Revised Funding Proposal: Oya Protocol

UMA Protocol Funding Proposals
1

Name of Project:
OyaChat / Oya Protocol

Proposer:
Vanessa Conyers (vanessa@oyachat.com)
John Shutt (john@oyachat.com)

Proposal Summary
The OyaChat team is seeking funding to release the public testnet of our UMA-powered natural language vault protocol and personalized AI chat application!

Project Description
Since our initial proposal, we have been bootstrapping the buildout of the Oya protocol for natural language cryptoasset vaults, and the OyaChat application that provides personalized AI guides that learn and grow with every user interaction. We launched our landing page and referral program at ETHDenver this year and received a huge amount of interest from potential users. Since we have already built so much behind the scenes, new releases will be coming rapidly in the coming weeks, beginning with AI personalization features.

The AI chat integration with our natural language protocol has been live on a private testnet since the middle of 2024, and we are finalizing the design and testing for the public version. We are seeking funding from the UMA DAO to continue our work, roll out our public testnet release, and audit and release our mainnet protocol.

Value Add
We think that Oya has the potential to be UMA’s biggest hit—both in terms of total value secured and total transaction value. The applications for natural language cryptoasset vaults are limitless. We strongly believe that the security and usability offered by natural language will be what brings mainstream adoption to crypto. UMA is the natural verification mechanism for the next wave of crypto applications, which will be based on AI agents and chat interfaces, and we are ready to prove that to the world. Our optimistic approach will be safer, cheaper, and more flexible than competing crypto AI projects. We have deep understanding of the design space, user needs, and underlying technology. What’s more, we have a plan to collect protocol revenue from day one. We want to form a symbiotic relationship with the UMA DAO and contribute to the UMA protocol’s economic security.

Deliverables
Our upcoming releases:

  1. Tools for users to create their personalized crypto AI guide.
  2. An AI engine that handles deep research, data analysis, and personalized insights.
  3. A crypto-focused chat application connecting personalized guides, the insight engine, and the onchain Oya protocol for natural language execution on testnet.
  4. Finally, the audited mainnet release of the Oya protocol.

We expect to have the public testnet version of OyaChat available in early Q2. We will begin the audit process shortly thereafter, budget permitting. If all goes according to plan, we will be ready for our mainnet release in late Q2.

Total Budget Requested
We are requesting a budget of 200,000 UMA tokens, to be paid based in two parts:

  1. 75,000 UMA tokens to sustain the team during this final push. We have been self-funding since November 2023, and have escalating legal bills and cloud expenses, as well as part-time contractors who have agreed so far to deferred payment.

  2. 125,000 UMA tokens on the event of our public testnet release. We expect that a significant portion of this will go towards audit costs.

Team
Vanessa Conyers (https://x.com/nesseps)
John Shutt (https://x.com/jdshutt)

Additional Information
There are a few additional pages you may wish to review!

  1. Original grant proposal, which discusses many of our goals for this project, and includes more information about the founders and discussion with the community about our ideas.

  2. Oya protocol contracts repo, which includes our testnet smart contracts and a README that describes their architecture in detail.

  3. Oya protocol node repo, which includes methods for proposing natural language intentions, and points towards the endgame of the Oya protocol as a pure natural language execution layer with its own persistent state.

  4. OyaChat About page, which provides more detail about us and our motivation for building personalized AI guides as a safe and comprehensible crypto interface for regular people.

We will be adding more information to this thread in the coming days, and are ready to answer any and all questions. We’re UMA’s biggest fans, and know we have something special brewing. Hope we can count on the DAO’s support to get Oya across the finish line!

Advance to Snapshot?
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters
4 Likes
2

Joined the waiting list early and was impressive to watch those numbers grow to an amazing level. Looking forward to see Oya deployed :flexed_biceps:

3 Likes
3

I thought the original proposal was enough to gain funding. With the work Vanessa and John have done to get this far I think they have made great strides and now make a stronger case. Looking forward to the testnet release!

2 Likes
4

Hey John,
I’m excited to see Oya come to fruition. A few questions:

  1. Can you give a simple summary of your legal costs to date, ongoing cloud costs and estimated audit costs?
  2. This grant looks to get Oya to mainnet launch. How do you plan on financing the team, ongoing operations and growth from there on?
5

Thanks, Lee! Here is a rough breakdown of our costs.

