partly to blame, and while UMA did see increased integrations, it was not as successful as we would have liked. Here is what we learned:

Key Takeaway 1: These relationships take longer to build and implement than 3 months. Many talks with the Super Umans are still ongoing.

Key Takeaway 2: Product-market fit exists in these treasury management tools, but selling them requires governance participation. This can take a long time.

Key Takeaway 3: People may come for the airdrop, but they stay for the friendships. Super Uman activity and enthusiasm never dropped off even when a lower payout became apparent.

Key Takeaway 4: The airdrop was way too diffuse. Of the 7000 addresses targeted, about 500 expressed an interest in participating directly.

Final takeaway: the design of the KPI Options is that the treasury does not pay out unless the objective is met. It was successful in the sense that Risk Labs will only have paid about 5% of the total amount locked, and will reclaim the remaining 95% which is now free to reissue elsewhere.

When promoted with the question “Was the uTVL campaign a failure?,” Super Umans had their own opinions:

About 30 Super Umans put in work commensurate with part-time job. They were “underpaid” but we also avoided overpaying the free riders. This is the primary motivation that the next KPI Option will be given almost exclusively to active Super Umans.

KPI Option Roll: uDAO Tokens

The next KPI Options will be in effect from July 1st to September 30th and will pay out based on the number of DAO integrations that UMA achieves in that time period.

An integration will have been achieved when a DAO funds with tokens one of the following three product categories:

• KPI options
• Call/Put options
• Range Bonds

These products were selected as they are the team’s strategic focus for this quarter, and we want to ensure alignment between the UMA core team and the Super Umans.

These tokens will pay out 50 $UMA tokens per integration, per 1,000 uDAO. For any integration that is funded with more than $5M USD worth of tokens, uDAO will pay out an additional 100 $UMA tokens.

Example matrix:

Taking the second row as an example, in the event that UMA has 12 qualifying DAO integrations and 4 of them are funded with an excess of $5M in token value, then each uDAO token will expire worth 1 $UMA each.

The maximum value of each uDAO token is 3 $UMA. This occurs in the event of 20 integrations that are worth more than $5M. In the event that there are more than 20 integrations, only 20 will count, but any of those 20 can be worth $5M to count for the size bonus.

Strategy and Joining the Super Umans

This program has been designed to be substantially higher paying for the target recipients, which for the example of 1000 uDAO, will pay out $500 in value for an integration plus an additional $1,000 for each one that reaches $5M in value. This is what a single individual would receive.

It is also designed to pay out more reliably. There are many relationships in process that we expect to bear fruit in the next quarter, both from Super Umans and the core team.

Membership as a Super Uman in this airdrop is predicated on participation before now. There has been no airdrop or other wide distribution. However, there are ways to start to participate for anyone who is interested. Join discord.umaproject.org and ask how you can join.