Synthetix
Synthetix is a protocol for creating global liquidity for synthetic assets on Ethereum. Synthetix facilitates the creation and trading of numerous asset classes including crypto, equities, and commodities, all on-chain.
Tokens that track the price of these assets can be bought and sold natively within the Synthetix ecosystem, which uses a combination of collateral, staking, and trading fees to operate. Notably, the Synthetix ecosystem is transitioning to be operated entirely by a structure of DAOs, where the SNX token is central to the entire ecosystem. SNX can be staked to provide collateral backing synthetic asset positions while accruing trading fees in return, and act as a governance token in the DAOs.
As the leading synthetic asset platform in DeFi, Synthetix has currently issued over $150 million of “Synths”. Chief among them is sUSD, their platform’s stablecoin, which is approaching $100M in market cap.
Today, Synthetix mostly offers crypto-based synthetic assets like sETH and sBTC, as well as index-tokens like sDeFi and sCEX that track a basket of assets. Much of their traction can be owed to their unique market design, where assets trade against an oracle price and therefore suffer no slippage when buying or selling.