UMA Token Surges By 28% Despite General Bearish Trend

UMA (UMA) has registered an impressive 28.7% gain in the last seven days, according to data by CoinMarketCap. In a week marked by market losses and little gains, the DeFi token showed much resilience to emerge as one of the biggest weekly gainers. 

Although most of the market stands in awe of the stunning bullish performance of the popular meme coin – PEPE -, UMA’s remarkable price gain has recorded much profit for its investors, drawing significant attention.

UMA’s Price Action 

Initially, UMA began trading the week around a price region of $1.95. The token showed no significant movement until two days after when it attempted a bullish run but couldn’t break past the resistance level at $2.31. 

On May 5, i.e., yesterday, UMA experienced a hike in its market price, gaining by over 43% to move from $2.18 to break above the $3 price mark for the first time since August 2022. 

Although UMA’s price has since slipped from such high levels, the DeFi token appeared to have found support and could be gearing for another breakout.

At the time of writing, UMA is trading around $2.55, with a 0.22% loss in the last 24 hours. In this same period, the token’s trading volume has boosted by a staggering 438.82% to attain a value of $336.70 million. 

Interestingly, UMA’s price growth is also reflected by the growing traction on its platform. Based on data from Stelareum, Total Value Locked (TVL) on the UMA protocol has grown from $10.33 million to $11.12 million over the last two days. 

UMA

UMA Protocol Set To Record New Partnerships

Amidst the impressive market performance of the UMA token, its underlying network appears to make much progress on the adoption front.

According to a tweet yesterday,  the UMA Protocol announced that two new DAOs is set to integrate its latest blockchain product, the oSnap module, a unique governance solution aimed at merging on-chain and offchain governance system.

The Optimistic Snapshot Execution, or oSnap as it is known, enables the “execution onchain of transactions performed off-chain immediately but with protections against harmful proposal execution.”

The last protocol to integrate the oSnap module was the popular decentralized exchange, ShapeShift.

That said, UMA generally functions as a decentralized platform that allows other DeFi protocols to build “priceless” financial contracts on Ethereum while providing them with publicly verifiable market data.

In essence, this project functions as an oracle, granting various DeFi protocols the underlying infrastructure to create fast, efficient, and secure synthetic derivatives on the Ethereum blockchain.

Grayscale Removes Bancor (BNT) And Universal Market Access (UMA) From Its DeFi Fund

The Grayscale Investment manager undertakes another phase of balancing its Grayscale DeFi fund. This round of rebalance inculcate the adjustment of the project’s Digital Large Cap Funds. This move marks its second balancing process after its launch in July 2021.

An announcement on January 3 revealed the in-depth adjustments to Grayscale’s two funds. The first rebalancing employed the Flexa payment network’s native collateral coin.

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Hence, Grayscale DeFi Fund’s weighting was rebalanced with the addition of AMP. Conversely, the rebalancing process led to the removal of Universal Market Access (UMA) and Bancor (BNT).

Though Grayscale created some adjustments to its funds’ weightings, the Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC) suffered no alteration to its token list. According to Grayscale’s announcement, the rebalancing process is the time to include AMP within a Grayscale investment vehicle.

Using its native token, Flexa can collateralize crypto payments and engage in fiat settlements. Thus, merchants and other users could quickly receive cryptocurrencies without delays.

Significance Of Grayscale Rebalancing Process

Following this second rebalancing process, the addition of AMP brings the number of crypto assets within the Grayscale DeFi Fund to nine in the DeFi ecosystem. Also, the alteration to the Grayscale Fund reflects the changes on the DeFi Index (DFX) of CoinDesk. Among the components of crypto assets that made the Fund, the highest weighting goes to Uniswap (UNI) with 42.33%. The newly added AMP takes up 7.39% of the Fund’s weighting.

Having its popularity as Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Grayscale now has about $30.1 billion assets under management (AUM). The share trading at $34.27 shows a 23% up from July 14, 2021, and a 59.16% up within the last 12 months.

The share price of Grayscale DeFi Fund at the press time is $5.56. This depicts an 11.2% rise from its launch price of $5 on July 14, 2021. Moreover, the Fund’s assets under management as of its launch period were $11.6 million with a share outstanding of 2.08 million.

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The ‘s performanceGrayscale Bitcoin Trust’s performance and its DeFi Funds is highly above the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), which is the biggest retail DeFi Index based on the market cap from July 14. However, despite the huge trading volume of the DPI, it still indicates a dip of about 2% within the same interval.

Bitcoin continues to drop | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Among all spot Bitcoin ETFs and Corporations, Grayscale possessed the most significant upsurge of BTC holdings through 2021. By the end of the year, the Fund accrued 645,199 BTC. This explains 71% of the corporate market and spot ETF BTC holdings.

Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com