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.

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.

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.

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.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… I’m not saying that software engineers working on decentralized finance are the modern day Jacobins, but it does feel as if crypto has become completely politicized. (”Elizabeth Warren is Building an Anti-crypto Army”, whatever that means.)

This year, ETHDenver moved to a larger venue. Despite the crypto market’s downturn, the attendance for the conference hit an all-time high. My coworker and I participated in their hackathon last year and this year he offered to volunteer as a mentor.

Synthetix V3 has been successfully deployed on Ethereum Mainnet and Optimism after a thorough security audit from Open Zeppelin, Iosiro, and Macro. Though this is certainly a big milestone for Synthetix, it should be considered a beginning and not a conclusion. We’ll be progressively enabling functionality and rolling out upgrades from here, as Synthetix has too many real-world considerations that can’t be anticipated in a laboratory setting.

With the holiday season upon us, chaos ripping through the crypto industry, and Synthetix V3 entering audit, I thought it might be beneficial to summarize my perspective on where Synthetix is right now and where it could be going. Everything included here is my personal opinion. I don’t represent other Core Contributors or any of the DAOs that govern the protocol. Developments in DeFi and my opinions are rapidly evolving, so this should be treated as a snapshot.

Since joining Synthetix as a core contributor, I’ve been asked to explain the protocol many times by people with varying understandings of finance, software engineering, crypto, and DeFi. Synthetix is addressing a fairly specific challenge: the creation of derivative financial assets on Ethereum (and compatible blockchains). This is my best attempt to outline some of the protocol’s history, current challenges, and long-term goals without assuming the reader has any context. It’s not comprehensive and things are rapidly evolving, so I’d recommend doing your own research if you find any of this interesting.