SNXweave Weekly Recap 33

SNXweave -

April 5, 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.

🚨Election Results!🚨

First and foremost — let’s talk election results!

  • Your Spartan Council members for the upcoming epoch will be Kain, SynthaMan, Danijel, Afif, calavera, ksett, JVK, and Mark
  • Serving the community on the Treasury Council this epoch will be artsychoke, Jordan, elliptic-crv, and Spartan Glory
  • Our upcoming Grants Council members will be BigPenny, ALEXANDER, CT, Mike, and cyberduck
  • And lastly, your Ambassadors for the coming epoch will be MiLLiE, Matt, and mastermojo83

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 March 29, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, bojan, jj, Kain, KALEB, redmarglar, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Cavalier, Mark, Rafa

Now onto our regular news updates: SIP-198 to update the atomic exchange functionality is currently in audit, and is likely to be done by the end of the week. This SIP proposes the following changes to the existing exchange function:

  • Allow trading at the pure Chainlink price for certain synths.
  • Remove the restriction on the Source or Destination Currencies being sUSD.

Kaleb brought up that Afif proposed SIP-222 to update the exchanger fee system, so that will probably need to be incorporated into the implementation of SIP-198. Afif said he spoke with JJ and Noah, and the plan is to incorporate them into the same release, which therefore may cause a slight delay to SIP-198. The Council determined that, despite the delay, it makes sense for them to be released together because it’s essentially the same contract, more or less.

SIP-222 was actually presented on Tuesday by Afif, who explained that the SIP basically proposes a better way to charge fees for spot synths. Currently, the fee for an exchange is a function of the destination synth’s associated fee. This SIP proposes instead for the fee charged to be set to the sum of fees for both synths. Afif explained that a common issue occurs for exotic pairs (asset pairings other than X/USD) where the latency issue compounds since you have to rely on a different feed for each of the paired assets. With SIP-222, instead of having fees set based on the destination synth, the fees would be additive. This SIP was voted on and approved with 7 votes in favor.

A few other SIPs were also presented last week, so let’s review them:

SIP-219: Add ApeCoin Perp & SIP-223: Add dydx Perp

  • SIPs 219 and 223 propose adding an APECOIN and a DYDX perpetual market (a futures synth market) on Optimism, respectively, to track the price of each of these tokens.
  • Both of these SIPs were presented by MiLLiE, who explained that these two were selected specifically because there is no Chainlink feed currently available on Optimism for them.
  • ApeCoin has shown a lot of trading volume recently and is a very “retail facing” coin, but it’s currently not offered for trading on any other DeFi exchange — the only way to trade Ape is to use a centralized exchange.
  • dYdX is also currently not offered on DeFi exchanges. Everyone trading on dYdX gets rewarded in its native token, so many users want to be able to hedge their exposure to dYdX since there is a lock period on the rewards.
  • “These assets are very high in demand, so there’s an opportunity for Synthetix to catch a lot of trading volume.” -Millie
  • These SIPs were both voted on and approved with 7 votes in favor

SIP-221: Decrease c-ratio on L1 and L2

  • This SIP proposes lowering the collateralization ratio for SNX staking to 400% on Optimism.
  • During his presentation, Raffiegang explained that since the debt pools have been merged, every staker is now exposed to the same debt pool composition. Logically, the c-ratio should therefore be the same for both networks, so he has proposed that the it be set to 400% on both.
  • Normally a c-ratio change would just require an SCCP, but since this was such a big change, Afif proposed that it be presented as a SIP.
  • This SIP has been voted on and approved with 7 votes in favor

During their meeting, the Spartan Council also discussed Synth Teleporters. Kain said “there’s a pretty hard dependency on Debt Migration for some form of fungibility across networks.” He also brought up the Ronin Network hack, stating that unless we have a trustless bridge, the plan is probably to introduce fungibility via a burn/mint bridge. This will be the first phase of ensuring that synths can move but, unfortunately, it will not be a very fast teleporter solution. Once the Debt Migration happens, though, the team expects most of the flow of synths to be from L1 to L2. But not to worry, wrappers will still be available on L1 so users can get sUSD.

But because of this, Teleporters will likely be shifted to part of the V3 scope. The Council said “this will allow for a much more thoughtful approach in how we find a solution to this problem.” The preference is still towards Chainlink’s CCIP, but since it’s not likely to be ready soon, the plan is to ask them to build a custom bridge (like the one built for the Debt Pool Synthesis). In the meantime, users will have to use the Optimism bridge to move synths across networks.

As for the Debt Migration SIP, Kain thinks there needs to be a separate SIP that addresses the deprecation of L1 staking. This process will be very complex and has a lot of implications, so he thinks it needs to be written up ASAP and presented before Debt Migration to make sure everyone understands what’s happening before migrating.

Lastly, for the Gold and Silver synths, the Council is still in talks with Chainlink about the circuit breakers. But they plan to add these feeds to Kovan this week for testing.

Grants Council

Present at the March 31, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: beachmom, CT, cyberduck, Mike

In Grants Council updates, the team is chugging along nicely with their various ongoing projects:

HERO Stats Page

  • The team discussed some of the coordination challenges surrounding the stats page. Since the Grants Council is heavily reliant on the Core Contributors (CCs) for input and data sources, it has caused some setbacks.
  • The Grants Council plans to set a course of action with the Treasury Council in the new epoch to ensure that they have the development resources necessary to achieve what they need to be achieved.

NFT Project

  • This project is progressing well.
  • The designers have been working on the accessories for each of the characters.
  • The Grants Council also received another lore submission and hope to have a more definitive direction for the final version this week. Once they decide on the specific direction, the writer will go deeper into that particular storyline.

Translations Initiative

  • The team has been discussing whether or not it would make more sense for this project to go through the CCs/marketing team, rather than through community grants.
  • Since the translations will require ongoing updates, and are a sensitive area that require a certain level of trust, it might be better to just work with one CC lead in each country for this project. More to come here.

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-198: Update to Atomic Exchange Function, Status: approved

SIP-222: Update Exchange Fee System, Status: approved

SIP-219: Add ApeCoin Perp, Status: approved

SIP-223: Add dydx Perp, Status: approved

SIP-221: Decrease c-ratio on L1 and L2, Status: approved

SIP-204: Synth Teleporters, Status: draft

SIP-208: Debt Migration, Status: draft

SIP-165: Debt Pool Synthesis, Status: implemented

SIP-212: Add Commodity Synths on Optimism, Status: approved