A much needed shakeup in coming to @synthetix_io. A thread on how we got here and what comes next. 👇
The Synthetix project has many firsts to its name. The first yield farm, the first EIP style governance for DeFi. The first governance council. The first DeFi architecture to leverage proxies. The first to deploy to OP. Yet its relevance has declined over the years.
Sep 3 • 17 tweets • 2 min read
A thread for those not on the list to help you cope.
doesn’t count as revenue because you basically have a cabal going around robbing small children of their lunch money at gunpoint.pump.fun
Jul 3 • 38 tweets • 6 min read
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.
May 4 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
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.
May 3 • 26 tweets • 5 min read
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.
Mar 20 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
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.
Jan 1 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Dec 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Ok so looking at the responses here I have to conclude a couple things, I’m not very closely followed by the core solana community 😂, and it seems like solana is going through a similar phenomenon as 2017 era Ethereum. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Most of the activity is purely speculative the same way ICOs were, but despite the majority of ICOs going to zero, we got dozens of foundational projects funded that are still relevant in the ETH ecosystem. I’m hoping that something similar is playing out and it’s still early.
Dec 7, 2023 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
What is your threshold for considering a service custodial? Binance & Coinbase? Obviously custodial. Memorising the seed words to a cold wallet? Obviously non-custodial. Is there a continuum in between these two extremes or is there a criterion that makes custody binary?
The meme, “not your keys not your coins” has been around a long time, but what explicitly does it mean? If you don’t control your keys, then your crypto is not really yours. Ok so what does it mean to control your keys?
Dec 5, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
We are finally seeing some green shoots out there after a long winter. Here are the projects I am watching closely, in no particular order (probably pyops).
$LYRA - This project has such Synthetix early 2019 vibes it is honestly hard to watch sometimes. V2 is coming soon.
$OP - The Superchain is a narrative that will dominate 2024. The tech is legit and only getting better, we are going to see so many new app chains deploy next year…
Jun 20, 2023 • 34 tweets • 5 min read
Can Synthetix death Spiral?
The short answer, yes it can. The longer answer, yes “if”. Let’s unpack the IF here.
How does Synthetix even work?
You lock SNX and borrow sUSD, the current collateral ratio is 500%, so you can only borrow 20% of the value of your SNX in sUSD. (An aside, this is overly conservative imo, but I don’t make the rules…)
Jul 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So here is a fun fact, I woke up this morning and realised as of a few weeks ago I’m the largest SNX holder, even factoring in the treasury council. Yet still the rest of the Spartan Council ignores my advice 🤷♂️.
And for the reply guys out there ready to say “SNX bad price, too many houses”. Let me explain the trade for you. SNX price ⬆️ = mint sUSD, sell sUSD for ETH at local bottom of the cycle. ETH ⬆️ ~40x, hedge some ETH into houses through the bull market.
Jun 8, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Loving the reply guys in this thread saying omg how could you do this? I’ll tell you exactly how, you do several thousand things with correct assumptions and then one with an incorrect assumption. Seeing the funds in your address is NOT sufficient as a test.
I can think of at least 50 different times something like this has happened within the Synthetix community. The correct way to test a tx is to ensure you can move the received tokens, but like 0% of people do this.
May 30, 2022 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
This year I’ve focussed significant attention on governance as a @synthetixio council member and more broadly facilitating within the ecosystem. An important part of this work has been helping projects launch protocols on @optimismPBC through a mentorship program.
It’s been awesome to watch the first cohort develop their roadmaps and decide Optimism is the best place to build. Now @Laurashin and @jinglejamOP will help me select the next cohort which will be focussed on women founders only. If this interests you here are some highlights.
May 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Another point on this, I think the more OG projects that have aggressively decentralised are in a unique position to enact this. Hard to see a labs style model absorbing another token given regulatory uncertainty. Whereas a pure DAO like @iearnfinance or @synthetix_io can yolo.
There are two approaches that make sense here imo. The first is a direct burn of the target token funded by the treasury of the acquiring project. This limits the size of these deals.
Mar 8, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Jan 13, 2022 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
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
20% of people are willing to lie about the fact that they understand how Synthetix works to look smart.
Dec 28, 2021 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
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.
Nov 21, 2021 • 30 tweets • 8 min read
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.
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.
Nov 7, 2021 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Oct 27, 2021 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
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.
