Scaling UMA

Published on: 17.06.2021

UMA is scaling to Polygon and laying the groundwork to support multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible scaling solutions.

Over the past few weeks, the team has been hard at work putting together scaling strategy, and they are taking the first step with Polygon.

This article explains how Polygon integration works and gives an overview of broader scaling strategy. The aim is to empower developers to enjoy the benefits of scaling solutions while retaining the continuing assurance that UMA’s DVM secures their contracts.

How are they scaling?

The UMA ecosystem comprises a dispute resolution layer — the Data Verification Mechanism (DVM), and the financial contracts it secures. UMA’s architecture has from conception been decoupled, meaning the dispute layer and the contract layer do not need to live on the same chain.

Having a decoupled architecture gives the advantage of being able to deploy to any EVM chain efficiently. Their scaling strategy allows the contract layer on Polygon or any EVM scaling solution to access the same DVM any contract native to Ethereum has access to.

With the DVM on Ethereum and the contract living on Polygon, the next step is establishing a communication channel or bridge. The bridge is responsible for establishing two-way communication between both chains, enabling price requests to be escalated to the DVM on mainnet from contracts on Polygon and price resolutions from the DVM to be pushed back to the contract.

Polygon deployed an arbitrary message system that we will be used to allow communication between the Root and Child Oracles.

The advantage of using this bridge over a bespoke solution is that financial contracts on Polygon only need to trust the consensus security of Polygon itself, secured by a validator set using proof-of-stake consensus, and the DVM on Ethereum. Crucially, there is no need to trust a centralized actor to relay information between chains.

A key characteristic of UMA being able to, in a trustless way, relay messages between chains is to have a bridge that does not rely on centralized control. UMA strongly prefers to use an arbitrary bridge that shares the same security properties as the sidechain itself. Trustless communication will be a critical part of approach as they extend to more scaling solutions.