🎙 UMA's Hart Lambur Says The Current Market Crisis Is A Sales Pitch For DeFi

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Hart Lambur, co-founder of the UMA protocol. UMA is an optimistic oracle on Ethereum that aims to record any knowable truth onto a blockchain. He was previously CEO of Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform, and also a US treasury trader for Goldman Sachs.

We discuss his take on the crypto market and how the current crisis is not a DeFi crisis, but rather a failure of risk management at centralized institutions.

He talks about co-founding UMA, which stands for Universal Market Access, in 2018 with the goal of making financial products and services accessible to everyone.

We discuss Optimistic Oracles, which let any application make requests for any piece of knowable data and allow anyone to respond to those questions, and how they enable decentralized dispute resolution.

There is constant discussion regarding the mismanagement of DAOs and issues surrounding governance. Hart believes that DAOs rely far too heavily on multi-sigs that are cumbersome and inefficient. We discuss Outcome Finance, an upcoming brand that will encompass all the DAO tooling that the UMA team has been building.

We dive into the risks posed by cross-chain bridges and how UMA’s Across bridge uses an optimistic oracle design to bridge EVM-compatible chains. Across is currently running a referral program ahead of its upcoming token launch.

Hart drops some alpha about UMA 2.0, which will improve the user experience for voters on the platform, and says he believes we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to the intersection of NFTs and DeFi.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

📺 Watch the video here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.