SNXweave Weekly Recap 24

SNXweave -

February 1, 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 25, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, bojan, jj, Kain, KALEB, redmarglar, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Cavalier, db, Matt, Noah, Rafa

The next release to go out (tomorrow Feb 2nd) will be Alsephina— named after a star like all of the previous releases. As mentioned last week, we should see several SIPs being implemented on Alsephina that will for the most part close out phase 1 of the v2x scope. One of the SIPs going out on this release is Dynamic Exchange Fees, which also affects phase 2 and Futures (as it is a dependency for the fee markets).

There is already a partial audit underway for Futures beta — the audit was originally scoped at 4 weeks to complete, and 2–3 weeks is already done. Once the auditors receive the remaining code, it should be completed in about a week. The hope is to get the code wrapped up and get these remaining bits ready for audit before ETHDenver.

As for phase 2, Debt Shares will be the first release and will go out on its own (independent of the other phase 2 SIPs). This SIP was voted on last week and approved with six votes in favor and none against. Kain explained that Debt Shares is a bit tricky since it’s such a critical component of the system. But db is working on a pretty comprehensive run sheet to handle the transition from the old debt register. JJ confirmed, however, that there will not be any downtime.

SIP-202 is also part of phase 2 and will introduce a target staking ratio incentivized through inflation. Jackson has been working on this SIP and has made changes that will split it into phases:

  • First, an off-chain calculation by the pDAO.
  • Then, a transition to Chainlink oracle to monitor the staking ratio of the network.

He got some feedback from Arthur who said there might be an issue with high-ratio users skewing the calculation. Kain said, however, there’s a pretty strong incentive to not have your ratio too high because you would be giving up a lot of rewards. The Council said this SIP is looking like it could be implemented fairly quickly, possibly before ETHDenver. This SIP is being presented today so be sure to tune in!

The remaining SIPs of phase 2 will then be SIP-198 to update the atomic exchange functionality (also being presented today) and SIP-203 for volume source fees. There is still ongoing discussion surrounding these two SIPs and whether they should be pushed to v3. Since they are still several weeks away, the team will assess this decision post-offsite once the Core Contributor resources are better allocated for v3.

And speaking of v3, there should be some drafts of the initial scope circulated soon. The community has been really looking forward to the Synth Teleporters, so Kain will be putting together a high-level overview of this SIP (as well as the Debt Migration SIP) so the community can start looking at them. Since the Debt Synthesis is a dependency for Synth Teleporters, they will most likely be a post-offsite implementation.

During the Spartan Council meeting, Kaleb brought up issues around communication with partner protocols. Kain mentioned that he has a weekly call with Lyra and Kwenta to discuss strategy, on top of the communication channels that are already set up for cross-protocol communication. It was suggested that a similar meeting be added for product-level updates and to discuss what’s been delivered. Cavalier will be helping lead this.

Grants Council

Present at the January 27, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: beachmom, CT, cyberduck, joey, Mike

In Grants Council updates, the team has been finalizing their budget for this epoch and should hear back from the Treasury Council soon with approval or feedback on what they submitted.

They were also contacted by Gitcoin in regards to participating in another funding round similar to the one in December. The Council has not made a final decision, but will likely try to participate in every other Gitcoin funding round.

You may have seen this in the announcements channel of the Discord, but Mike posted a message about the 300 group being opened up for another round of members to join! So if you’re looking for ways to get more involved with Synthetix and the growing ecosystem, this is a great first step. If you join the 300, you can share marketing and growth ideas, work on expanding the Optimism ecosystem, or even just post or share others’ posts on social media to help reach more people. If you’re interested in joining be sure to DM Mike or anyone with The 300 role to be added!

As for the NFT project, CT said they are very much in the thick of it for the styling and design concept portion of the NFTs. The team is now going to be working more on the minting contract, and will be discussing more of the minting technical details in the next 2–3 weeks.

The “Tools” site is coming along nicely, as the Grants Council is working with a test version of the site this week. We’re going to keep “Tools” in quotations for now since the name is still up in the air. If you’re a 300 member, be sure to participate in the emoji poll that Beachmom posted in the 300 channel to vote for which name you like the best! The team is still aiming to release the site on February 4th, depending on any feedback that comes from this week’s test site.

