About Umia
The onchain value creation layer, and the platform behind it
Umia is the onchain value creation layer: a platform where tokens become financial primitives aligned with the value creation of the projects behind them.
What Umia Is
Umia is the full-stack platform for funding, governing, and scaling onchain projects. Founders apply to launch and fund through Tailored Auctions, with projects selected through a Curated Track or a market-led Community Track. Once launched, founders build independently while tokenholders govern the project's noncustodial treasury through decision markets.
It combines four tools essential for any new project:
- A legal framework built for tokens. Every project operates within a legal token wrapper (a segregated portfolio under Umia's Cayman structure, built on the MetaLeX BORG framework) with one critical rule: decision-making authority is delegated to an onchain treasury contract, not the founding team. IP, operating team, and treasury sit under one entity; there is no foundation / DAO / labs split. See the Legal Framework.
- Programmable funding. Fund your project through a Tailored Auction: onchain price discovery with configurable phases, gating, and refunds. Proceeds land in the treasury contract, never a team wallet.
- Decision markets. Strategic decisions are priced by markets rather than decided by opinion polls, and the resolved outcome binds the project like a board decision.
- A noncustodial treasury. The team draws a monthly operating budget and keeps building; everything beyond it goes through governance. Holders never have to trust a multisig.
Who It's For
- Founders who want to fund their project from their community without giving up operational control: crypto-native teams, AI-accelerated builders, and increasingly a much broader set of companies.
- Tokenholders looking for early access to new kinds of onchain projects, with a real say in direction.
- Liquid funds participating in larger Tailored Auctions.
Founder-Led, Market-Driven
Umia's governance model is deliberately hybrid. Founders keep full operational agility: direction, product, shipping. At moments of strategic significance, the choice defers to decision markets, which price the impact of each possible outcome. Tokenholders act as a board of directors, not a C-suite: they set guardrails and validate direction, but don't run operations.
The Third Path
This is a third path between the two bad defaults: fund fast but lose control (DAO-style governance, memecoin launchpads), or keep control but lose alignment (traditional equity with a token bolted on).
Umia as the First Project and Token
Umia runs as the first project on its own platform and legal wrapper, under the same rules every other project accepts. It has its own identity and aims to be self-sustaining after launch.
UMIA is the token of the Umia protocol. Holders govern the protocol the same way every project on the platform is governed: through decision markets. That covers the protocol's own noncustodial treasury, its configuration, including the fee switch on decision-market and swap activity, and its strategic decisions. Umia is the first project launched through its own stack, so UMIA operates under the same rules, the same treasury constraints, and the same binding outcomes as every token launched on the platform.
UMIA is also the working token of the Community Track. Curation markets are traded in UMIA: holders take positions that rank each cohort's applicants, and the top-ranked projects are admitted to launch. Projects admitted this way grant an allocation of their supply to the protocol treasury, which UMIA governance controls. Fees and allocations accrue to that treasury, and what happens with them is decided by the market of UMIA holders, not by the team.