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
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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