In case you missed it, the Grants Council recently funded a community proposal for Uniswap to incentivize liquidity on Optimism and Arbitrum. The Grants Council funded the developer of this proposal to code the project and is funding the audit process as well. Lito is the author of the proposal, and was the one who posted the Temperature Check that passed with flying colors. ABDK is doing the audit for this, and it should be coming back any day now. This proposal is another great example of the amazing public goods side of the Grants Council.

Ambassador Council

Present at the January 25, 2022 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: Matt, MiLLiE

Quick Ambassador Council PSA — if you participated in the Governance Participation Program (GPP) and have NOT claimed your rewards yet, DO NOT claim them on Mainnet! All SNX rewards from the GPP have now been distributed to your wallets on Optimism, so no need to do anything further but access your wallet on Layer 2.

In other news, the Ambassadors hosted a City Hall with Thales last week where we got to talk to Padzank, Red, and Danijel.

Thales launched in the summer of 2021, deploying an orderbook-based system with a novel mechanism of minting option tokens. They quickly realized that L1 ETH was not an optimal environment for Thales with its high gas fees, so the priority shifted very early to an L2 deployment. Their first major milestone was the launch of the dApp, for which they received an unprecedented amount of positive feedback.

They didn’t have a ton of early success in building trading volume, but they were able to launch their token with tokenomics that were very aligned with Synthetix. Danijel then built an AMM contract that was launched with their Optimism deployment this past December. This was a huge success, as it facilitated over 765,000 sUSD of volume in trades in the first month. The AMM started with 70,000 sUSD initially seeded from the Treasury Council, and ended up doubling this number to over 140,000 sUSD being held in liquidity. That’s pretty awesome.

They also had two rounds of daily token incentives for traders based on volume. The first round was for global buy volume, then they devised a better system for the second round that split the rewards equally to s-short and s-long buyers proportionally.

Rather than renewing for a third round, Thales has instead integrated staking on Optimism. This will introduce bonus rewards on top of the base inflation rewards — on L1 there were 50,000 Thales tokens weekly, and on L2 there will be around 70,000 Thales tokens in rewards weekly. Stakers can also make bonus rewards on top of that if they are SNX stakers, traders on Thales, or Thales Royale participants. Like “gamified staking.”

Podzank further explained that there will be a token migration to Optimism tomorrow, February 2nd, that will add bonus rewards on top of the base inflation rewards. This system will replace the current standalone SNX staking rewards system and better align the rewards with SNX staking. This is very exciting since users who are staking both will now get much more out of it than with the original tokenomics. And since it was approved by the community and formally voted on, all stakers will be auto-migrated. But not to worry, you still reserve the right to opt out of this for any reason.

As for the Thales Council, the first one was voted on by SNX stakers, but the second one was voted on by Thales stakers in December. Their goal is to do everything as publicly and transparently as possible, and they have been very happy with the way the Council and governance in general have played out so far. They inherited several governance systems from Synthetix such as the Treasury Council, pDAO, etc. so this has helped with having such a smooth deployment.

And in exciting news, Thales Royale returned to Optimism yesterday! And this time it’s here to stay. This ETH price prediction winner-takes-all positioning game is super addicting, and we’re very excited to have it officially on Mainnet. There is a 30 sUSD buy-in, and a 1,000 sUSD seed reward pot, so join the fun!

It was quite clear from this City Hall that Thales has had a great deal of success since its founding last year, and they continue to remain on an upward trend. Be sure to check out the recording if you missed this great call!

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-184: Dynamic Exchange Fees, Status: approved

SIP-80: Synthetic Futures, Status: feasibility

SIP-185: Debt Shares, Status: approved

SIP-202: Target Staking Ratio, Status: draft

SIP-198: Atomic Exchange at Pure Chainlink Price, Status: draft

SIP-203: Volume Source Fee, Status: draft

SIP-165: Debt Pool Synthesis, Status: approved