Unsolicited Advice for DeFi
People used to care about decentralization—or pretended to, at least. When I first started working on decentralized finance, onchain perpetual futures markets were the cutting-edge. Layer two scaling solutions were being rolled out for Ethereum so transactions could include enough compute power to process trades at a reasonable cost. Dynamic funding rate mechanisms were engineered so liquidity providers could earn trading fees without price exposure. Decentralized oracle networks were being d...
Unsolicited Advice for DeFi
People used to care about decentralization—or pretended to, at least. When I first started working on decentralized finance, onchain perpetual futures markets were the cutting-edge. Layer two scaling solutions were being rolled out for Ethereum so transactions could include enough compute power to process trades at a reasonable cost. Dynamic funding rate mechanisms were engineered so liquidity providers could earn trading fees without price exposure. Decentralized oracle networks were being d...
The Internet
I’m just old enough to remember when the internet was fucking awesome. It was open and lawless. Using it was an experiment. You could ask “asl” in an AOL chatroom. You could play pretend. The invention of MP3 compression and file sharing apps was life-changing. As a middle school boy learning to play bass guitar, I suddenly had access to practically every song in the world. Incredibly, it was even cooler than that—using it was breaking the rules! At one point, an ISP threatened my dad that th...
The Internet
I’m just old enough to remember when the internet was fucking awesome. It was open and lawless. Using it was an experiment. You could ask “asl” in an AOL chatroom. You could play pretend. The invention of MP3 compression and file sharing apps was life-changing. As a middle school boy learning to play bass guitar, I suddenly had access to practically every song in the world. Incredibly, it was even cooler than that—using it was breaking the rules! At one point, an ISP threatened my dad that th...
ERC-7412 Library Batching Implementation Proposal
ERC-7412 is a standard that allows smart contract engineers to incorporate off-chain data by simply calling functions on oracle contracts. It preserves composability across smart contracts and also aligns economic incentives between data consumers and oracle networks. This standard relies on transaction batching (i.e. atomic multi-operations, multicalls) to automatically prepend the verification of data from decentralized oracle networks when necessary to execute a transaction. Synthetix’s Co...
ERC-7412 Library Batching Implementation Proposal
ERC-7412 is a standard that allows smart contract engineers to incorporate off-chain data by simply calling functions on oracle contracts. It preserves composability across smart contracts and also aligns economic incentives between data consumers and oracle networks. This standard relies on transaction batching (i.e. atomic multi-operations, multicalls) to automatically prepend the verification of data from decentralized oracle networks when necessary to execute a transaction. Synthetix’s Co...
Synthetix 2023: What We’ve Built
As we enter the holiday season, I wanted to share an overview of the work completed by Synthetix’s Core Contributors so far this year. We built a lot of awesome shit. This is a long post. The year kicked off with the launch of Perps V2. Despite relatively low volatility in the crypto markets, this has facilitated over $30 billion in trading volume. With no incentives, Synthetix’s liquidity providers have experienced the most profitable days in the protocol’s history over the last month. This ...
Synthetix 2023: What We’ve Built
As we enter the holiday season, I wanted to share an overview of the work completed by Synthetix’s Core Contributors so far this year. We built a lot of awesome shit. This is a long post. The year kicked off with the launch of Perps V2. Despite relatively low volatility in the crypto markets, this has facilitated over $30 billion in trading volume. With no incentives, Synthetix’s liquidity providers have experienced the most profitable days in the protocol’s history over the last month. This ...
Intro to Oracle Multicalls
Synthetix’s Perps V3 Testnet Competition is underway. In addition to testing the new functionality in the perpetual futures market implementation, the use of spot synthetic assets as collateral, and multiple liquidity pools backing different combinations of markets, this deployment is also testing a new pattern for consuming oracle data: ERC-7412. This is implemented with an external node for the oracle manager, requires a client library for front-ends/integrations (that could ideally be buil...
Intro to Oracle Multicalls
Synthetix’s Perps V3 Testnet Competition is underway. In addition to testing the new functionality in the perpetual futures market implementation, the use of spot synthetic assets as collateral, and multiple liquidity pools backing different combinations of markets, this deployment is also testing a new pattern for consuming oracle data: ERC-7412. This is implemented with an external node for the oracle manager, requires a client library for front-ends/integrations (that could ideally be buil...
