August 31, 2022
The following post contains a recap of news, projects, and important updates from the Spartan Council and Core Contributors, as well as the Grants Council and Ambassador Council from last week.
Spartan Council and SIP updates
Present at the August 25, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, Burt, Danijel, Kain, ksett, SynthaMan, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Cavalier, Darius, db, KALEB, Mark, Matt, Mike, noah, Steve, sunny
Let’s talk top priorities! At the moment the main items are: improving atomic swaps, getting Debt Migration ready, and getting V3 and perps V2 to audit. Currently, the architecture refactor for perps V2 is mostly complete and is being reviewed internally by engineers.
In addition to these top priorities, there are also several other SIPs that are currently in progress: the SIPs for the direct integration and subsequent Curve integration, as well as SIP-252 to allow SNX escrow entries to be liquidated.
SIP-252 has been approved and is in its final testing stage. There was, however, some discussion regarding the penalties for this SIP, with Kaleb suggesting a higher penalty on escrow liquidations and Kain being opposed to this. Kaleb argued that this would encourage responsible staking, and while Kain is against this as a rule, he might consider it as a one-time clean up action on the initial escrow liquidation. Afif also called attention to the fact that there is a one-click hedging solution now in dSNX, so there really isn’t a reason for stakers to fall below the minimum c-ratio. Kain was concerned, however, that the “staking equilibrium” may be disrupted with a move like this, particularly at the same time that many Council members are starting to lean towards reducing inflation significantly.
For V3, the draft implementations for SIPs 301–305 have been completed, and SIP-301 should be in audit this week. And in some exciting news, there was some alpha dropped during the weekly sync last week regarding some of the system details of V3. Check out this diagram! ⬇️
There was also one SIP presentation last week, so let’s briefly review it:
SIP-271: System Wide Suspension — Proof Of Stake
— Kaleb presented this SIP, explaining that it will suspend all Synthetix contracts on both Ethereum and Optimism two hours before the expected Ethereum merge event on September 15th. It will then resume activities after ensuring that the Chainlink feeds and the rest of the protocol are in a stable state.
— It’s just a precaution to give the Core Contributors and Spartan Council time to react in case something doesn’t go according to plan
— At the point of the merge, Synthetix will no longer support the proof of work (POW) chain
— Db suggested a less controversial suspension parameter based on terminal total difficulty rather than a time period ahead of the specified block
— Mike from Chainlink was in the audience and came up to answer some questions:
- Chainlink will not be supporting POW
- They won’t be facilitating payment to POW node operators
- He doesn’t think the hypothetical scenario where node operators continue to support POW on their own is possible but he’s going to confirm and get back to the group
Grants Council
Present at the August 25, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: ALEXANDER, CT, cyberduck, JVK, Mike
In Grants Council updates, the team had an initial meeting with Quixotic to go over the details of the NFT project. Quixotic is very excited to be working with Synthetix on this, and they have agreed to help with the marketing and coordination of the mint event. And Jade is working on the design for the minting site.
As for the SIP submission site, the Grants team shared the working site with all of the Councils/CCs to get feedback. The most significant comment was that many of the fields are not always necessary for a valid submission, so they have added instructions to fill fields with N/A if this applies. The site was officially made live last week for the community to use, so be sure to check it out here to start writing SIPs and SCCPs with ease! And Duck is already exploring some of the features that they would like to see in V2 of the site, specifically the ability to edit SIPs.
Lastly, the stats page is also ready to go live. The staking percentage has been updated for accuracy, with help from Kaleb, and Kwenta’s trading volume data has been integrated. We should be seeing this very soon!
Ambassador Council
Present at the August 24, 2022 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: mastermojo, Matt, MiLLiE
In Ambassador Council updates, the team hosted not one but TWO Spartan Spaces last week — the first with OpenOcean and the second with Thales. So let’s talk about them!
Representing OpenOcean during the first call was DM, who is one of the ecosystem developers, has been in crypto for 2 years, and has been following the space since 2017. As a brief overview, OpenOcean is a DEX aggregator that seeks to deliver the best trading prices to users by taking advantage of liquidity across multiple DEXs.
The Ambassadors asked what their goals are for the Synthetix/OpenOcean integration, and DM said the goal is to make sure users are getting the best bang for their buck. And Synthetix definitely supports that goal by offering limited slippage on large trades.
When asked how OpenOcean is delivering the best fills, the guest answered saying swap pricing is very competitive, but they integrate liquidity sources as quickly as possible to get the best fills to users. They see 1inch as their biggest competitor and, in order to capture market share, OpenOcean has to be beating them on price.
The protocol also recently had some updates, including:
- Complete visual refresh on the landing page, including UI upgrades
- Adding the trading view chart to the interface
- Adding more tokens to the selection list
- Adding limit order functionality
- Operational on mobile now as well
DM also explained that, in terms of user trust, OpenOcean doesn’t actually take custody of any funds. So when you set an order, the funds remain in your wallet until the order is filled.
And lastly, there was some discussion of OpenOcean’s governance and future plans. At the moment, they are still in the early stages of governance, where most of the decisions are being made by a small team. And as far as a roadmap goes, they have a few goals for the coming months:
- Allowing the community to be more involved in decision making
- Cross-chain swaps
- (Long term vision) Enter the wealth management space to help users make educated decisions on how to swap
Next up is the Spartan Space with Thales. We got to hear from Padzank again, who is the strategy lead at Thales and has been around the Synthetix community for a while. As we all probably know, Thales is one of the first Synthetix spinoffs on Optimism.
For some background, Synthetix had the codebase already built into it to support binary options, but they weren’t able to develop it to its potential. Thales therefore spun off from there with a focus on building out a suite of products based on this functionality. Anyone can create a binary options market, and when a market is created, two types of tokens are minted based on the possible outcomes. Depending on the outcome, only one of those token types is eligible for sUSD claim.
Currently, Thales has the following product offerings:
— Positional markets
- Crypto assets above or below specific price at a time
— Range markets
- Assets within a price range at a specified time
— Exotic markets
- Prediction markets with in-house optimistic oracle (Oracle Council elected by stakers who solve any potential disputes)
— Overtime markets
- First fully on-chain AMM for sports games
- Chainlink provides the odds and results oracles
For overtime markets, Padzank said they really nailed the launch of this first viable solution to decentralized, global, on-chain, permissionless sports markets. Thales users have access to the most competitive markets in the industry thanks to the limited overhead that comes with on-chain markets, as opposed to traditional sports markets. He is also confident that this type of market has the highest potential of capturing users who are not necessarily crypto-native. Pretty cool!
Overall it was a busy week for the Ambassadors with these two successful Spartan Spaces, so don’t forget to catch the recordings if you missed them!
