SNXweave Weekly Recap 67
November 30, 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.
Happy Thanksgiving to our community members in the US! Since the holiday was last Thursday, the Spartan Council meeting did not take place. But our other Councils still had a chance to meet during the week!
Grants Council
Present at the November 24, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: CT, cyberduck, JVK, Max
The Grants team had a quick sync to go over their ongoing initiatives, mostly notably the NFT project. They are still working out the details regarding what marketplace the NFTs will be listed on, and JVK is working on a support guide to put on the minting website for users. Max is also still working on the whitelist, and Duck will be getting back to the Council this week with an update on the Lore.
Ambassador Council
Present at the November 21, 2022 Ambassador Council meeting:
Ambassadors: GUNNBOATs, Kevin, mastermojo, Matt, MiLLiE
In Ambassador updates, the team is planning to have Gearbox on for a Spartan Space this week, and the Ambassadors actually joined as guests last week with Across for a Lightening Twitter Space. Clayton hosted the space, with Millie as a guest speaking on behalf of the rest of the Ambassadors. Millie gave a pretty thorough high-level overview of Synthetix, since Clayton last spoke with Kain a few years ago and asked for a bit of a refresher on what the protocol has been up to!
Millie explained how Synthetix is more of a liquidity layer now, and how V3 is going to make us similar to Uniswap where protocols can tap into on-demand liquidity. He then gave an overview of the Spartan Council, and explained how new assets get introduced based on risk parameters and deliberation by the Council, with vigorous testing and risk assessment done in the background. After that, Millie went over some of the protocols that are built on top of Synthetix (specifically highlighting Kwenta and Lyra), and how Synthetix really mitigates risk for them.
Clayton then took the floor to give a high-level overview of Across, which he started by saying: one of the foundation pillars of Across is that it’s an Optimistic bridge. This differs from bridges that use just an AMM because, in those cases, the AMM is pricing a transaction which includes a slippage issue (which is why you can see varying fees on different AMM bridges).
With Across, users are paid exactly what they transfer, minus a small fee. This is able to happen because the Optimism bridge doesn’t need to use an AMM pricing model, it can just look on another chain, identify that something happened as promised, and then provide the incentive for relayers to service the bridging.
By being an optimistic bridge, there is a dispute window for if anything goes wrong on the relayer’s side. They are essentially doing everything at their own cost — the relayer provides the funds at the destination chain for the bridger, then later asks for a rebate from the pool. And that’s where the optimistic oracle comes in and checks everything to make sure it’s right. This is another outcome of this optimistic design — the fact that it can validate after the fact instead of having to use a deterministic outcome. As a result, Across ends up with higher capital efficiency and no slippage (both of which are UX improvements).
Overall it was a pretty fun and quick call, so don’t forget to catch the recording if you missed it!