Going Mainstream with KPI ^Tokens (Initial Research | Part One)

UMA Protocol
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^Upside
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The purpose of this post (Part One) is to gain feedback from the UMA community and Risk Labs team. A more formal follow-up proposal (Part Two) will be submitted in the following days/weeks.

If successful, Moai Labs aims to take the input from this proposal and:

  1. Build upon UMA’s OO
  2. Expand the awareness, understanding, and utility of KPI tokens
  3. Develop a new consumer-facing product that fuels mainstream adoption

In short, similar to how Polymarket built a product on top of UMA’s OO, we want to build a product on top of UMA’s OO that leverages and showcases the potential of KPI tokens.

Who is Moai Labs?

Before we get too far down the rabbit hole, let us introduce ourselves! Building together since 2019, Moai Labs is a crypto development studio consisting of five individuals:

  • Zachary Dash (BD/Product/Growth)
  • Umar Salim (Solidity/Backend/Security)
  • Steve.ETH (Strategy/Treasury/Ops)
  • Ben Azoulay (UIUX/Frontend Dev)
  • Hwdini (Community/Strategy)

The founders of Moai Labs are also the primary builders behind Blockzero Labs (a decentralized venture studio), Flashstake (an upfront yield DeFi Protocol), and Epoch Island (the onchain Silicon Valley)

Through the last several years, we have become very familiar with the history, culture, team, and ethos of UMA…

In short, we love building, and we love building with UMA <3

Abstract

Our thesis is simple:

KPI tokens are one of the most powerful yet underutilized and underappreciated technological breakthroughs in all of crypto. We (Moai Labs) want to be the ones to help scale them to mainstream adoption.

There are two primary reasons we believe KPI/success tokens have not reached the level of industry-wide adoption they deserve:

Reason #1: B2B vs. B2C

Resources like outcome.finance have done an amazing job of showing the benefits of KPI and success tokens to DAOs and projects. No other team knows this better than Moai Labs, as we’ve utilized this technology to build and launch multiple KPI-based tokens over the years.

However, we believe adding a product positioned more towards consumers (B2C) would greatly increase usage.

Reason #2: Code to No-Code

KPI tokens are relatively easy to create if you are a developer. However, we believe there is a massive market of non-developers who would like to create KPI-based tokens.

For this reason, Moai Labs aims to create a no-code interface for anyone to create KPI tokens in a matter of seconds.

The Product

Upside ^Tokens leverage the concept of KPI tokens to build a simple-to-use and easy-to-understand consumer-facing product. Here’s how it works.

Step One: Create ^token

Within a few seconds and no code, any person or project can create a KPI token. For clarity moving forward, we are calling these Upside Tokens (^tokens).

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The no-code form asks basic questions:

  • What is the name of your ^token?
  • What metric must be hit to unlock this ^token?
  • What is the redemption date of this ^token?
  • What token will people earn if this metric is met?
  • How much collateral will you put into this ^token?

This information is then used to automatically mint an ^upside token (KPI-based token).

Step Two: Create Campaign

Once the ^tokens are created and collateralized, the person or project can create an Upside Campaign.

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This includes questions like:

  • How would you like people to earn this ^token? (Buy or Stake)
  • What assets would you like to accept for this token? (ETH, USDC, etc)
  • What is the start and end date of this campaign? (September 1st - December 1st)

This immediately creates an Upside Page for that person or project.

Step Three: Search

Immediately, anyone can now search for this ^token on the website.

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Step Four: Stake or Swap

Depending on the campaign, anyone can begin staking to earn or swapping to buy this ^token.

  • If staking, the yield from their stake will go to the ^token Creator
  • If swapping, the funds deposited will go to the ^token Creator

Additional Features

There are many other primary features not included in this document we would like to add over time. This includes features like a Dashboard, analytics pages, and other customization tools.

Also, while we believe the MVP for Upside can be built using the current KPI and/or Success token standards, Moai Labs is interested in researching ways to add additional flexibility to Upside Tokens.

