🚀 NEW EPISODE 🚀 Optimistic Oracles & Intent-Based Bridges for Unifying Ethereum @tw_tter chats with @hal2001, co-founder of @UMAprotocol & @AcrossProtocol, about his journey from UMA's synthetic assets & next-gen optimistic oracle, to attempting to unify Ethereum’s ecosystem through Across’ intent-based bridge. Universal Market Access (@UMAprotocol) envisioned a world in which global markets were 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, @UMAprotocol 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, @hal2001 also co-founded @AcrossProtocol, 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. Don't forget to RT & follow @epicenterbtc! Topics discussed in this episode: 0:00 - Introduction 3:41 - Hart’s background 5:24 - Universal Market Access, from synthetic assets to oracles 7:53 - Building Across 10:01 - UMA’s optimistic oracle 14:42 - Incentivizing voters & resolving disputes 25:56 - Dealing with invalid outcomes 32:47 - Optimistic security assumptions 34:56 - UMA x Across dual token interactions 37:37 - Across’ intent-based bridge 43:53 - Pricing mechanism & solver competition 48:07 - ZK settlement 54:54 - Bridging fragmentation 58:23 - Abstracting & unifying cross-chain bridging 1:04:46 - Bridging between rollups 1:06:55 - UMA & Across governance systems