I hope everyone is making it through this past week ok - It's obviously been a tough time throughout the industry this week, but
14 Nov 2022, 00:05
I hope everyone is making it through this past week ok - It's obviously been a tough time throughout the industry this week, but it shows us that the path forward for crypto has to be different than what centralized opaqueness created over the last 3+ years.
DeFi, with the correct vigilance, can solve all of this, providing non-custodial solutions and inherent on-chain transparency throughout. The DAO contributors understand that on-chain transparency isn't always enough and that crypto needs communication + products built around these rails to help everyone interpret and verify.
To address the largest, immediate concern:
FTX
Both the Synapse DAO & the Synapse Foundation have no direct exposure to FTX to the knowledge of existing contributors. All DAO treasury assets are held on-chain, in smart contracts, across the chains that Synapse is deployed on. The DAO treasury remains strong, with $8.5M in liquid, non-SYN assets. Work to consolidate all of these assets back onto Ethereum will be done soon, and existing contributors would look to the community to take charge of treasury management and/or diversification opportunities.
As of the latest information available, Amber is operating fine, though approximately ~10% of their trading capital was locked on FTX (https://twitter.com/ambergroup_io/status/1590382103350640640). Of that amount, approximately 467k SYN was custodied with FTX at the time of withdrawal freeze, which was being used to provide liquidity for SYN/USD markets. Those tokens represent about 15.5% of the 3M SYN loan the Synapse DAO authorized.
The Foundation & Advisory Board
The Foundation was recognized on Aug 22 to work on behalf of the DAO in a formalized structure. The DAO allocated a $150k budget in the SIP-11 governance proposal to cover "administrative costs (including the independent director fees and other operating expenses) and legal fees paid to effectuate and implement governance proposals, contracting with outside parties and contributors, and similar costs."
Note that "Any unused portion of the budget allocation at the end of each fiscal year would roll over to the following year and be applied against the subsequent year’s budget allocation."
There appears to be some confusion around the Advisory Board. The Advisory Board has not been elected yet - this would take the form of a forum post + governance proposal initiated by any existing Synapse DAO participant to formally ratify 5 individuals to advise the foundation's independent director in how to best direct the foundation, on behalf of the DAO.
From SIP-11: "Participants in the community may nominate any individual - whether a Synapse DAO participant or not - to be considered for an Advisory Board “seat” during a one-week “Nomination Period”."
The monthly payment to Interoperability, Inc. remains $300k per month as set through Synapse DAO governance. The payment cannot be changed absent a full governance proposal or the election of the Advisory Board, either of which may adjust or terminate the contract. Interoperability is an independent team that conducts engineering, research, and infrastructure work for the DAO. Analytics & the upcoming explorer is one such project of Interoperability. If there are specific projects the community would want the Interoperability team to focus on, conversations around feasibility and process can be had in an open and transparent way on Discord, Telegram, or the forums.
This nomination period could commence at any point that a governance proposal is created, and the existing contributors look to all of you for who this advisory board should be! This process should be open, public, and transparent, with tokenholders voting to decide on the Advisory Board: "At the conclusion of the Nomination Period, a one-week “Voting Period” will commence, during which Synapse DAO participants may cast votes for the nominees." As evidenced by the active discourse within Synapse DAO and communi