Examples:

  1. Instead of having to wait for expiry, a user should be able to redeem their Upside Token at any time if this KPI is met.
  2. An automated vesting schedule for the ^upside redemption so not all collateral hits the market at once.
  3. Bonding curve redemption rate values, instead of all or nothing.

These are some wishlist future items we have developed based on our own community feedback and internal brainstorming!

Potential Partnership Structure

In addition to building a product that takes the industry by storm, Moai Labs has two primary motivations and outcomes of a potential partnership.

Goal 1: Drive Initial Social Proof and Activity

We all know how hard it is for new products to get off the ground. Many times users won’t try a new product unless it has met some minimum TVL and/or social proof.

For this reason, we believe UMA DAO and/or Risk Labs can help us achieve this by creating a $1M ^token (KPI token) through the Upside product front end.

This will showcase not only how easy the product is to use, but also give us an initial case study to recruit other projects to join.

Here are three examples:

  1. Create a ^ACX-100B token where the KPI is to reach $100B in volume through the Across bridge before the end of 2025.
  2. Create a ^UMA-TVS-10B token where the KPI is for UMA to secure $10B before the year 2026.
  3. Create a ^ETH-LP-25k token where the KPI is to reach 25,000 ETH in the Across ETH-LP pool before 2025.

Moai Labs is agnostic on what Risk Labs and or the UMA community comes up with. We just wanted to get the ideas out there :slight_smile:

Goal 2: Cover baseline expenses of Moai Labs

To build this, Moai Labs would be covering the following roles:

  • Front-end Developer

  • Product + UI/UX Designer

  • Smart Contract/Solidity Developer

  • BD to recruit projects to create Upside ^Tokens

  • Content Creator for walk-through videos and threads

If UMA and/or Risk Labs could provide a grant to cover all or a portion of our $30,000/month expenses, Moai Labs could 100% focus on building and getting to market as quickly as possible.

To reiterate, Moai Labs is excited to explore all potential ways to partner and build this Upside product together. Curious to get some feedback on other options!

Timelines and Milestones

Moai Labs moves and deploys quickly. Right now, our tentative macro-level roadmap would be:

  • 1-week after approval: Figma board (UI/UX)
  • 3-weeks after approval: Front End MVP
  • 6-weeks after approval: Private Beta #1
  • 9-weeks after approval: Private Beta #2
  • 12-weeks after approval: Public Beta and Product

Pending more feedback on this document, the next document (Part Two) will give greater detail and precision on expected milestones.

Questions and Feedback

Questions and feedback would be greatly appreciated. We will then use your input to make a more formal follow-up post hopefully next week.

While you’re welcome to take your feedback in any direction, here are some prompts in case they help spark some questions!

  • What about this proposal would you like more information or clarity on?
  • Is there anything you read here that intrigued, excited, or resonated with you?
  • Is there anything here that brought uncertainty or concern?
  • Is there anything about the overall technical architecture and implementation we can go into more detail with?
  • Do you have a preference or additional ideas on how to structure the Partnership Agreement structures listed above?

Closing Remarks and Appreciation

Regardless of how this proposal goes, we have deep respect and love for the UMA community and products.

Want to give a special shout-out to several UMAzing individuals who have either helped Moai Labs over the years or by providing direct feedback to this proposal here:

Quick Links

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Hey everyone, steve.eth here from Moai Labs, also a $ACX and $UMA holder, I wanted to say hello, I will also try to help answer any questions.

As you can see from our history, we love building cool innovative DeFi projects and working with UMA. The KPI project we have proposed here today I am very excited about how it could popularize KPI tokens and open up new easier ways to promote and incentivize projects reaching their goals. One aspect of this project I’m especially bullish on is the ability to swap KPI tokens because I think this feature could become popular and gain a lot of usage and greatly increase the TVL of total KPI value of assets protected by the OO.

I’m really looking forward to making this product happen, there’s a ton of potential to upgrade the abilities of KPI tokens :rocket:

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