SNXweave Weekly Recap 22

SNXweave -

January 18, 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 January 11, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, bojan, jj, Kain, KALEB, redmarglar, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Ale, Matt

Phase 1 of the v2x roadmap is finally nearing its completion, with just SIPs-196, 193, and 184 remaining.

SIP-196 proposes removing all centralized oracle code from Synthetix contracts and testing, and was presented at last week’s SIP presentation call. Since the centralized Synthetix oracle is no longer being used, this SIP proposes removing the power of a centralized oracle to update rates. During the call, Synthaman asked if circuit breakers will be impacted by this SIP, to which Arthur replied no. Circuit breakers look at the rate as it’s returned by the exchange rate contract, and though the rate source would be different under this proposal, it would still work the same.

SIP-193 will refactor the SystemSettings into a library in order to reduce contract size, and SIP-184 will introduce a dynamic fee to neutralize frontrunning opportunities during market turbulence. Both of these SIPs were presented and approved several weeks ago, and will be going out on the next release — most likely sometime in the next week.

Phase 1’s scope can then be closed out, just leaving us with the promised (and much-anticipated) futures beta. During their meeting, the Spartan Council laid out this remaining work for Futures:

  • Liquidation keeper to ensure liquidations are happening
  • Code merge (consolidation of code written during last epoch)
  • Additional market upgrades

JJ said they are working with the auditors to hopefully get Futures beta out before ETHDenver, which is about a month away. Cross your fingers!

As for Phase 2 of the v2x roadmap, the Council has decided to consolidate the Debt Pool Oracle SIP and Debt Pool Synthesis SIP in order to define the entire debt pool synthesis process. This process includes all of the code required to do the debt synthesis, outside of the Debt Shares contract itself.

Debt Shares was actually presented last week — as a reminder, this SIP proposes the implementation of a debt shares token mechanism that allows the percentage of a staker’s debt to be calculated based on their number of shares. Kain explained this saying the debt register construct will be replaced with a tokenized representation. So when debt is mined, the user will receive extra debt shares. And when debt is burned, debt shares will be burned. The Council hopes this SIP will be audited and ready to go soon.

Once all of the aforementioned SIPs are done, more Core Contributors can be assigned to the v3 scope. If this means more people on v3 by late February, then we could potentially be looking at June for v3 if we’re being optimistic. Obviously, however, the v3GM transition is the first component and will happen before this.

The SIP to upgrade the liquidation mechanism is still being worked on, and is likely still several weeks away depending on audits. Feasibility is currently being done on this SIP, and it was presented last week. The Council, however, decided that it needed to be reworked and is therefore being presented again today.

The final two components for Phase 2 will then be Synth Teleporters and the Debt Migration. As a reminder, synth teleporters will allow us to instantaneously migrate any synth from one network to another, meaning semi-instantaneous deposits and withdrawals of synths across L1 and Optimism. This SIP could potentially be folded into v3, depending on timelines. Lastly, the debt migration will give L1 users the ability to one-click migrate their debt position to L2. Once this is completed, it would allow for all of the inflation on L1 to be switched over to L2. Then, once v3 is deployed, the only remaining contracts would be the exchange contracts on L1.

Lastly during the meeting, the Spartan Council had a conversation about the ongoing discussions in Discord regarding the discount on sUSD. Kaleb brought up that the experience is not ideal for users to find no liquidity on Uniswap when going between sUSD and other stablecoins. While the Treasury Council has already been stepping in to help with this, he’s also hoping that Curve will provide some stable liquidity for synth against synth once it’s deployed.

Kain then brought up Gelato, which will be deploying soon on Optimism. This will give users the ability to deposit into a managed Uniswap pool, get a tokenized representation of ownership, and allow someone to manage it on their behalf. This will hopefully allow the Treasury Council to start experimenting again with incentivized liquidity towards a defined purpose, which would help the peg.

