September 14, 2022
The following post contains a recap of news, projects, and important updates from the Spartan Council and Core Contributors, as well as the Grants Council and Ambassador Council from last week.
Spartan Council and SIP updates
Present at the September 8, 2022 Spartan Council Weekly Project Sync:
Spartan Council: Afif, Ale, Burt, Kain, ksett, SynthaMan, TerraBellus
Core Contributors: Cavalier, Darius, db, KALEB, noah, Rafa, Steve, sunny
FIRST, it’s election time again! Nominations for the next epoch’s Councils are open and will close on September 17th, after which voting will commence. As a reminder, the nomination and voting processes now both take place on https://governance.synthetix.io/ as the V3GM Election Module is in full swing. Check out the blog post here to see the full election schedule and read more about the process and how to nominate yourself.
And of course, with every election season comes lots of SNXweave content! In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing the Attendance & Participation Report and the Synthetix Quarterly Report, as well as hosting the Spartan Council Election Panel. If you plan to run for Spartan Council and would like to speak to your candidacy with the other nominees, be sure to DM ProofOfCake in Discord to be on the panel! It will be live in the community governance stage next Wednesday September 21st at 8pm UTC — so go ahead and RSVP to the Discord event and we’ll see everyone there!
Now onto our regular news updates…SIP-271 is the biggest item right now with the Ethereum merge event now upon us. This SIP proposed suspending all Synthetix contracts on both Ethereum and Optimism, starting about 3 hours before the expected merge block (which is happening tonight). Activities will be resumed after ensuring that Chainlink and the rest of the protocol is in a stable state.
Besides this, the other V2X priorities remain generally the same as last week: improve Atomic Swaps, Debt Migration, V3, and V2 perps. And speaking of V3, the docs page is currently more updated on V3 than the SIPs are, so if you’re looking to read more, be sure to check there. Noah, however, is currently working on updating the V3 SIPs. And, at the moment, SIP-301 is in audit and 302 is ready for an initial audit review, pending its vote.
Last week there was also some discussion amongst the Council regarding the c-ratio. There has been some talk about lowering it back to 350%, given recent price action. There is support on the Spartan Council in favor of this, IF there were to be strict criteria written for when it gets raised back up to 400% again.
Kaleb reminded everyone that Gauntlet is recommending a c-ratio change in the opposite direction, to 450%, and Kain countered this saying Gauntlet is just a recommending body. He added that ultimately, the Spartan Council has to take the input that they receive and decide based on a number of factors beyond what Gauntlet considers in their models. After a temperature check, it seems that 5 of the Council members have indicated their support for the strict criteria compromise written into the SCCP.
Lastly, there were also a couple of SIP presentations last week, so let’s briefly review them:
SIP-276: Turn off the money printer
- Presented and proposed by Kain himself, this SIP ends inflation with the total supply of SNX tokens capped at 300 million
- This SIP also elevates the token supply to metagovernance status, meaning any future changes to the token supply will require a unanimous vote by the Spartan Council
- The idea here is to taper inflation over the next 10 weeks towards that final supply target
- At that point, protocol activity would be sustained by fees
- The timeline for the taper is up for discussion and Kain is looking for feedback from the Council on 10 weeks vs. 15 or 20, etc.
SIP-274: Introduction of an Inactivity Threshold in Spartan Council SIP and SCCP Vote Participation
- Terra presented this SIP, which proposes an “inactivity threshold” for the number of missed votes that a Spartan Council member has. Once a certain number of votes are missed, over a certain time period, a dismissal process is triggered for that Councilor.
- The SIP proposes setting the threshold at 5 sequentially missed votes over a period of 7 days
- After further discussion, consensus was reached on a compromise at 10 days rather than 7
- Following this period, if a Council member has not been voting as required, the remaining Council would have to report that to the pDAO for them to be dismissed
- Dismissal would then trigger an emergency vote to replace them
- Ale disputed this saying he’s not sure there should be hard rules for something like this because it seems like something that’s going to collide with a lot of edge cases. He thinks these kinds of actions should have some kind of soft consensus among Council members
- Terra: “The overarching objective is to assure the community that their elected Council members are participating as expected.”
Grants Council
Present at the September 8, 2022 Grants Council meeting:
Grants Team: ALEXANDER, CT, JVK, Mike
In Grants Council updates, dHEDGE has officially submitted a funding request to support their integration. The Grants Council has also expressed interest in funding a research and development phase for dHEDGE to produce a document that outlines the integration process. This documentation could additionally be used to help other protocols integrate in the future.
The team has recently revisited the translations project, as Mike and Matt have built out a process for getting documents translated. They’ve been working with a couple of translators and have issued retroactive rewards for the work. Mike thinks it’s probably time to open the pool to a wider group of candidates. The plan would be to reward community members retroactively for work that has been done and eventually offer part time appointments within the marketing team.
The Council is also in the process of reviewing the grant request for an academic conference in Italy to assess if they may consider sponsoring any portion of the event. The conference is scheduled for early 2023, and one of the translators working on document translation is in Italy so they might consider a collaboration to see if the translator can help spin up some marketing material for the event.
Ambassador Council
SCCP-230 was approved! This proposed increasing the number of Ambassadors on the Ambassador Council to 5 members (from 3), and has passed following an 8/8 unanimous vote by the Spartan Council.
There will now be 5 Ambassadors that win seats, which will be reflected in the election that is currently ongoing. Engineers are now working on reflecting this in the backend/frontend for the Synthetix Governance Module.
Podcast now also on YOUTUBE
Follow us on Twitter! @snx_weave
SIP/SCCP status tracker:
SIP-271: System Wide Suspension — Proof of Stake, Status: approved
SIP-301: Accounts (V3), Status: approved
SIP-302: Pools (V3), Status: draft
SCCP-232: Lower Target Collateralization Ratio to 350% from 400% temporarily, Status: draft
SIP-276: Turn off the money printer, Status: draft
SIP-274: Introduction of an Inactivity Threshold in Spartan Council SIP and SCCP Vote Participation, Status: draft
