SNXweave Weekly Recap 18
December 14, 2021
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 December 7, 2021 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: BigPenny, bojan, Danijel, jj, Kain, KALEB
Core Contributors: Jordan, Mike, Rafa
We are officially well into election season! In case you missed it, SNXweave published our election-special Spartan Council panel podcast yesterday. Voting opens today, so go check out the panel of Spartan Council candidates to help in your voting decisions. The voting period will close one week from today — don’t forget to also get your votes in for the Grants, Ambassador, and Treasury Councils!
As for Spartan Council updates, the LUSD wrappr parameters have been updated — the wrappr cap has been increased to 75 million sUSD, and the minting fee has been increased to 10 basis points.
Kain gave an update on the Liquidation Mechanism Upgrade, which he says will probably be implemented once Debt Shares is ready. Given the conversations that have happened over the last couple of weeks while prices have been down, there have been some concerns about liquidity on L2 that led to this decision. Debt Shares is actually ready, but unfortunately won’t be audited until early next year, as the auditors are extremely backed up this month. And since the liquidation mechanism SIP has already been presented, it can pretty much be implemented as soon as Debt Shares is ready. IF the audit can somehow be accelerated, that would allow for the new liquidation mechanism to potentially be rolled out before the end of the year. This would put us in a much better place on L2 and L1.
Grants Council
Present at the December 9, 2021 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: clem, CT, cyberduck (rubber^duck), Mike
In Grants Council news, the Retroactive Public Goods Grants (RPGG) initiative with Gitcoin will be ending on December 16th. So hurry and go check out the curated list of projects to which the Council will be matching donations! And the Grants Council would very much appreciate your donations to help support these DeFi public goods projects!! To hear more from the Council and Gitcoin, check out the YouTube video of the livestream held last week.
During the livestream, CT, cyberduck, and Mike got to speak with unvetica.eth, the community liaison at Gitcoin. Be sure to check out the YouTube video recording of this conversation to hear more about the background of the RPGG initiative, the motive behind it, and more.
Next, Coordinape is a new initiative that Mike from the Grants Council is leading. Coordinape is a site where groups and communities can join to reward contributors, incentivize participation, and manage resources within the group. This is being tested within The 300 group as a way to reward active members of the 300 channel for going above and beyond in helping Synthetix and ecosystem partners. After testing is complete within The 300 group, the Grants Council will create a snapshot proposal for Coordinape and formally vote on it as a grant for Synthetix.
As for the NFT project, the Grants Council had another call with the Universe.xyz guys last week to further discuss the graphics deck for the upcoming NFTs. The aim is to finalize a version of an NFT with a frame and a background that can be replicated for all generated sets thereon. Once the graphics are finalized, Universe.xyz and the Council will begin to work on the contract side. Universe will be deploying their marketplace on both Ethereum Mainnet and Optimism — they will be the first marketplace for NFTs on Optimism, which is very exciting! The Council hopes to join the Ambassadors in a Spartan City Hall with Universe soon, where we should hopefully hear some more exciting news about the project. And Cyberduck is optimistic for an early Q1 launch, so get excited!
Ambassador Council
Present at the December 8, 2021 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: andy, GUNBOATs, MiLLiE
In Ambassador Council news, the Ambassadors held another Spartan City Hall last week, this time with dHEDGE. We got to hear Cyrus, JakeyBoi, Taminater, and Edson give a high-level overview of dHEDGE and answer some questions. Cyrus works on the contract side at dHEDGE, Taminator (aka Matt) is part of the growth and communications team, Edson is a product manager, and JakeyBoi (aka Jake) is on the growth and marketing side.
dHEDGE is a non-custodial decentralized asset management platform that links investors and fund managers together in a decentralized way to enable efficient fund management. The guests explained that dHEDGE is a little over a year old, and was made possible via Synthetix — being able to trade and hold all of the synths available on L1. Their launch last October brought a lot of managers and investors, who were keen on being able to utilize the zero-slippage feature, which was especially attractive for larger trades.
Matt explained how earlier this year they had some problems with a lot of gas being used for transactions, which became problematic for small users. In response to this, they created a Layer 1.5 solution. This created a way to do computations off chain, so the entry and exit into dHEDGE pools was significantly cheaper and gas fees were brought down to Uniswap prices. However, as the year went on and ETH continued to go up, gas got higher and higher. This led to dHEDGE v2. For v2, dHEDGE pivoted to what was another EVM equivalent chain — Polygon became the pivot from Optimism Ethereum because it was a much better scaling solution with cheap gas costs and high throughput.
There is one key difference between v1 and v2. v1 was solely built on top of Synthetix, so you could really only hold synths or trade synths. Whereas v2 was built with GOAT — Guarded Open Access Transactions. This means dHEDGE can whitelist any protocol and then interact with that protocol within dHEDGE. The contracts are set up in a way where they can easily be rolled out on any EVM equivalent chain. Basically, this means the dHEDGE chain can swiftly add more assets and protocols, and it creates more flexibility for those managers. v2 also allows for yield farming and allows for LPs, which wasn’t possible before.
Cyrus also informed us that dHEDGE is completely permissionless, in that investors can allocate funds to managers, but the managers can only invest those funds into protocols and assets that are whitelisted on the protocol. So, if you’re an investor, you can be sure that a manager is not going to run away with your funds. The WORST they can do is invest them poorly, but one of the benefits of dHEDGE is that you can withdrawal your funds at any time.
He also explained that anyone can be a manager, but the dApp allows you to find the best managers by ranking them by performance, volatility, etc. This exposes several attributes that lets investors make good decisions. Matt added that managers can be people but they can also be automated bots if you build them within the dHEDGE infrastructure.
There will also be a dHEDGE trading competition on Optimism starting December 21st with $100,000 in prizes. Get ready!
Hopefully this overview of the City Hall with dHEDGE provided some insight into the protocol, and if you’d like to hear more please check out the recording here!
SNXweave Podcast: https://anchor.fm/snxweave
Election Special Spartan Council Panel HERE
Follow us on Twitter! @snx_weave
SIP/SCCP status tracker:
SCCP-156: Update LUSD Wrappr Parameters, Status: implemented
SIP-302: Upgrade Liquidation Mechanism, Status: feasibility
SIP-185: Debt Shares, Status: SC review pending