UMA was founded in 2018 by Allison Lu and Hart Lambur, two ex Goldman Sachs traders. Their goal was to make global markets universally fair, accessible, and decentralized. The team drew inspiration from traditional finance derivatives to define an open-source protocol that allows anyone, anywhere, to design and build trustless financial contracts. The optimistic oracle design concept has been in development since 2014, when Vitalik Buterin first published on the matter. Over the years, there have been several iterations leading to the current design of UMA's optimistic oracle. As of September 2022, there was a supply of 108,858,567 UMA tokens with 68,947,415 in circulation.