UMA Announces Launch of Oval for Oracle

UMA’s Announcement on the Launch of Oval

On the evening of January 23, 2024, UMA announced the launch of Oval, a solution designed to help DeFi projects capture additional value from Oracle Extractable Value (OEV), a concept similar to MEV but occurring each time a project updates price data through oracles like Chainlink.

Lending protocols lose hundreds of millions of dollars to MEV.

It’s time to capture that value.

Built with @chainlink Data Feeds and Flashbots, Oval is now live. 🥚 🧵 pic.twitter.com/lPJRuBS8Gt

— UMA 🥚 (@UMAprotocol) January 23, 2024

MEV, or Miner Extractable Value, refers to the value that miners or validators can extract by reordering transactions within a block before submitting them to the blockchain. MEV activities are most prominent on Ethereum, where participants often use bots to engage in price-arbitrage trading or sandwich attacks on regular users to maximize profits.

UMA noted that the MEV method can also be applied to the oracle space, which provides input price data for many DeFi protocols. Accordingly, each time an oracle updates its data source, there is an opportunity to profit from MEV during a period when traders can take advantage before the market reacts to the new price level.

UMA Co-founder Hart Lambur stated:

MEV is a significant issue that Ethereum hasn’t solved, with millions of dollars being extracted each year. OEV constitutes a large portion of that because many protocols need to update oracle data. Oval will address this issue by helping projects retain value from OEV.

UMA’s Oval is expected to enable DeFi projects to compete with MEV trading bots in the market, thereby retaining a portion of the value from OEV. Participants in Oval will bid to access price data sources from oracles. The funds raised from these auctions will then be used to support the protocol’s development.

Oval was developed by UMA in collaboration with Flashbots, a leading MEV mitigation solution on Ethereum at the current time.

UMA was launched in 2017 as a DeFi project on Ethereum specializing in synthetic assets but has since evolved into a platform where users can confirm on-chain data based on a reward-penalty model.

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The UMA Chart Following the Launch of Oval

The price of UMA token has tripled over the week following the announcement of the project’s implementation of the MEV solution for oracles on Ethereum.

4H chart for the UMA/USDT pair on Binance as of 03:19 AM on January 24, 2024.