How Synthetix Became the Second-Largest DeFi Platform - Ep.148

Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, talks about synthetic asset issuance platform, which enables people to create tokens that track the price of assets in traditional and crypto finance. We discuss the various types of assets available, why changing the monetary policy helped the ecosystem take off, why people would buy synthetic Bitcoin over Bitcoin itself, and why Uniswap has been pivotal to Synthetix's success. He covers the role the SNX token plays, why people minting synths must be over-collateralized by about 700%, and some of the changes coming down the pike, including futures, tweaks to the inflation rate, and a new oracle system. He also explains what happened when a trader made the system insolvent — and how they negotiated with the trader to keep it alive — how he thinks about decentralization and why the system's governance might one day be handled by a DAO.
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Episode links:
Synthetix: https://www.synthetix.io/
Synthetix on Twitter: https://twitter.com/synthetix_io
Kain Warwick: https://twitter.com/kaiynne
Havven transforming into Synthetix: https://blog.havven.io/havven-is-transforming-into-synthetix-2fdf727b8892
Synthetix overview: https://blog.havven.io/synthetix-overview-f4a5a6c41210
How Synthetix works: https://www.synthetix.io/how-it-works/
Synthetix lite paper: https://www.synthetix.io/uploads/synthetix_litepaper.pdf
Changing monetary policy: https://blog.synthetix.io/synthetix-monetary-policy-changes/
Oracle hack: https://www.coindesk.com/synthetix-trader-rolls-back-broken-trades-that-netted-1-billion-profit
Synthetix response to oracle incident: https://blog.synthetix.io/response-to-oracle-incident/
How staking works on Synthetix:  https://www.stakingrewards.com/asset/synthetix-network-token
https://help.synthetix.io/hc/en-us/articles/360020245314-How-can-I-earn-Synth-exchange-rewards-
Reddit complaint by trader who initially made the system insolvent: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/d4edxm/the_synthetix_dapp_deleted_my_balance/
Efforts to resolve the front running problem: https://sips.synthetix.io/sips/sip-6
Synthetix and Chainlink: https://blog.synthetix.io/synthetix-and-chainlink/
Kain’s tweets on the censorship vector stack: https://twitter.com/kaiynne/status/1197265019169169409?s=20
https://twitter.com/kaiynne/status/1197265044204998656?s=20
Unconfirmed episode on Uniswap: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-uniswap-quickly-became-one-of-the-most-popular-dexes/
Defiant interview: https://thedefiant.substack.com/p/theres-a-pipeline-of-etf-like-tokens