SNXweave Weekly Recap 34

SNXweave -

April 12, 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 April 5, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, calavera, Danijel, JVK, Kain, ksett, Mark
Core Contributors: Cavalier, jj, KALEB, Rafa

That’s a wrap for the first week of the new epoch! Our new Councils have been getting situated and are now rocking and rolling. So let’s talk about what happened this past week.

SIPs 198 and 222 are both done with their audits — as a reminder, these SIPs will update the atomic exchange functionality and the exchange fee system, respectively. The Council is hoping for a Mainnet release this week. For SIP-198, Kaleb said the plan is to add EUR, BTC, ETH, USD, and eventually the Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen, and British Pound.

Kain said he sees atomic exchanges as just another form of exchange that Synthetix offers, meaning it would probably require a SIP for each additional asset. He added, however, that it would make sense to shift the requirement to SCCPs as these instruments continue to get added (in order to reduce the burden on governance). SIP-211 for the Asset Listing Methodology will therefore be expanded to include which instrument changes can be made via SCCPs vs. SIPs.

The liquidation mechanism upgrade was originally supposed to go out before SIPs 198 and 222, but the audit came back with some feedback and adjustments that needed to be made. The auditor pointed out that some functions needed updating and the liquidator reward wasn’t quite right — it was vesting like staking rewards, so the time component had to be removed. The auditor, however, is currently backed up and will likely not be able to review the changes until later in the month.

As for SIP-203, for a volume source fee, there was a bit of discussion as to whether the fee should be additive or subtractive. Consensus was reached to make it additive. Danijel asked why Synthetix would need to be involved at all if the fee is additive. Kain explained that partners who choose to use the volume source fee mechanism won’t have to then write their own fee contracts, which might expose users to additional risk. He added, “another reason we decided to make it additive was because now there are two competition points — UX and fees — vs. a subtractive fee where protocols are only competing on UX.” Fees can therefore be set by each protocol at the contract level. Now that the new Council is in place, the SIP will be presented again with all of its new updates.

The Council also discussed Synth Teleporters and sUSD fungibility. Kain reviewed all of the challenges with the new Council, including bridge hacks, Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) release, moving Teleporters to V3, etc. Calavera asked if this SIP is currently paused, to which Kaleb replied that there will be a new SIP that allows users to move assets across networks. He added, however, that this won’t be as fast as Teleporters — L2 to L1 will come with a 7-day delay.

For the issue of deprecating L1 staking, the current plan is to raise the liquidation threshold and c-ratio over time. Danijel, however, thinks they need to see more data on this before making a decision.

Kaleb brought up that he wrote an SCCP to disable new renBTC loans since there are currently no caps, which presents a risk to the protocol. The general agreement was that they should be disabled, and it was put to a vote. All 8 Council members voted in favor of disabling new loans against renBTC, so this SCCP was implemented.

Afif also presented a high-level overview of the V3 scope to the Council during their meeting. He said the idea is to take the blended debt pool architecture that we have now, and replace it with a more permissionless one (with the existing debt pool architecture added on top). In this model, every asset will be in its own pool.

With V3GM, governance will still decide what synths will be supported by SNX stakers, but the big difference is that anyone will be able to add a synth as long as they have an oracle — they will just need to start a debt pool, and people can decide whether they want to provide liquidity to those pools. Afif said that this lets us separate the exposure while maintain the benefits of the blended debt pool model that we have today through governance. He added that V3 should be picking up momentum now that there are more resources on it.

Ksett asked if this means shorting will be separated by asset. Afif confirmed this, saying that all of the collateral contract in V3 will be redone. He said “we want to have the flexibility of permissionless markets to allow people to design whatever they want, while also retaining the power and coordination to be able to bootstrap new markets.”

Lastly, Kaleb also asked a few questions, which Afif answered:

— How do liquidations work in this model?

  • SNX liquidations will continue to be socialized. Exposure to markets that liquidated users are in will be dialed down. Afif also said that for non-SNX collateral, they’re leaning towards suggesting those be normal liquidations vs. socialized.

