SNXweave Weekly Recap 13

November 9, 2021

The following post contains a recap of news, projects, and important updates from the Spartan Council and Core Contributors, as well as the grantsDAO and ambassadorDAO from last week.

Spartan Council and SIP updates

Present at the November 2, 2021 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, bojan, Danijel, jj, Kain, KALEB
Core Contributors: Mark, Max, Rafa

Now that Avior is out, the next release will be Alkaid. Gotta love these stars. Going out on Alkaid, we will see the Atomic Exchange Function and L2 Bridged Governance SIPs. For the Atomic Exchange Function, Brett says he is done and has given the final pull request to JJ. However, there’s still a bit work left to do to incorporate it into the existing contracts, so JJ has been working on that. We should hopefully see this SIP go out in the next week or so, and when it does, the cap will initially be set low to see how it behaves and to ensure that nothing goes wrong.

With the regenesis being pushed back to mid-November, the L2 Bridged Governance SIP unfortunately wasn’t able to happen as early as it was supposed to. However, Kain has been in contact with Ale to help get it launched.

Dynamic Exchange Fees is also in progress; however, it might not make it into the Alkaid release. Afif says Lecky has nearly finished up the code for this SIP, and that the hope is to have it up on Kovan soon so that Kaleb can start testing it out with his bots. There is, however, a possibility that this SIP gets accelerated in order to have it done in time for the next trading competition.

I know we’ve all been waiting for Futures, and it’s almost here! Kain says it’s likely that there will be another test-net competition after the regenesis, and then all of the parameters should be finalized for Futures to go up on Mainnet — hopefully by next month.

Kain also said he spoke to Jackson about the Debt Pool Oracle SIP, and Jackson said he’s getting Kevin from Coinage to review the specs and look at what work is needed on our side. Kain says this also requires a conversation with Chainlink to get this SIP kicked off.

There’s a new SIP coming soon that will provide augmentation for the wrappr factory on L1. Afif said he did some initial feasibility brainstorming with Daniel, Mark, and Jackson, and the consensus was that it should be pretty doable. They’re just going to be adding some logic to facilitate wrap and unwrap exchange combinations that will reduce the skew.

Kain thinks that the Debt Pool Oracle, Debt Pool Unification, and Debt Shares SIPs are all most likely achievable by the end of the year. He emphasized that there needs to be more in-depth conversation around what the debt pool unification will look like, but once the other two SIPs are done, it will open up the possibility of finally unifying the debt pool.

Last week we talked about how Afif suggested bringing back next price exchanges as a way of preventing frontrunning and lowering fees. This past week, Kaleb brought up the subject again saying that they are researching ways to offer this next price fulfillment with the best UX in mind. However, Kain said it would be difficult to trigger a price update. Afif emphasized again that the idea is to have next price exchanges in parallel with atomic exchanges, which would basically mean just adding back in the old code to operate in addition to atomic exchanges. He said that this would create a low-fee tier for arbitragers to set an order that neutralizes the skew with a low slippage tolerance.

Kaleb added another idea which was to have dynamic fees with a keeper function on the test-net to see if it would help lower fees while adjusting them, as per the dynamic fee SIP. He said the idea behind this is that if the dynamic fees code isn’t ready for the next futures test competition, then maybe dynamic fees can be baked in by changing the fee with a keeper based on the price. Afif agreed that if SIP-184 isn’t ready in time for the next test-net competition, then there should be a keeper ready to use. Or else, perhaps it would just be better to wait to do the next competition until 184 is ready. For this reason, the Council is examining whether or not it’s feasible for the Dynamic Exchange Fees SIP to be accelerated.

The Spartan Council also briefly discussed the possibility of having internal auditors who would report directly to the Risk Committee. The consensus was that this would be a good idea, but it needs to be discussed more in-depth.

grantsDAO

Present at the November 4, 2021 grantsDAO meeting:
grantsDAO Team: ALEXANDER, CT, Mike, rubber^duck

Moving on to the grantsDAO, the team has been exploring possible ideas to incentivize stakers to migrate over to L2 from L1. We should hear more definitive plans on this front soon.

Another exciting gDAO project that we should be hearing more about soon is the NFT project that they’ve been collaborating on with Universe and ARCx. They’ve been working on designs, and are currently waiting for the Optimism regenesis for the Universe team to start looking at contract deployment there.

The new gDAO site is coming along nicely — a pull request has officially been submitted to add a markdown to grants and remove the description from the grants list. Clem is sorting out some technical stuff with the coder, but we should see this new version up soon.

The Heroku integration for the hedging bot is also almost complete. It’s in its final stage of testing before being released to provide a more user-friendly interface.

In case you missed it, the gDAO posted a request for proposal on their blog a few days ago. They are looking to fund a smart contract tool that enables Synthetix stakers to fix their c-ratio by buying SNX. If you are interested and have prior experience in developing smart contracts, and can provide source code references, please go ahead and submit a proposal!

Lastly in grantsDAO updates, Mike is currently trying to zero in on a few core messages in The 300 group that can rally members and provide an opportunity to build unique perspectives. He said a couple of examples would be the idea of trying to integrate Synthetix and the ecosystem into the DeFi 2.0 narrative, or the idea of Synthetix as a financial Lego. He is also working with Core Contributor Alix to help get the Korean community involved in The 300.

ambassadorDAO

Present at the November 3, 2021 ambassadorDAO meeting:
Ambassadors: andy, MiLLiE

In ambassadorDAO updates, the next Spartan City Hall is this week! In the first City Hall the Ambassadors spoke with Nick and Mike from Lyra, and this week they’ll be hosting Hop Protocol. Be sure to tune in this Thursday at 23:59 UTC in the community governance stage of the Synthetix Discord!

In other news, the aDAO has decided to lift the deadline for claiming rewards from the Governance Participation Program. So if you delegated $UNI during the program, you may now claim your rewards at any time.

Lastly in aDAO updates, expect some blogs coming soon! The Ambassadors are first going to be releasing a post detailing the results of the Governance Participation Program. Then, there will be a second blog post that will talk about the aDAO’s upcoming initiatives and how they will be focusing on the social side of things for the short-term. During their meeting, Andy mentioned that the Ambassadors can likely create more value by focusing more on the culture aspect of Synthetix and the wider community. Millie added that since we are in the process of transitioning to v3, the governance strategy could benefit from the Ambassadors focusing on the social side of things, similar to the idea behind the City Halls.

SNXweave Podcast: https://anchor.fm/snxweave

SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-120: Atomic Exchange Function, Status: approved

SIP-167: L2 Bridged Governance, Status: approved

SIP-184: Dynamic Exchange Fees, Status: approved

SIP-80: Synthetic Futures, Status: feasibility

SIP-156: Debt Pool Oracle, Status: draft

SIP-165: Debt Pool Unification, Status: draft

SIP-185: Debt Shares, Status: SC review pending