I took last week off for a friend’s birthday (don’t freak out please 🤦‍♂️ I still responded to like a million messages, I wasn’t completely MIA). Been back this week for an hour and was speaking to @AlexTheBoredApe about cross-chain @aelinprotocol staking and this idea popped out. Ok so when you stake AELIN you get inflation and deal fees. 2% of deal fees are paid on every deal to all stakers. Apparently the networks that Aelin has been talking to have been pushing for native staking on their network. Because of course. I’m looking at you @avalancheavax.

I’m starting to come around to the idea of deploying the @synthetix_io Exchange contracts to multiple L1’s. This is purely based on a concept that emerged recently for Synths to act as fast withdrawal bridges across networks. Synthetix has some *weird* properties so a 🧵👇 As @AndreCronjeTech demonstrated recently

https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech/status/1466367684271132674?s=20

20% of people are willing to lie about the fact that they understand how Synthetix works to look smart.

I appear to have become public enemy #1 in red triangle land. While the reply guys are painful it has provided some interesting perspective on the narrative. My first take away is that I genuinely underestimated how powerful the “Et hirium is toooo expensive” meme would be. 🧵👇 Interestingly my first attempt to post this thread got rugged by iOS, so I got a chance to see the responses to the first tweet. So I am going to add a little more colour. L1 is too expensive to use, the meme is not about that though.

I appreciate the shout out ❤️. The story behind yield farming is a long and complicated one imo and a LOT of people contributed to it.

https://twitter.com/andrecronjetech/status/1462437912549769220

To understand why yield farming to get ownership of a protocol in the form of tokens didn’t happen until 2018 you have to go back to the market structure of ICO’s. For most of this era the expectation was that all the tokens would be distributed in a single event.

Lots of @synthetix_io FUD going around lately. A thread on my perspective on the state of the project. This year has been painful in many ways, scaling has been slow, but I said from the start of the year the L2 transition was going be rough. Despite this I’m still bullish. We have been in this position multiple times in the past. The CC’s tend to take on many simultaneous threads, probably too many. This leads to a point where there are 3-4 major improvements at 90% completion. It feels like stagnation but only upon a cursory glance.

As promised, a thread on where DeFi goes next and why DeFi summer was not the zenith. I’m feeling particularly self-indulgent so this is going to be a long thread. Original tweet I am responding to is here.

https://twitter.com/DegenSpartan/status/1451849957623824386

Here is part 2 due to 25 tweet limit on threads 😓. When was the last time we hit a 50m+ install base of a transformational platform? It was 2010. Here is the first three years of iPhones sales.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of DeFi, NFTs, art and gaming lately. Putting my current thoughts into a thread… The first thing I want to highlight is the difference between attention and impact. Many things that garner high attention are not impactful, think the latest marvel movie. While many things that are high impact get minimal attention, think novel mathematical proofs.

One month later, checking in. Balance of probabilities definitely shifting towards bear market, but I don’t think we have confirmation yet.

https://twitter.com/kaiynne/status/1396052975823380483

In late May we were in -40% now -50%+, the further we go the more unusual this would be in historical terms as a bull market correction. But this is already historically a weird bull market.

Something I’m a little concerned about given the recent interactions I’ve had with the BSC and SOL communities is that they seem to be genuinely gaining organic traction. Much more so than say EOS or Tron last cycle. I have some thoughts about this… Firstly Solana is pretty clearly an upgrade on the previous generation of ETH killers. Primarily because they have managed to hide the scaling trade-offs much more effectively.

Now that sXAG (silver) markets are live I want to provide some context on the situation for those who have not been living in the Synthetix discord for the last few years. Firstly, sXAG is a Synthetic ERC-20 (lives on Ethereum) silver token that tracks the price of silver via this @chainlink oracle: data.chain.link/xag-usd.

It appears that “you are just a VC project” might become this cycle’s “no token, no ICO” both of these statements are just counterproductive virtue signalling imo. The no token mantra alone probably set us all back 18 months due to overcorrecting for ICO scams. I said many times through 2018 and 2019 you actually want scams and other fuckery, not having them is a sign of underinvestment, which is far worse than the alternative.

