Something that comes up fairly regularly in the Synthetix discord is the concept of efficiency + openness vs fairness. If a system is designed such that it is totally open, then players (e.g. liquidation bots) with a preexisting advantage will dominate, is that fair?
The writers of these bots have a skill set and access to capital that allows them to perform a service efficiently, this is GOOD for the protocol but bad for the inefficient players. You could make it more fair by introducing some handicap, but that would reduce efficiency.
The disconnect arises because there is conflict with the fairness of a system when integrated into an “unfair" world. Many people associate fairness with equal outcomes, but efficient systems actually have a tendency to increase inequality. They favour the dominant players.
Contrast this with an unfair closed system which is also inefficient, ie a corrupt system where poor players having seized power can somehow shift the equilibrium to maintain their power.
The irony here is that if you are a poor player, you actually want the latter system, as a totally open and fair system will be dominated by more efficient players. In a corrupt system at least you have a chance of being corrupt!
Personally I am a Rawlsian when it comes to ethics, but I also accept there is a harsh trade-off when trying to achieve fairness, it comes at the expense of efficiency. This is the challenge, tempering efficient markets to achieve fairness, where do we even start?
Smart contracts are hyper-efficient but that does not make them fair.
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doesn’t count as revenue because you basically have a cabal going around robbing small children of their lunch money at gunpoint.pump.fun
Ethena obviously doesn’t count, because it is basically Luna, except not in the way that Synthetix is basically Luna, it is like basically Luna in a different way, but worse. Also it is basically FTX because did you hear that they also uses CEXs, not even DeFi imo.
Breaking the meta is challenging, but there is nothing that excites a degen more than a new mechanism to try to game. This is why yield farming was so effective in creating DeFi summer. Pool 1, pool 2, pool 8?... shut up and take my money.
This is why the points meta created so much excitement, and for the projects that got in early it was extremely effective at driving awareness and attention. Unfortunately as we have recently realised it was not sustainable.
Points were a hybrid of airdrops and yield farming. The problem is that points, unlike tokens, could be infinitely inflated, this allowed projects to farm the farmers. It's not much, but it's honest work.
Man @LayerZero_Labs you’re really gonna make me write up another thread huh…
I had a call last night with one of my favourite projects, they are working on their governance framework. The word I kept coming back to was LEGITIMACY.
This is probably the single most important concept in crypto. This is one of the reasons why almost every points distribution recently has been a dumpster fire.
It’s been a while since I’ve put my theadoooooor hat on, so let’s have a little chat about capital formation incentives in crypto.
Yes there are many bad actors, but not everyone is a bad actor, never attribute to malice what can more easily be explained by misaligned incentives.
People do not realise how much pressure there is to conform to existing meta for new teams. Even, and maybe even especially, the most successful teams are constrained by the current meta if they want to raise big rounds.
This has gotten way out of hand 😂. is the new site for @KengLernitas. A 🧵 on what has happened so far.kenglernitas.wtf
I started playing around with memecoins a few weeks ago, bridged some USDC to Solana and started yoloing on @dexscreener. This was right around the launch of @bodensol. Despite what a lot of overly serious people are saying I find many of these memecoins to be utterly hilarious.
That said I am most definitely not a serious person. I’ve been a fan of @getbentsaggy for a long time, and many of the Dolan memes are incredible. There’s no accounting for taste tho…
Interesting start to the new year in @synthetix_io land. SNX stakers incurred ~$2m in losses during the TRB incident today. Not amazing but not world ending either, here are my thoughts.
What happened? TRB had a 250k USD open interest cap that ballooned to 12.5m as the price ran up the last few months. This should have been adjusted back down, but risk controls were lax, there was diffusion of responsibility. The Spartan Council is responsible for params though.
Several short positions were opened as the price spiked today and with the dislocation of spot and perp prices there was no arb to balance it. We’ve become used to the skew being ultra responsive to the funding rate mechanism but it failed here. Lesson learned.