I think it is fair to say that most people in crypto assumed that Synthetix was dead. From mid-2023 to the end of 2024, two very long years, the project languished. It was run by a committee and was optimising for all of the wrong things.

But in late 2024, we began to reassemble a team to finish the job that we started. A job that began in 2020 with the publishing of SIP-80. This specification would later be iterated on by multiple DeFi teams, either via forks or through modifications to the spec. I won't go through all of them, but the DeFi OG's remember.

One of the issues that prevented Synthetix from delivering a viable perp DEX in its first three iterations was unrelenting decentralisation maximalism. When I came back to the space in 2023, I finally realised that aiming for maximal decentralisation up front was a huge impediment to iteration and efficiency. Far better to build a product people wanted and then progressively decentralise. Ironically, this was the approach that early Synthetix had taken, and it was what allowed us to frontrun DeFi summer. We were one of the first projects to implement upgradable proxy contracts, and this allowed us to iterate much faster than many projects which opted for immutable contracts. Today, this is not controversial, but back then, boy howdy.

Thankfully, Hyperliquid killed this debate; it was now obvious that the only path forward was optimising for the best product and iterating. We knew we had one final chance to get this right, so we began to design a new modern Perp DEX, a hybrid off-chain orderbook with optimistic settlement direct to Ethereum Mainnet. We built quietly, and last month, we felt it was finally ready to launch.

We knew we needed to do something bold to drive awareness and visibility to the new exchange. Of course, when an OG DeFi project does something crazy and unexpected, people will take note, but competition was fierce, and the attention game is critical.

So we cooked up a campaign based around a $1m invitation-only trading competition. Thankfully, I am not completely washed, so we were able to wrangle some of the best and most entertaining traders on the timeline. And the first few days have been as entertaining as expected. Six people have crashed out completely, and multiple six-figure round-trips were executed.

So far, the exchange has been holding up well during the comp. We had some teething issues on the second day, but the feedback has been broadly positive from traders. Our goal is to scale up markets through the trading comp and be ready to launch to a closed group of beta testers as soon after we wrap up the competition as possible.

That means we need a strategy to attract liquidity and traders. We have a plan on the liquidity side, we are working wth several large market makers to ensure we have deep liquidity from day one. We are also working on an incentive campaign for our SLP vault. This will be one of the primary early liquidity sources on the exchange.

We also need an incentive scheme. The treasury has around 15% of the token supply, and it is critical that we rapidly bootstrap liquidity on the exchange, so we must allocate a reasonable portion of the token supply to liquidity and trading incentives. But we are going to tweak this mechanism slightly. Rather than paying out liquid tokens as trading rebates, directly incentivising mercenary farmers, we are going to provide Snax. Snax can be used to bid in a weekly auction for SNX options. Finer details tbc, but a block of options will be auctioned each week, and traders can bid for them using Snax. Snax will be distributed based on trading volume generated on the exchange.

The other lesson we learned the hard way is that while staking is important, only stakers getting network value is suboptimal. It creates a two-tier system and discourages more passive holders. In fairness, this is exactly what we wanted in the early days, but the world has changed.
This is why, based on strong empirical evidence, I have changed my position and believe that buyback and burn is the optimal model. We tested this out with Perps V2 and burned a small amount of SNX. We aspire to burn a lot more this time around. And this is why early momentum is so important. If we can begin to generate meaningful revenue by rapidly scaling the new Ethereum exchange, we can buy back and burn significantly more tokens while the FDV is at historical lows.

Infinex has already integrated HL and is in the process of integrating Lighter and Synthetix. It is safe to say that the Infinex trading experience is one of the best in the market today. You can seamlessly switch between mobile and desktop and access the trading interface on multiple devices simultaneously. You also get access to the extension, which means you can, if needed, trade directly on HL. But the killer feature is the ability to easily move funds in and out of your margin account without needing to think about gas or cross-chain swaps or deal with any friction at all.

Infinex perps will soon support three trading venues, making it one of the first perp aggregators in the market. This will be extremely convenient for traders who like to access multiple venues, whether to tap into different markets, for arbitrage or for maximising fee rebates and points farming.

We are very confident in the architectural choices we have made in building this latest version of Synthetix, whether it is all transactions and orders being private in the order book, or the ability to launch novel perp contracts for pre-market assets, RWAs or even memes, we think this exchange design is the optimal tradeoff between capital efficiency performance and security. The goal is not to compete with other DEXs; the goal is to accelerate the extinction of centralised exchanges. The world is changing rapidly, and we are about to enter the post-CEX era, and Synthetix is positioned to be a huge beneficiary of this shift. We bet on the world migrating onchain almost a decade ago, and it has been a longer and more gruelling journey than we ever expected, but we are still here, and you cannot yet dance on our grave.

If you want to follow along with the competition or check out the leaderboard, and the exchange. We have assembled an almost completely new team, combined with a few of the hardcore OGs who stuck around. The gloves are off, and we know how to deliver an amazing trading experience. Follow along and get ready for the beta launch by depositing sUSD or USDe into the exchange to get on the waitlist.