I just published Synthetix 2021. Which is nothing more than a veiled attempt to cling to a sense of power in this ever more decentralized world. blog.synthetix.io/synthetix-2021/ I will do a quick run through of the highlights for those that don’t want to wade through a 2500 word post. Most critically, as I jokingly alluded to above, this is all just my opinion I have no power to enforce any of these changes, they must go through community governance.

For those who were trading in 2017 or earlier bull markets this may be obvious, but these kinds of corrections are typically driven by overleveraged longs, not whales dumping on you. That hasn’t started yet. Let me break down why it happens and why it is worse on the weekends. I should probably have data to back this up, but I haven’t kept up to date with the latest trading data so much of this is based on intuition and experience trading through 2016-2018. If you have data that invalidates this please provide it, happy to be wrong here!

Here’s my list:

1. L2 migrations and attempts to consolidate around a solution will take up most of the year, fragmentation and forks will ensue across different scaling solutions. Basically what a lot of VC’s imagined in 2016/17 but their L1 bags will still end up worthless.

https://twitter.com/defiprime/status/1343587775908605952

2. 1559 will be a game changer for the Ethereum community. The wealth effect will dwarf that of Bitcoin and since many ETH holders are builders we will see a mass proliferation of new projects as these gains are reinvested in the ecosystem.

I voted yes on @compoundfinance proposal 032. This proposal would distribute COMP to offset losses incurred by liquidated DAI positions. etherscan.io/tx/0x2dc20d2e5… I thought about this a lot over the weekend, and while I expect the proposal to fail here is my reasoning regardless. Factoring in all risk @compoundfinance is probably the defi platform I trust most. Excluding SNX there have been times when 50% of my crypoassets have been on deposit there. I think it is one of the safest places in DeFi you can put your funds.

Been ruminating on this for a while, but few events really drilled it home recently. I’ve been lucky to have had input into the design process with some early stage projects lately. It’s one of my favourite things. But it has also reinforced why crypto is hard. We are so early that the solution space is still massively unexplored. It feels a little like after the App Store launched and all of the sudden startups had access to this incredible platform on which to build. Ethereum is like that but amplified 100x.

Do you like weird origin stories? You do? Good here is great one.
Early August I get an unsolicited email from a purported SNX holder. This happens pretty regularly, no idea how they get my email, probably @garthtravers’s fault… So I was thinking it was a pitch, which it kind of was, but with a twist, it was pitching Synthetix to take an idea for tranching risk in the debt pool. I had actually been thinking a lot about risk swaps at the time. Probably withdrawals from @matt_levine being MIA.

Hearing about some messages saying essentially “oh noes, Kain is not in control of Synthetix anymore. Panic. Flee.” I guess if you are in the project for this long and you still don’t get it you probably should flee. But in case you are just a little dense I will spell it out.

https://twitter.com/kaiynne/status/1316704772246835200

The new governance structure gives you all of the good stuff with none of the bad stuff. With minimal command and control overhead every core contributor has the autonomy to go out and execute.

Here comes a long and meandering thread about markets, competition and social norms, with some personal history thrown in. I’ve been thinking about what precipitated my interaction with @sgoldfed yesterday a lot and I have some thoughts. I think the first thing to clarify is that my “nothing is even close” comment was aimed directly at competing L1 chains, for ETH scaling we’ve picked the OVM and I’m confident they deliver but if you are building something on Ethereum we are cool. I support you and wish you well.

I’ve had a few pings about the @kucoincom hack over the weekend, just to save my DMs from turning into even more of a dumpster fire than usual, here are my thoughts. They are my own, and do not represent the collective views of the @synthetix_io community, because obviously lol. So we heard there were anomalies within a few minutes of the news from a number of people who track on-chain movements closely. It seemed ~500k of the ~1.5m SNX on kucoin was in a suspected hacker address already. Kucoin said they would be making an announcement shortly.