Kaleb said the debt pool synthesis should help a lot with bringing liquidity to L2, to which Kain agreed but said we need an interim solution since synth teleporters are still pretty far away. He thinks the solution is to get Uniswap liquidity up to $5 or $10 million, emphasizing that fast withdrawal bridges are critical for improving user experience so this needs to be solved now.

A couple of other SIPs were also presented last week. SIP-191 proposes moving Council dilution to Optimism and integrating it within the Staking dApp. This integration will shift all governance features to be compatible with L2/OVM. This will significantly reduce the cost and time for SIP and SCCP proposals to be created and stored to be voted on.

Lastly, SIP-197 to bypass SIP presentations was presented by Kain last week. This one is pretty simple — some SIPs require urgent implementation (for example, bug fixes) and don’t necessarily have the time to be presented and voted on before being implemented. This SIP therefore proposes a governance update that allows the Spartan Council to bypass the SIP presentation requirement, on the condition that the subsequent vote passes unanimously in order for the SIP to be implemented.

This deviates from the normal SIP process, which requires 5 out of 8 votes in favor for a proposal to pass. However, since a unanimous vote among Spartan Council members for these types of urgent SIPs would be nearly guaranteed if it were to go through the typical process, there is little lost from a representative governance standpoint. Additionally, a dilution mechanism already exists to trigger a re-election, which provides the community with the opportunity to hold the Council accountable if they feel the decision was not in their best interest. So this SIP seems like a win-win for Synthetix governance!

Grants Council

Present at the January 13, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: beachmom, CT, cyberduck, joey, Mike

Moving on to Grants Council news, there has been some discussion about a 2022 Roadmap. This will potentially come from the Spartan Council, as Mike says he is trying to pull together the right people to get the logic on the roadmap. He hopes to have a timeline for it sometime this week, and the Grants Council will potentially be seeking a graphic designer to put together some visual aids based on the written component of the roadmap.

The Council may also be seeking translators for some key Synthetix reading material. They will be pulling some site analytics to determine which languages would be most beneficial to the Synthetix community.

Next, there was some discussion about the Telegram Bot that has stopped working. It initially worked well as a bot that you could activate via the Telegram app and it would notify you of things like your c-ratio movements. This has stalled for a bit, but now there is talk about potentially running it on L2. Beachmom will be following up with the developer to see if there’s an opportunity for it to run properly on L2.

The Grants Council has also been brainstorming the Tools Site, and is currently looking into a content management system (CMS) to be able to add new tools, remove old ones, and do general upkeep on the site after its development. They are also thinking about adding “packs” to the site — for example, a “Synthetix staking starter pack” would include all of the links and tools to begin staking. Pretty exciting stuff!

The Council’s newest possible grant is a hackathon. This is still in the works, as they are assessing the proposal and will still need to vote on a formal grant request before moving forward. However, if approved, the Grants Council would come up with some sort of problem statement, organize an event and presentation, and be part of judging the results of the hackathon. So stay tuned!

Lastly, the Grants Council is leading an effort to create a new public stats & data dashboard for the Synthetix ecosystem. They have narrowed down the total number of data points and now need YOUR help prioritizing them. So be sure to go fill out the short typeform that Mike sent out in the announcement channel to help improve the Synthetix Stats page!

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-196: Remove Centralized Oracle, Status: vote pending

SIP-193: Refactor the SystemSettings into library to reduce contract size, Status: approved

SIP-184: Dynamic Exchange Fees, Status: approved

SIP-80: Synthetic Futures, Status: feasibility

SIP-156: Debt Pool Oracle, Status: rejected

SIP-165: Debt Pool Synthesis, Status: feasibility

SIP-185: Debt Shares, Status: vote pending

SIP-148: Upgrade Liquidation Mechanism, Status: SC review pending

SIP-191: Moving Council Dilution to Optimism, Status: vote pending

SIP-197: Bypass SIP Presentation, Status: vote pending