SNXweave Weekly Recap 88

May 10, 2023

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 May 3, 2023 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Adam, Cavalier, cyberduck, Danijel, dsacks, Jackson, and ml_sudo
Core Contributors: Afif, Ana, Darius, db, jz, KALEB, Matt, Mike, noah, Rafa, sunny

First of all, in case you missed it, the new perps markets are officially live! These nine new perpetual futures markets are now available for leverage trading on Synthetix Perps, where prices will be set by the decentralized off-chain Pyth Network oracle and fees will vary depending on the asset.

And speaking of Perps V2, there was a keepers discussion last week since a few issues occurred during the recent period of high gas. Some decentralized keepers switched off when transaction costs exceeded the rewards associated with the transaction. The CCs have been brainstorming how to build a stronger network of decentralized keepers, and integrators have expressed a desire to prioritize execution over cost of execution. SIP-2013 for a dynamic gas fee module was drafted in response to this issue and was presented yesterday.

The Spartan Council and CCs also discussed leverage at their meeting, where recent questions regarding how liquidation penalties are determined were brought up. The penalty is assessed based on the total leveraged position size, and the liquidation premium multiplier and buffer limit leverage are based on the size of the position. Basically, as the position size increases, lower maximum leverage levels are permitted. Jackson suggested providing documentation on this to better describe how all of these values are set.

For a quick V3 update, the spot market implementation is through audit with OpenZeppelin and Iosiro should be finished with their review shortly. Next, a front end has been set up for stakers in V3, and a rudimentary trading app prototype is also in development so that users can begin interacting with the Alpha spot market. The next hurdle was just the presentation of SCCP-304 for a snxETH V3 Spot Market, which also happened yesterday. It was questioned whether this should be a SIP or SCCP, but it was decided to be presented as an SCCP given that it is a configuration change rather than a code change.

At the meeting, Adam also brought up an issue that many protocols on Optimism are experiencing: RPCs seem to be failing under a fairly light load. He questioned if there should be some grant funding allocated here to help solve this problem, as it seems to happen every time volatility exceeds 2%. This is mostly a frontend issue, but Adam suggested that, given Synthetix positioning as a B2B liquidity provider, it would be wise to use the larger resource base to solve some of these problems that may be insurmountable for a very small integrator (and since Optimism doesn’t view the RPC issue as their issue).

Lastly, the Council discussed the Arbitrum deployment, since V3 is being designed with a potential Arbitrum deployment in mind, but it will need to go through governance first. With the current implementation, however, there would be no cross-chain capability since the CCs are still waiting for CCIP, and any deployment on other EVMs would be siloed and require its own separate collateral base. There is no official release date from Chainlink yet, but the CCs are expecting an update from them soon.

Grants Council

Present at the May 4, 2023 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: Alexander, CT, JVK, sunny, synthquest

The Grants Council also had a productive meeting last week and spent the time going over a general grants/initiative status review, and onboarding their new member: Sunny! ☀️

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-298: Adding APT, LDO, ADA, GMX, FIL, LTC, BCH, SHIB, and CRV to Synthetix Perps V2, Status: implemented

SIP-2013: Dynamic Gas Fee, Status: draft

SCCP-304: snxETH V3 Spot Market, Status: draft