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Been ruminating on this for a while, but few events really drilled it home recently. I’ve been lucky to have had input into the design process with some early stage projects lately. It’s one of my favourite things. But it has also reinforced why crypto is hard.
We are so early that the solution space is still massively unexplored. It feels a little like after the App Store launched and all of the sudden startups had access to this incredible platform on which to build. Ethereum is like that but amplified 100x.
You can do anything, and that is both incredible and petrifying. Because the freedom comes at a cost, it is really easy to drive off a cliff without even realising it. So many people try to optimise for certainty in planning.
But there is no certainty at this stage, this disconnect is why I think communities can become frustrated when things get delayed and unexpected impediments arise. They don’t realise that it is not just more effort in = more progress. Communicating this is hard.
Fundamentally, designing crypto systems, if you are doing it well, is a non-linear process. You often grind away getting nowhere for weeks or months and then a single conversation can change your trajectory, or you can make progress for months and then have it all invalidated.
It’s something I’ve tried hard to manage with @synthetix_io through being radically transparent with how I’m thinking about the protocol. I’ve spent more time thinking about the mechanism than anyone else on the planet, so I try to put my thoughts out there as often as possible
But I probably don’t communicate how often we go down dead ends that lead nowhere. One really cool initiative we’ve started is putting these sessions on video, the first one is here: or how often we stumble upon novel unexpected solutions.
A few examples lately are virtual synths, replacing inverse synths (TBC), the new debt snapshot mechanism. All three of which were fairly serendipitous.
1. https://research.synthetix.io/t/virtual-synths-sip/202
2. https://sips.synthetix.io/sips/sip-83
1. https://research.synthetix.io/t/virtual-synths-sip/202
2. https://sips.synthetix.io/sips/sip-83
If you are not open to these kinds of events and you try too hard to hew to a predefined path you are missing out on most of what is magical about crypto right now, which is that we are at the intersection of both creative and logical processes.
For those that have made it this far, here is the alpha leak I promise last week. I was talking with @hjmomtazi and @justinjmoses discussing the launch of @UniswapProtocol V3 when I kind of had an epiphany, we had skewed too far towards iterative development.
The Synthetix process is a huge advantage in that we can rapidly iterate, but we have also accrued huge amounts of anachronistic functionality over 3 years. So why not draw a line and rewrite and deploy brand new contracts.
This would be an upgrade more like Uniswap or Augur, where each user must migrate their tokens to the new contract. But critically it would allow us to start fresh with a much leaner and more scalable codebase. It will be a huge advantage next year.
I’ll propose this process to the community more formally in the next few weeks as Synthetix V3, but the key insight here imo is that we could very easily have continued with the current iterative development process but for a random discussing about the Uniswap migration.
When volatility and randomness makes you stronger, you are antifragile, and right now one of the best places to get exposure to this is in DeFi. I strongly suggest if you are working in crypto you clear space for a bit of randomness in your day!
