SNXweave Weekly Recap 19

December 22, 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.

🚨Election Results!🚨

First and foremost — let’s talk election results!

• Your Spartan Council members for the upcoming epoch will be Kain, KALEB, Afif, BigPenny, bojan, redmarglar, jj, and Terrabellus.
• Serving the community on the Treasury Council this epoch will be ConvexMonster, Jordan, artsychoke, and SpartanGlory.
• Our upcoming Grants Council members will be cyberduck, CT, Mike, joey, and beachmom.
• And lastly, your Ambassadors for the coming epoch will be MiLLiE, Matt, and GUNBOATs.

As a reminder, the current Council members will serve out their terms through the end of the month, and the newly elected members will begin their epoch-term as usual in January. Thank you to all who ran, voted, and participated in governance this epoch, and congratulations to our newly elected Council members!

Spartan Council and SIP updates

Present at the December 14, 2021 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, Danijel, jj, Kain, KALEB
Core Contributors: db, Mark, Rafa

Now onto our regular news updates: In case you missed it, the Alhena release went out last week. This release included SIP-188, 194, and 195. SIP-188, which was already presented several weeks ago, has added an ETHBTC synth, while SIPs 194 and 195 were both presented last week.

194 ensures that the Synthetix contract on L2 can facilitate liquidations. The reason why there originally weren’t liquidations on L2 was due to a contract size problem. Before the OVM 2.0 upgrade, some logic was removed due to contract size limitations — part of which was liquidations. So when the regenesis went through, that logic was added back in, but the Core Contributors missed the fact that the overarching Synthetix contract is the only way for the liquidation to be initiated. So SIP-194 will fix that by deploying the Synthetix contract, overriding it on L2.

SIP-195 is for L2 multi ETH collateral loans — meaning it deposits ETH as collateral to pull out synthetic assets against ETH. Since the Optimism regenesis, ETH is now a “native” currency for L2 which enables the CollateralETH contract to be deployed, accepting ETH as collateral. The motivation behind this proposal was to increase the supply of sUSD safely by introducing ETH-backed loans along with SNX staking on L2. This will also increase the fees generated via the interests collected from loans to stakers.

Last week the Council also discussed an old rejected proposal: SIP-81 to remove all centralized oracle code from Synthetix. JJ said this was initially rejected because it wasn’t worth the effort to do it — as long as there’s a Chainlink aggregator for any currency key, it doesn’t matter what’s in the oracle because it will always use the price reported by Chainlink. However, the Core Contributors have been talking and realized they don’t feel very comfortable making such core changes to exchange rates and to exchanger without better test coverage. Therefore, he said, they are pushing to fix the test coverage by pulling out the old oracle so that they can have more confidence that the Dynamic Exchange Fees SIP will do exactly what it’s supposed to do.

And speaking of Dynamic Fees, Kaleb said he would ideally like to test this SIP on Kovan first. Afif said this will most likely be possible, adding that Dynamic Fees will be on L1 and L2 — but for L1, the window will be configured to 1 or 0. So it basically won’t be active on L1, it will just be there to align the code with L2. Dynamic Fees is also required for Futures, so the plan is still January for this.

As for Phase 2 of v2x, Mark, db, and Noah have been tackling the debt synthesis chunk and are making good headway on the debt shares contract, oracle, and debt pool synthesis. Debt Shares is code-complete, it’s just waiting to be audited, which likely won’t be able to happen until January. All of these SIPs will hopefully be done by February, leaving just the Synth Teleporters and Debt Migration SIPs. Then we’ll be on our way to v3!

A few SCCPs were also implemented last week: SCCP-154 which included sEUR to atomic exchanges, SCCP-149 which updated atomic swap parameters by increasing the volume per block on all atomic exchanges to 5 million sUSD, and SCCP-157 which updated the sETH/ETH wrappr parameters by lowering the minting fee to 150 basis points and increasing the max capacity to 3,200 ETH.

Lastly for Spartan Council updates, last week the Council discussed some takeaways from the Lyra launch. Kain said he would like to do more incentivized reward programs, specifically yield farming liquidity incentives. Afif suggested incentivizing Hop pools so there is more capacity for people to move SNX between L1 and L2. More to come here.

Grants Council

Present at the December 16, 2021 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: ALEXANDER, CT, cyberduck (rubber^duck), Mike

In Grants Council updates, the team has been working on the making the stats page an overall better experience for the user. They are currently narrowing down which stats to include on the page, and would like the community’s help in doing so. Be on the lookout for this!

As for the upcoming NFT project, CT and cyberduck are planning to have another meeting with the Universe team to discuss some edits, and will likely be setting up weekly progress meetings starting in January.

Ambassador Council

Present at the December 16, 2021 Ambassador Council Spartan City Hall:
Ambassadors: MiLLiE

We also got to hear more about Universe.xyz during the Ambassador’s City Hall with them last week! If you couldn’t make it, be sure to check out the recording link here. This city hall was a little different than the ones we’ve had in the past — it felt more like a conversation about NFTs, and I think we all learned a lot! We met Mark and Chuba from Universe — Mark is a project lead and Chuba is a technical lead.

Starting with the basics, Universe is a decentralized NFT marketplace. They are creating a marketplace and minting platform to create permanent NFTs that will exist on chain forever. Universe is, however, DAO-first meaning all decisions are made through the DAO using on-chain governance. They also have a token, which is called XYZ.

Chuba gave us a brief rundown on how IPFS works and how the current NFT model for OpenSea works. He explained that NFTs basically contain a link inside them to some IPFS node. That link itself lives on IPFS and has more links to images, details, the name of the NFT, and more. So for many of the major NFTs that are using IPFS, if one of those nodes were to go down, that NFT content would be irrecoverable forever. Mark added that they are therefore creating a backup to IPFS using arweave — this redundant layer will protect NFTs in the case that IPFS goes down.

Millie then asked the guests to elaborate a little on their current collaboration with the Grants Council. Mark explained that they’ve been working together for a few months now on the Synthetix NFT avatar drop. This drop will incorporate all of the Synthetix ecosystem, including Lyra, Thales, and Kwenta. They are partnering with Optimism to be able to make this happen and allow everyone to mint there. The NFTs will live in the Optimism ecosystem as part of a larger Spartan World, that will hopefully eventually be built out to include games and other cool things down the road.

Millie also asked Mark and Chuba where they place the rule of law in an NFT marketplace. They explained that decentralization doesn’t mean they don’t have rules — there are a clear set of rules that govern NFTs on their platform and there is a governance process that includes a voting system for people who own the XYZ token or have NFTs listed for sale on the marketplace. This allows the community to decide what goes on the platform and go through the mechanism of curating content and voting on that content.

Towards the end of the city hall, there was a very interesting chat that resulted in a philosophical sci-fi discussion about the future of NFTs. Highly recommend checking it out ;)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 🎅

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-188: Add sETHBTC synth, Status: implemented

SIP-194: Fix Liquidations on L2, Status: implemented

SIP-195: L2 Multi ETH Collateral Loans, Status: implemented

SIP-184: Dynamic Exchange Fees, Status: approved

SIP-80: Synthetic Futures, Status: feasibility

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

SCCP-154: Include sEUR to Atomic Exchanges, Status: implemented

SCCP-149: Update Atomic Swap Parameters, Status: implemented

SCCP-157: Update sETH/ETH Wrappr Parameters, Status: implemented