— For the segregated pools, are the c-ratios decided by governance?

  • Collaterals will have to be whitelisted and set by governance. The big difference is that pool creation will be permissionless. Users will be able to delegate their stake to the Council pool in “standard mode” and more advanced users will be able to delegate to whatever pool they want.

— If I just want exposure to a particular product (Futures for example), is that possible?

  • Yes — what’s interesting about the fund model is that you can have a fund that is either all crypto or all non-crypto Futures markets to simplify the UX even more.

Grants Council

Present at the April 7, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: ALEXANDER, BigPenny, CT, cyberduck, Mike

Moving on to Grants Council updates, the new Council each listed their ongoing and upcoming initiatives, and estimated the cost for each so that a budget can be submitted to the Treasury Council. The Grants Council actually ended last epoch under budget, so hats off to them!

The Council is currently brainstorming a few new initiatives:

— A Discord bot to report Synthetix bugs

— Tutorial videos

  • The team hopes to get the 300 involved in these Synthetix tutorial videos
  • Specifically on Futures content, there will need to be coordination with Kwenta

— Mike suggested a Futures-powered-by-Synthetix explainer video, then a follow up for any front ends

  • The Council also discussed possible learn & earn incentives for this project
  • Mike will be writing an outline for this initiative

Next, the design for the Hero Stats page is ready, the team is just working on who to get the data sources from. It was initially expected that the stats page would have to use subgraphs, but RPC queries might provide the most reliable data. Cyberduck has also been in communication with a dev from Kwenta who is willing to build the front end for the Hero Stats page, which can likely begin before the data source is final.

Lastly, Mike brought up the possibility of adding a Lieutenant role to the 300 group. He said there is a need for people to lead more specific tasks or objectives for the 300 such as marketing, competition organization, etc. He added that extra leadership is necessary, especially for the times when he or Matt are unable to step in. CT suggested making this a performance-based incentive in order to increase accountability. The team also discussed possibly nominating members who ran for council positions but were not elected for the Lieutenant role, in order to allow them to continue supporting the community in an impactful way. The Grants Council will likely fund this role on a trial basis, with the possibility that it eventually becomes a role that is funded by the Treasury Council.

Ambassador Council

Present at the April 6, 2022 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: mastermojo, Matt, MiLLiE

In Ambassador Council updates, Millie has drafted a SIP to update the Ambassador mandate and will be presenting it to the Spartan Council today. The SIP aims to create a more structured approach to the Ambassador Council role based on a number of key performance indicators. Initially, the purpose of the Ambassadors was to rally support from the community for external governance proposals and encourage/seek delegation of governance tokens.

This SIP, however, proposes that the following key performance indicators be used to track the Ambassador’s success in the future:

  • Total voting power delegations
  • Number of social events coordinated
  • Sum of protocol integrations, Grants referrals, or any referrals attributed to the Ambassadors
  • Approved SIPs written by the Ambassador Council
  • Onboarding Core Contributor (CC) positions
  • Use of the Synthetix Councils’ and CC’s Coordinape circle as an indicator for non-public contributions and productive Discord engagement

The Ambassadors are also hard at work planning their upcoming Spartan City Halls. With the start of the new epoch, the team wants to bring back City Halls immediately, and refine the process for getting them scheduled. And they already have one scheduled! Be sure to tune in this Thursday to hear a discussion with the engineers from UMA protocol and Thales. The Ambassador Council is very committed to building relationships with as many projects as possible through these Spartan City Halls, and they already have a long list of possible guests to accomplish this.

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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-211: Asset Listing Methodology, Status: draft

SIP-148: Upgrade Liquidation Mechanism V2, Status: approved

SIP-203: Volume Source Fee, Status: SC review pending

SIP-204: Synth Teleporters, Status: draft

SCCP-178: Disable New Loans against renBTC, Status: implemented

SIP-224: KPI-based Ambassador Mandate, Status: draft (being presented today)