Umee Cross Chain

Originally launched as Umee and later rebranded to UX Chain, this Cosmos-native, sovereign Layer 1 blockchain is engineered to build the next generation of decentralized lending and debt markets. The company was founded in 2020 by Brent Xu, who brought extensive experience from his prior roles, including Head of Strategy at Tendermint and as an early employee at ConsenSys. Xu's background as a bond trader and his deep involvement in the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems shaped the platform's vision to address fragmentation and inefficiency in both decentralized and traditional finance.

UX Chain operates as a cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) hub, enabling interoperability between the Cosmos ecosystem, Ethereum, and other networks like sidechains and Layer 2 solutions. This is primarily achieved through the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) and other bridging solutions, which facilitate the seamless transfer of assets and data. The business model centers on providing a foundational infrastructure for developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) and financial primitives, often referred to as "money legos". Revenue generation for protocols built on the chain, such as the lending DAO known as UDX, comes from issuance and over-the-counter (OTC) trading fees. The platform's native token, UX (formerly UMEE), is central to the ecosystem, used for paying network transaction fees (gas), participating in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus by staking with validators, and governing the protocol's evolution through voting on parameters and upgrades.

The core service of UX Chain is a permissionless lending and borrowing market. Users can supply crypto assets to earn interest or use their holdings as collateral to borrow other assets across different blockchains. A key feature is the ability to use staked assets from PoS blockchains as collateral, allowing users to participate in DeFi lending without forfeiting their staking rewards. The platform introduces unique token types like 'meTokens' for collateralized liquid staking positions and 'uTokens' for representing lent assets and their accruing interest. Security is a major focus, employing the Tendermint BFT consensus mechanism, an autonomous liquidation engine to manage risk, and features like IBC rate limiting to protect user assets. In late 2023, there was a proposal for UX Chain to merge with Osmosis, a leading decentralized exchange on Cosmos, to combine their functionalities and create a comprehensive DeFi hub.

Keywords: UX Chain, Umee, cross-chain DeFi, decentralized lending, Cosmos SDK, Brent Xu, interoperability, IBC, layer-one blockchain, DeFi hub, permissionless borrowing, Proof-of-Stake, Tendermint BFT, money legos, decentralized debt markets, liquid staking, UDX, meTokens, uTokens, Gravity Bridge, DeFi protocols, crypto asset lending, blockchain infrastructure, multichain staking, interchain leverage