Legal Expenses (Total)
Total Paid: $27,764.50 (includes $6,000 retainer)
Outstanding Balance: $3,575.00

Cloud Expenses
Heroku: Roughly $255/month

OpenAI API: Only $160 total so far, benefitting from huge reductions in inference cost, as we predicted! This will increase when we have a public chat available, but we will rate limit usage, and restrict the full chat functionality to verified users.

CoinGecko API: $129/month

Privy: Don’t want to share exact numbers, since they were willing to give us a special rate given our early stage. Expecting to start paying enterprise rates in a few months, since we have over 2.6 million signups.

We have numerous subscriptions for the company, but those are the main cloud costs for the application itself.

Post-Mainnet Funding Plan
We have three major potential sources of revenue after launch: Protocol fees, transaction fees charged at the interface level, and proposer tips. We may also raise angel or venture capital funding in the coming months to accelerate growth, but want to keep our team lean and focused overall.

1 Like
6

Thanks for the response John. UMA DAO really has no official guidelines or past track record to evaluating grant proposals, so I’ll try to give my reasoning and encourage others to do the same.

In my opinion this is the strongest grant proposal UMA has received from an external project due to:

  • John is experienced and knows UMA deeply
  • UMA is foundational to the project, not an optional add-on adaptor
  • significant effort has already been put into the project
  • this is a new use case that pushes the boundaries of what UMA has been used for, not an existing use case

I think the difficult part points are:

  • there is no clear guarantee the DAO will have tangible benefit from this as it’s not tied to a KPI, but that type of funding is not in line with Oya’s funding needs right now.
  • as with any startup there is a decent chance of failure

So it really comes down to whether the DAO wants to fund grants building new use cases on UMA? If so, this is likely the best opportunity we’ll get. If you think the DAO treasury should be used only for investments that have clear and legible positive expected value, this probably isn’t for you.

Based on the above, I am in general support of the grant. I’ll also add that I think funding an audit after seeing a functional testnet launch is the most appealing part of this proposal to me and I would be in very strong support of that.

1 Like
7

John, thank you for putting together this proposal. First of all, this is all just my personal opinion as an UMA holder and voter. I’m super excited to see different ways LLMs can interact with blockchain infra, and I’ve heard the early numbers look really good!

While I’m a big supporter of projects building on UMA and have tons of respect for you, John, I don’t think this type of grant is a good idea for the DAO. I think UMA DAO grants should be either an incentivization mechanism or (rarely) a secondary/minor source of funding. I don’t think the DAO should be a primary source of bootstrap funding for a project.

If a protocol has revenue sources (which it sounds like Oya does) and intends to make money, venture capital, in my opinion, is the best place to get bootstrap funding in exchange for early equity. The market is really good at helping founders refine and improve their projects in an incentive-aligned way, so I think this will likely lead to the best long term outcomes both for UMA and for Oya.

While I don’t support funding this grant proposal, I’m a big supporter of the Oya team and project!

8

I truly love all who voted and showed us love. It means a lot! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Also, thank you for your thoughtful feedback on our proposal. I sincerely appreciate your support for the Oya team and project! Your point about UMA DAO grants being best used as incentivization mechanisms rather than a primary funding source for bootstrapping resonates deeply with us. We’ve taken this feedback to heart and would like to revise our approach.

Since November 2023, we’ve been exploring how a symbiotic relationship between UMA and Oya could work. Our goal has always been to collaborate with the battle-tested Risk Labs team and active UMA members who truly understand the ecosystem’s needs. We are also passionate about preserving as much of the token supply as possible for users, builders, and partners who give our protocol value by their participation, which is why we have been bootstrapping solely from our own savings so far.

UMA’s economic security is very important to our use case. That’s why we’ve scripted into our tokenomics a mechanism for Oya Protocol to use part of of its future protocol revenue on a continual basis to buy back and burn UMA tokens. We had a productive call with a law firm last Thursday who can advise us on fundraising and our token release, and will be moving forward with their expertise.

In the meantime, we’d like to approach the UMA DAO for a smaller, focused grant of 35K UMA tokens. This would signal that UMA is interested in collaborating with Oya and would help us develop the token mechanisms and cover some of the associated legal costs.

This initial funding would allow us to demonstrate our capabilities while setting the foundation for ongoing collaboration between UMA and Oya.

We would welcome an opportunity to discuss this directly with the Risk Labs team and other UMA DAO members to refine the incentive structure and ensure it aligns with UMA’s strategic objectives.

Would you be open to reviewing this revised approach? We truly value your perspective as an UMA holder and would appreciate any additional guidance you might offer.