The UMIA Launch: Tailored Auctions in Practice

A project’s first token holders help shape what it becomes. They bring capital, but also the knowledge, participation, and conviction that a young ecosystem needs to grow and iterate. Giving that community a meaningful place in the launch has been a central consideration in how we’ve built Umia.

With the UMIA auction, we put that approach into practice for our own token launch. The launch combined an early window for verified participants, an open public round, and onchain price discovery through Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction mechanism. Participation protections extended across both windows, with credential verification for early access and additional anti-bot measures for the public opening.

Early bidding opened on August 26. Access included a group of manually vetted funds and angels, alongside any participants who privately verified their eligibility through the Umia extension. This gave people a way into the opening round based on their existing activity, without needing a personal connection to the team.

For this launch, qualifying credentials included having traded in a MetaDAO decision market, took part in an EthGlobal hackathon or participated in a funding round on Echo. These criteria reflected the community we wanted to bring into Umia: builders, decision-makers familiar with market-based governance, and allocators already engaging with onchain capital formation.

The extension verified those credentials using zkTLS, which allows someone to prove a fact about their activity on another website without ever handing over their login details. A participant could demonstrate that they met an entry condition while preserving the privacy of the account used to qualify. While the extension shows the type of proof that was submitted, the individual proof was not linked to the participating wallet in any way.

This was the foundation of our approach to bot and sybil resistance during early bidding. Wallet creation is inexpensive, which makes unrestricted access easy to farm across multiple addresses. Requiring a credential tied to existing activity raises the barrier: a newly created wallet alone does not establish eligibility.

For Tailored Auctions, this is a useful property beyond our own launch. Projects can choose entry conditions relevant to their communities, and participants can verify that they qualify. In UMIA’s case, those conditions focused on building and experience in futarchy and capital allocation. Other projects can select for the product usage, contributions, or experience that matter to them.

On Saturday, August 29, the public bidding window opened, allowing anyone to participate with a limit of 5,000 USDC per wallet. Verified participants had already had time to submit their bids before the broader opening.

Opening participation also required addressing a different challenge. A public allocation can be captured by automated bidders before ordinary participants have a reasonable opportunity to enter. A per-wallet cap helps spread commitments, but it does not address automated sniping on its own.

We therefore applied additional anti-bot and anti-sniping measures during the public round to protect access to the allocation. These measures operated alongside the bidding cap, extending participation protections beyond the credential-gated opening. We are keeping the specific techniques private to preserve their effectiveness in future launches.

The available allocation filled in approximately seven minutes and remained filled through the scheduled close on September 2. That demand made protecting the public opening particularly relevant: how participants gained access mattered as much as how quickly the allocation filled.

Throughout both windows, the underlying auction mechanism handled allocation and price discovery. Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction allows participants to submit a budget and a maximum price, while token supply is released over time.

Each part of the structure served a purpose: Verification determined who could bid early; The public cap limited commitments per wallet, while the additional protections addressed bots and allocation sniping. Finally, continuous clearing established prices and allocated supply over the auction window.

At the close, liquidity migrated onchain directly into a fresh Uniswap pool, with trading beginning at the auction price of $0.36 per UMIA.

Launching UMIA through our own infrastructure was an important step for the protocol. It brought community verification, protected public participation, crowdfunding, price discovery, and initial liquidity together in a single launch: the same process we are building for projects that choose to launch on Umia.

Thank you to everyone who participated and became part of that first holder community. We look forward to building the future with you.