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Unsolicited Advice for DeFi

Noah
April 04
People used to care about decentralization—or pretended to, at least. When I first started working on decentralized finance, onchain perpetual futures markets were the cutting-edge. Layer two scaling solutions were being rolled out for Ethereum so transactions could include enough compute power to process trades at a reasonable cost. Dynamic funding rate mechanisms were engineered so liquidity providers could earn trading fees without price exposure. Decentralized oracle networks were being developed to provide prices associated with specific timestamps to prevent front-running.

The Internet

Noah
June 08
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 Library Batching Implementation Proposal

Noah
December 31
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.

Synthetix 2023: What We’ve Built

Noah
November 20
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.

Intro to Oracle Multicalls

Noah
October 03
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.

A Tale of Two Financial Systems

Noah
April 25
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.)

ETHDenver 2023

Noah
March 07
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 is on Mainnet

Noah
February 22
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.

Synthetix Update

Noah
November 18
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.