The Fomalhaut release

This Thursday (September 24, beginning around midnight UTC) we're deploying an upgrade with various protocol improvements. During this time, expected to be up to several hours, users may be unable to interact with the system, including using Mintr or Synthetix.Exchange and transferring SNX or Synths.

Here's what is included in this release:

• SIP-85: Ether collateral v0.3 — Ether collateral will provide a much needed lever on the Synth supply. There is currently no direct mechanism to increase the Synth supply other than lowering the collateralisation ratio of the network, and this has very limited impact while introducing significant risk into the system. The introduction of sUSD borrowing against Ether will enable ETH holders to mint sUSD when sUSD is trading above $1 to help reduce the premium. Given that demand for sUSD continues to grow, it became increasingly obvious that this was one of the most impactful changes that could be made in the current environment. This also opens the possibility of sUSD borrowing against BTC tokens such as renBTC and tBTC in a future release.
• SIP-86: Exchange rates aggregator V3 — This change was required to support new data types following the transition to Chainlink, completed in the Pollux release. Specifically it allows for consuming gas price data critical to enabling incentives for Keepers required for the Synthetic Futures launch.
• SIP-87: Migrate iETH rewards to the protocol and decrease to 0 SNX per week — The iETH trial incentive has run for several months being paid by the synthetixDAO at a consistent rate of 32,000 SNX per week. Given the value of this incentive in balancing the debt pool, this adds the iETH incentive to the weekly inflationary supply rewards distribution. The distribution will originally be set to 0 SNX, but can be configured via SCCP as per community governance rough consensus.

[Link to audit]

This release is called ‘Fomalhaut,' which like all releases is named after a star (in order of visual magnitude). If you've got any comments or questions about the release, please come join the conversation in Discord.