Recap: Community Call #1

Selvers.eth

5 min readFeb 22, 2022

February 7-February 14

This is a text digest of discussion on Twitter Space, Community Call #1 of Syndr Protocol.

What did we cover during the call?

Synthetic Assets
Current Landscape
Introducing Syndr
DeFi’s Omnichain Future
DeFi’s Liquidity Problem for Synthetic Assets
Syndr’s Novel Approach to Sustainable Liquidity
Ongoing Meme Competition
Community Q&A

0–3:40

Welcoming everyone and opening by Founder Vyom

3:40–4:50

Syndr is a DeFi protocol for simple, capital-efficient, and omnichain synthetic assets with sustainable liquidity.

We started out building for synthetic assets because we felt there was a lot of scope of innovation in the market. The Crypto derivatives market is stereo tiny compared to the traditional derivatives market and the scaling solutions get more mature with layer tools and even multiple layer ones competing for dominance.

We think crypto caring solutions are here and they’ll unlock use cases that have not been possible for derivatives like high-frequency trading.

4:50–6:20

So what are synthetic assets? Synthetic assets are tokenized derivatives engineered to simulate the price of another asset and this asset can be anything. It can be a currency, index, equity, or commodity. Syndr is a protocol that allows you to create these synthetic assets and trade these synthetic assets.

They are kind of very hard problem to solve for the current landscape, so synthetic assets are difficult to use and understand. They are expensive to create and maintain and most importantly they are extremely inefficient. Let’s say you want to create $100 worth of synthetic assets. For example, $100 worth of synthetic gold. You need to put up upwards of like 400 or 1000% in collateral on other synthetic protocols currently and even that kind of comes with very hard-to-understand protocol risks and which are retail traders will not be able to understand.

6:20–7:45

Talking about specific protocols like, let’s say Synthetix and Mirror, they are tight to only one chain. So you are kind of limited to using that single ecosystem. That’s another major kind of problem that we want to solve.

With Syndr first thing that we wanted to solve, make it super simple to use, simple to create, maintain, and super capital efficient. We launched our first Testnet back in late October. We allowed people to borrow synthetic assets using LUSD, DAI as collateral with 5 different assets (dTokens) on the Testnet.

7:45–9:00

After the launch, we received feedback from the community. Apart from the normal frontend issues and all of the UX issues, we were not satisfied with the product. We took our birds-eye view of the product and we thought there were so many problems yet to be solved so we kind of held off on launching it on Mainnet until we finalize the main product.

9:00–11:20

We just kind of rewrote everything, some of the problems that we faced at that time, even though it was more accessible because we had stable coins as collateral it was super capital efficient. But it was hard wired, now we have made the whole system much more dynamic. You can independently set collateral ratios for every synthetic asset that you create.

We’ve spent the past two months working on 2 problems. Mainly one is we wanted to improve accessibility by becoming the very first Omnichain synthetic derivatives platform. We’ll have 7 chains on launch, that’s kind of our current plan. That’s how it’s different from the current landscape. Right now you need to use a bridge like Hop or Anyswap to bridge them into another chain. Syndr Protocol is a native Omnichain which means you don’t have to go to an external solution to do that. It’s kind of having a bridge built into the protocol level itself.

11:20–13:50

The launch will be on 7 chains: Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Phantom, Avalanche, and Ethereum Mainnet. More than just EVM definitely will expand to non EVM chains as well in the future including Cosmos.

We wanted to have sustainable liquidity for all the synthetic derivatives that we created on Syndr. We have a three-step plan to do that. One is we wanted to aggregate liquidity across chains. Syndr will allow you to make that rate regardless of chain, the entire process is abstracted away in the backend. We don’t need to bootstrap liquidity on every chain that we’re on, that makes it easier and more efficient for liquidity providers.

13:50- 17:00

Syndr will own a portion of its liquidity for every synthetic asset as well as other voting assets. The entire goal here is to be less dependent on the mining rewards plus owning its own liquidity means that we make our community decide where that liquidity needs to be directed, where it’s most needed, where it can do the most good. And second, we have liquidity ownership: Using the concepts of Token bonding, Protocol controlled liquidity, and Protocol controlled assets to implement an antifragile mechanism for sustainable liquidity. The third point is liquidity direction via community governance. Syndr Protocol is focused on partnerships and integrations with other protocols to grow.

Listen to the recorded call here: https://twitter.com/Syndr_co/status/1493560390902554630?s=20&t=HdJg6WAGBW6Yt5JGGHzuMg