Thread by @redphonecrypto

A rambling dissection of of the $SYN failure

1. I was excited for this project for a lot of reasons... mainly bc I thought they'd incentivize liquidity on Uniswap/sushiswap for 3x tokens. In other words...

(more below)

https://twitter.com/dareal_sisyphe/status/1370629572513923076

I envisioned being able to go to Uniswap and buy 3xYFI bull/bear tokens for example. That would have made it the easiest way in the world to get leverage on just about any asset

2. The dev didn't seem to see Uniswap liquidity as desireable or possible on 3x tokens... I call bs since 3x tokens have been succesfully trading on thorchain's bepswap for months. Synlev had an opportunity to be doing the same on Ethereum instead of Binance Chain

3. Big picture question: why build a decentralized 3x token platform that forces people to visit your website to use it? It's not very composable, it's not all that innovative and it's not exciting

If you're building a website-centric margin product, you'd better be doing something utterly amazing or unique bc you're basically competing w centralized exchanges... the only difference may be a lack of KYC. That sounds huge, but you still need global awareness for your project

If you focus on getting liquidity on existing trading platforms from day 1, you can tap into organic growth and their existing users, which are likely in the millions. Good luck getting millions of users to your tiny cap website

4. $SYN did some silly things.... like having a fixed-price presale with bad terms that lingered on for basically the entire duration of the project

5. The design/UX broke a lot of conventions that are common in the world of decentralized trading

6. The bad UX and presale should have clued me off that the founder wasn't all that in touch way people actually use decentralized platforms. Not a big deal if he would have listened to others who suggested changes, but he didn't

7. The platform absolutely crushed LPs in the early days... some lost 20-30%+ of what they pooled due to front-running bots and design flaws. Devs should have halted trading until that was fixed

8. Some traders bought the 3x tokens without realizing they might experience price decay... so they bought and held a product for weeks or months that was designed to be held for hours or a few days at most. They lost money, and that sucked

The UX could have popped up warnings for 1-time users right before they hit "buy". Something simple like "I understand these are short-term trading vehicles designed to be held for a few hours or days. Holding longer than that could cause losses even if Token A climbs in value"

9. I sold my remaining bag last night. Didn't have much left at that point, and I will use this experience as a reminder to cut ties completely (rather than gradually) when I see warning signs

10. There were plenty of warning signs. Mostly the fact that the dev was becoming less and less active in Telegram, trading vols had dried up on the platform and the official twitter account went stale

They did tease moving to another platform like BSC, but looks like that was simply a way to distract the community... either that or they found moving too hard or just weren't interested in it

11. My hunch is the lead dev wasn't intending to scam here, but he just flailed after volume dried up and started losing interest. If so, man up and tell the community

12. ETH gas fees didn't help Synlev at all. Someone should build something similar on optimism or zk

13. @thorchain_org mainnet will go live soon, so it should be much easier to get access to 3x tokens

14. Sorry to all who lost $$$. Don't let it sour you on this space. When you explore the fringes, you sometimes see things you don't want to see. That's not stopping me from exploring, though, and I hope it doesn't stop you

CODA: just heard an interesting theory. Was Icarus the owner of the bot that rekted LPs?

If he was, he would have had no incentive to stop LPs from getting rekted