For me, the promise of crypto is in fairer and more transparent markets. I believe markets are the best mechanism for resource allocation. Yet, I also believe markets are imperfect and that we can have collective goals as a society that markets alone cannot solve. The view that we both need markets and social coordination is only a controversial take in the most radical circles. One of the most powerful aspects of crypto is its ability to create a parallel financial system that does not require a central authority to exist. Crypto is a technology with a unique power to challenge authority. Crypto need not ask permission. This lowers barriers to entry and fosters a far more competitive and efficient market.

There appears to be some confusion. I am here to help. Why is Infinex doing weird stuff and not all the stuff you want it to do, like integrating your favourite AI-powered pizza delivery blockchain robot network? That is a good question; let’s dive in.

Firstly, a big shout-out to Fifa and Cav, who helped review and critique my thoughts on this post.

Intro This post was originally published on April 15th 2021, on the Synthetix blog. I am updating it, making minor edits for clarity, as well as inserting numerous parenthetical comments making fun of myself; I will use curly braces {} to indicate these comments for disambiguation from the parentheses in the original post, you can find the original post here to compare the two if you are so inclined.

My previous post was a long-form exploration of the future of Synthetix. This post is going to take a different approach. It will be a simple 🤷‍♂️ and practical guide to help the community reason about the experiments we must run over the next few months. All of the proposed experiments below would not be possible without the new more flexible V3 architecture, it has taken time to get this right, but we are now well-positioned to rapidly test and iterate.

With Synthetix V3 now "live," it is a perfect time to question past assumptions to ensure the community is aligned on the long-term vision. This post will focus on the SNX token and its role in the ecosystem.

Infinex Years ago, there was a debate in the Synthetix Discord about what to call our new front-end project. After much bloodshed "Kwenta" emerged victorious, but I never lost hope as an "Infinex” maximalist. Well, now Infinex is back from the grave.

Over the years, the Synthetix community has voiced concerns over the complexity of staking SNX. Given SNX serves as the collateral backing all trades within the network, the percentage of SNX staked is critically important. Although high inflation paid to stakers was an effective strategy to increase staked SNX in 2019, its effectiveness diminished in 2021/22.

One of my favourite things about the crypto community is our deep love of hindsight bias. This is probably a consequence of working in a space with so much randomness. Humans need to find order in chaos, retrospective narratives help create a false sense of order out of this chaos. Lately, I’ve been working to make sense of everything that’s happened in the five years since the launch of the HAV token in March 2018. I keep returning to the same question: why didn’t we figure all of this out faster? Mainly because a bunch of jerks in Discord keep asking it.