SNXweave Weekly Recap 64

SNXweave -

November 9, 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 November 3, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Adam, Afif, Burt, dsacks, Ethernaut, ksett, nana, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Bex, Cavalier, Darius, jz, KALEB, Matt, noah, Regina, Steve

Synthetix Direct Integrations have gone live! This SIP went out on the Suhail release, and allows governance to drive new integrators to the SNX ecosystem, where they can now pass lower fees (and more) onto their users. The benefits for Synthetix include more competitive offerings, better aligned incentives for integrators, and deeper control of fees.

The 1inch integration should now shortly follow, as the SIP was presented last week. Kaleb explained that SIP-288 allows there to be certain addresses that have different parameters from the standard ones (1inch will be one of these), and that there are 4 important things to consider here:

  1. Which addresses can have the different parameters
  2. Which Uniswap pool would be used to get the price
  3. Max volume per block
  4. Fee

As for V3, Noah said the full deployment of the core system for V3 is on testnet right now. So the main focus is just polishing that off, getting it prepared for audit, and making sure it’s feature-complete. Expect more gov calls about V3 in the coming weeks as well, as the CCs want to encourage more community discussions about it. He added that draft SIPs have been put up for how cross-chain & spot markets are going to be handled in V3, and they hope to have something soon for Perps. Basically, there will be a plan for covering the full feature set for V2X in V3.

And speaking of Perps, two of the three Perps V2 SIPs are in audit and implementation of the 3rd SIP (279) is being wrapped up. The goal is to have this on testnet this week. Staking V2 is also being tweaked for testnet, as the new interface has been released internally for testing. Keep an eye out here for leaks!

Towards the end of the call, the Spartan Council had a discussion about the Pyth SIP. Some of the Council members voiced their stances:

  • Burt was waiting for the Chainlink call last week to gather any additional information, and was wondering how much time would actually be gained by going with Pyth
  • Nana was on the fence
  • Ksett emphasized that integrating Pyth wouldn’t be a vote against Chainlink
  • Adam was leaning towards a “begrudging yes” despite initial reservations about Pyth
  • Ethernaut thinks this SIP is in line with the V3 philosophy
  • Afif thinks this is an improvement over on-chain oracles, but also echoed that Chainlink’s solution is tailored specifically for Synthetix

The vote for Pyth closed a couple of days ago, and the SIP passed with 5 votes in favor and 1 against.

Lastly, there were a couple more SIP presentations after the sync last week: SIP-287 to extend the epochs to 4 months and SIP-286 to reduce the election periods, both of which were presented by TerraBellus.

He explained that the rapid turnaround of Councils might be hindering some productivity, and that 4 months would create more stability that can be useful in ongoing partner relationships, establishment of integrations, and just general long-term ordered running of the protocol. If voted in, this would start at the beginning of the new year (not for this current epoch). It was mentioned that there might be an increase in participation dropoff if the epoch is longer, but it was noted that there is now an inactivity threshold for the Spartan Council to counteract lack of participation. This SIP was approved with all 8 votes in favor.

For his second SIP, Terra argued that 3 weeks is too long for elections, especially where the majority of voting happens in the last week. This SIP calls for a simple solution of a 2-week election period instead, and was also approved with all 8 votes in favor.

Grants Council

Present at the November 3, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: ALEXANDER, CT, cyberduck, JVK, Max

In Grants Council updates, as we discussed last week, the SIP/SCCP site is live with a WYSIWYG editor and image embedding. The Council said this is the version they are sticking with for now to see what the usage is like, then they may reevaluate in a few weeks. There is also the potential to expand by allowing the ability to edit existing SIPs/SCCPs, but they have decided not to push for this right now and will instead revisit it in the future.

The Stats page is still being worked on, as dev Bigkey is busy building a dune analytics dashboard from scratch with all of the data for the site. CT is following up with him to check on the timeline for this. Alexander is also going to be following up with dev Junwei about the feedback he gave him for the Loans UI project.

The NFT project is slowly but surely coming together. The team will be meeting with Tyler and Mark from Universe, and is working on getting a smart contract developer for the mint contract. Jade is also working on the design for the NFT site, and the lore is being decided on this week in terms of which story the writer will pursue.

Lastly, while the sUSD tip bot in Discord is fully functioning, CT has requested a small amount of sUSD in his account so that he can actively tip in the Discord when community members share knowledge and contribute good content in governance discussions. He is encouraging the other Council members to do the same.

Ambassador Council

Present at the November 2, 2022 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: GUNNBOATs, Kevin, mastermojo, Matt, MiLLiE

In Ambassador updates, the team hosted another Spartan Space last week, this time with Chainlink! We got to meet Roger, who is the director of solutions architecture at Chainlink labs, Kemal, who is the chief product officer, and Clement, who is the product manager for the new low-latency oracle that they’re developing.

During the call, Roger covered a pretty wide agenda, including:

  • The problem of frontrunning,
  • Synthetix’s need for low-latency oracles,
  • Chainlink’s unique ability to solve this problem,
  • Chainlink’s low-latency oracles,
  • Architecture, and
  • The Key benefits for Synthetix.

So let’s review some of that!

Basically, Synthetix needs low-latency oracles to serve 2 main objectives: mitigating risk & ensuring security. Synthetix has made over 11 million proxy calls to price feeds, so the highest level of reliability in an oracle provider is necessary.

The low-latency oracle deign from Chainlink consists of a high performance off-chain oracle network that can be pulled on-chain by users on-demand. Individual node signatures will be directly verified on-chain to increase trust-minimization guarantees.

A community member asked who these data providers are and how transparent they are with their feeds. Roger explained that they select premium data providers with the broadest market coverage. They also work with them and do a lot of data analysis to make sure that their aggregation methodologies meet Chainlink’s standards.

Someone else asked when this will be ready to ship, and Roger said they’re hoping to have the system ready for testing by the end of the year. Then they’re looking to be production-ready by the end of January. This is a pretty aggressive timeline, but he said the Chainlink team is confident, adding that they want to get this in the hands of the Synthetix CCs as soon as possible for testing.

Matt broke down the information a bit and gave his own summary of this oracle system, saying: “Basically each oracle price that would have been pushed on-chain is now saved off-chain with a corresponding block number, and then once a person initiates a trade, the price is pulled from that block and deemed valid or not.”

Roger ended the presentation with a few key benefits for Synthetix, which are:

  • Ultra-low latency,
  • Frontrunning mitigation, and
  • Gas efficiency.

And for anyone wondering, he estimates latency to be every block and gas to be about 200k-250k. Overall, it was a great call with Chainlink and we can’t wait for this solution to super-fast, low latency, off-chain oracles for Perps V2!

Podcast now also on YOUTUBE

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-267: Direct Integration, Status: implemented

SIP-288: 1inch Direct integration, Status: approved

SIP-280: PerpsV2 (Perps Upgradability), Status: draft

SIP-281: PerpsV2 (Trading fixes & improvements), Status: draft

SIP-279: Perps V2, Status: draft

SIP-285: Pyth Network Oracles for Synthetix Perps, Status: approved

SIP-287: Extend Governance Epoch Duration from Three to Four Months, Status: approved

SIP-286: Reduction in the Length of Council Election Periods, Status: approved