SNXweave Weekly Recap 20

January 4, 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 the last week of December.

Spartan Council and SIP updates

Present at the December 21, 2021 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, BigPenny, bojan, jj, Kain, KALEB
Core Contributors: Darius, Mike, Rafa

Happy New Year!

As we discussed in our last blog post, the Alhena release went out in December. This release included the ETHBTC synth, which is now live for trading on Kwenta. Follow this link to start trading and taking advantage of changes between ETH and BTC price correlations! sETHBTC will hopefully be released on Optimism soon as well.

The Spartan Council is now concentrating on the next release, Peacock, which will mainly focus on getting the Dynamic Exchange Fees SIP out. The Council is waiting for a few SIPs to come back from audit, as many people have been on break for the holidays. So we should see several implemented SIPs in the coming weeks.

As for phase 2, most of which surrounds the debt synthesis, JJ says Debt Shares is code-complete (it just needs to be audited), and the debt pool synthesis as a whole is looking pretty good for February. This will then open the door for the completion of Synth Teleporters and the Debt Migration.

And in exciting news, Aelin Protocol is live! Check out Kain’s announcement post for a detailed history, overview, and explanation of Aelin.

In case you missed it, Thales is now live on Optimism. The first batch of markets will be incentivized with 20,000 THALES until January 7th, and will be shared pro rata for traders buying from the new Binary Options AMM.

Lastly for Spartan Council updates, two new SCCPs were implemented. The first was SCCP-158, which updated the ETH wrappr parameters on L2 by decreasing the minting fee to 20 basis points. The minting fee is paid upon minting sETH with ETH and helps control the supply of the synth. The second was SCCP-160, another wrappr parameter update, which increased the capacity of the L2 LUSD wrappr by 25 million sUSD, putting the maximum minting amount of sUSD for this wrappr at 100 million.

Grants Council

Present at the December 30, 2021 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: CT, cyberduck (rubber^duck), Mike

In Grants Council news, keep an eye out for a typeform coming soon that will ask for suggestions related to the Stats page. CT recently tweeted asking relatively new SNX stakers what 4–6 stats, data, or pieces of information they would want to see on a Synthetix stats page in order to get a better idea of what data is most relevant and important to stakers. The Grants Council wants to make sure the new stats page has everything that users want, so be sure to leave your suggestions in the upcoming questionnaire!

Also, the Retroactive Public Goods Grants funding round that the Grants Council partnered with Gitcoin to make happen has come to an end. The Council will be issuing a payment to the amount of $75,000 to Gitcoin for them to distribute directly to the following public good projects that were voted on:

• Frame
• L2BEAT
• Hardhat
• DefiLlama
• vfat.tools
• hardhat-deploy and jolly-roger
• CryptoFees.info
• Blockscout

Check out the Gitcoin page to see the list of projects and read more about them!

Ambassador Council

Present at the December 22, 2021 Ambassador Council Spartan City Hall:
Ambassadors: MiLLiE

In Ambassador Council news, the Ambassadors held a City Hall with the devs from OptiPunks and OptiMarket at the end of December. We got to hear from Bodo, Mario, Burtrico, and briefly Platocrat who joined towards the end.

First, the guests discussed what made them choose to donate all of their proceeds to Optimism and whose idea it was to start OptiMarket. Bodo said the retroactive public goods funding concept was their main influence. The idea of rewarding projects that have already succeeded and provided value to the community led to them donating 100% of their proceeds. Burtrico added that OptiMarket was basically a community effort of several OptiPunk holders.

Millie asked if they could explain their philosophy on a decentralized marketplace — like, who has access to what, how much moderation there is, etc. Burtrico explained that, as they are first adding features and getting those rolled out, it will just be their internal team. So it will mostly look centralized in this initial period, but as they grow they hope to get the community involved. He added that their ultimate goal is most likely to make the frontend open source down the road, but right now it’s private because they want to make sure everything is working correctly before releasing it.

The group also had a very in-depth conversation related to the open source self-hosted concept as a whole, and how it might fit in to blockchain applications in the future. Mario chimed in saying a self-hosted metaverse is very debatable because the computational power it takes to run a graphic is quite big. Since this computational power to open up a metaverse is exponentially higher, it also opens it up to exponentially more threats. So, he postulated, when comparing ETH, smart contracts, and an actual metaverse that is decentralized, the key point is that the computational power needs to be decentralized — and that’s something that is not easy to scale.

Similar to a question posed during the Universe.xyz city hall, Millie asked the Opti guests what their thoughts are on NFTs and where they see the future of NFTs going. Bodo said he likes to think about it in terms of his friends who aren’t into crypto, because what always seems to pique their interest are NFTs and play-to-earn gaming. He believes that NFTs will continue to grow and will become one of the main factors driving adoption for networks like Ethereum and Optimism.

Lastly, Millie asked if there is anything the community can do to contribute in the time leading up to the OptiMarket rollout. Burtrico said they’ve actually had several people reach out asking if they can help with any sort of dev support, and that they will probably be reaching back out to those people once they get their first version out. Platocrat reiterated this saying they’re mostly just waiting to launch v1 and get something out there that people can use, and then they will gather feedback from the community and discuss ideas with everybody who wants to help improve OptiMarket. So be sure to join their Discord server to be part of this discussion!

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SIP/SCCP status tracker:

SIP-188: Add sETHBTC synth, Status: implemented

SIP-184: Dynamic Exchange Fees, Status: approved

SIP-185: Debt Shares, Status: SC review pending

SIP-180: Aelin Protocol, Status: implemented

SCCP-158: Update sETH/ETH Wrappr Parameters, Status: implemented

SCCP-160: Update LUSD Wrappr Parameters, Status: implemented