What Is Synapse (SYN)?
Synapse (SYN) is an interoperability protocol designed for safely and securely sending arbitrary data between blockchains.
Its users can transfer and swap their assets across many different chains, including layer 1, layer 2 and sidechain ecosystems.
The project aims to improve inter-blockchain compatibility by helping its users move their assets between different networks more efficiently. In order to securely transfer its users' assets to and from different ecosystems, while maintaining slippage, liquidity pool balances, and transaction prices, Synapse uses a stableswap algorithm.
The Synapse ecosystem is made up of six parts: the Synapse Bridge technology, the cross-chain AMM, aggregative cross-chain communication, the SYN token, the Synapse Chain, and optimistic security approaches.
With Synapse’s generalized messaging system, any arbitrary data can be sent across chains in a secure and seamless way. Applications no longer have to be separately deployed across multiple blockchains; they can be deployed on a single chain and communicate with other chains to create the exact same user experience from one central application layer. Generic message passing also includes smart contract calls, enabling smart contracts on different chains to easily interoperate with one another.
Synapse Bridge allows users to seamlessly swap on-chain assets across 15+ EVM and non-EVM blockchains in a safe and secure manner. The bridge supports two types of bridging: Canonical Token Bridging — bridging of wrapped assets across chains; Liquidity-based Bridging — bridging of native assets across cross-chain stableswap pools.
Synapse Chain is an Ethereum-based optimistic rollup designed to serve as a sovereign execution environment for cross-chain use cases. Synapse Chain will offer developers a generalized smart contract interface for building natively cross-chain use cases by leveraging Synapse’s cross-chain messaging system. Applications built on Synapse Chain will be able to execute their business logic across any blockchain.
Synapse supports multiple EVM-compatible blockchains and is integrated with nearly 18 layer-1 and layer-2 chains, including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Harmony, Avalanche, Polygon, Moonbeam, Fantom and BNB Chain.
Who Are the Founders of Synapse?
Synapse, which is based in Singapore, doesn’t list its founders, co-founders, or team members. However, the core team is active on Twitter, and their account names are AureliusBTC, Socrates0x, Caesar0x, and Trajan.
In March 2022, Max Bronstein joined the protocol as COO. Bronstein was part of the crypto startup Dharma, where he was involved in building the first DeFi lending markets. He was also one of Coinbase’s earliest investors, and helped develop the platform itself.
Synapse is the rebranding of Nerve Finance, the first stableswap AMM on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC). In August 2021, the project rebranded to Synapse Protocol and modified its business model, but it kept its key investors, including Three Arrows Capital, CMS Holdings, Alameda Research, Immutable Capital, Primitive Ventures, DeFiance Capital and Mechanism Capital.
Synapse’s community governs its protocol through a decentralized group of SYN holders - called the Synapse DAO. Community members steer the protocol’s development by voting and taking part in governance activities.
What Makes Synapse (SYN) Unique?
Synapse Chain is built as an Optimistic Rollup, this offers the following benefits:
EVM Compatibility: Synapse Chain will leverage the EVM to ensure composability with the rich developer and application ecosystem built around it. Not only will building applications on Synapse Chain match the developer experience of existing EVM blockchains, but existing decentralized applications can easily be deployed to Synapse Chain with little to no architectural changes. This ensures that Synapse Chain can bootstrap a vibrant ecosystem of cross-chain applications from its earliest days.
Security: While blockspace designed for more granular use cases can dramatically increase throughput, fees, and overall user experience, it often does so at the expense of security. Instead of needing to bootstrap independent security systems, optimistic rollups enable dapps to leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum’s base layer, which has the highest security spend out of any generalized smart contract blockchain.
User Experience: Rollups offer throughput and scalability that is orders of magnitude higher than that of Ethereum. Transactions on Synapse Chain will be near instant and will cost a fraction of what they would on competing base layers, ensuring applications built on Synapse Chain can foster a user experience akin to that of centralized competitors.
Simplicity: Optimistic rollups provide a construction for an execution environment that is both simple and secure. By borrowing from Ethereum’s battle-tested infrastructure, Synapse Chain does not have to re-engineer new features from scratch. To that end, Geth will be Synapse Chain’s client software, meaning Synapse Chain is as close to Ethereum under the hood as possible. Adhering to Ethereum’s core design principles helps minimize new attack vectors that come with creating a new execution environment from scratch.
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How Many Synapse (SYN) Coins Are There in Circulation?
Synapse (SYN) is the platform’s native token, which powers the entire ecosystem. The token has a maximum supply of 250,000,000 coins, with a total supply of 192,696,599 coins. As of March 2023, there are 139,773,376 SYN in circulation.
The platform’s tokenomics focus on rewarding SYN users who participate within the ecosystem. The two cross-chain tokens that users can exchange between networks are nUSD and nETH.
SYN tokens serve a number of different functions, including:
Governance. SYN holders can access network services and vote on changes to the platform via the Synapse DAO, helping to steer the platform in a positive direction.
LP incentives and rewards. The network gives liquidity providers rewards for helping the ecosystem grow and for helping to run and maintain its cross-chain features.
Staking. Validators can stake SYN tokens and receive rewards;
Fees. Users can pay for gas fees, including cross-chain swap fees, transaction protection fees, and smart contract interaction fees using SYN tokens.
How Is the Synapse Network Secured?
Synapse’s optimistic verification is inspired by Celo’s Optics protocol.
The security models of most bridges today can be characterized in three ways: Locally verified — only parties involved in a given cross-chain interaction verify transactions; Natively verified — all validators of the two blockchains involved in a transaction verify the message; Externally verified — an external validator set is used to verify transactions between chains
Even with these three main archetypes for cross-chain verification, most bridges today still effectively operate as basic multi-sig consensus schemes in order to create a faster user experience. While these systems are useful for fast finality, that speed comes at a cost, exposing users to security threats. As espoused in the Interoperability Trilemma, certain tradeoffs are inherent in cross-chain communication. Trading security for speed has resulted in a multitude of bridge hacks totalling well over $500 million USD in cumulative funds lost.
Optimistic verification borrows from optimistic rollups in that transactions are assumed to be honest by default with a network of off-chain actors responsible for submitting fraud proofs during the course of an optimistic window to disallow any fraudulent transactions. This mechanism adds a significant layer of security to the network, making it far more costly for a bad actor to conduct an attack versus the existing M of N mechanism. Externally verified networks rely on an honest majority assumption whereas optimistic verification relies on a single honest verifier assumption. Optimistic verification just needs one honest guard to behave honestly for the system to remain secure. Rather than a bad actor needing to co-opt M number of validators, that actor would need to co-opt all N actors, and the cost to attack the network becomes unbounded as the number of N fraud watchers increases. Naturally, the added security requires a trade-off - here, latency.
There are four off-chain actors responsible for security of Synapse’s optimistic verification mechanism: Notary — responsible for signing merkle root on each supported chain and bonding SYN behind attestations; Broadcaster — responsible for forwarding updates from home contracts to replica contracts; Guard — responsible for observing cross-chain messages and submitting fraud proofs when detecting malicious state updates; Executor — responsible for posting the final transaction once the latency window is completed
Where Can You Buy Synapse (SYN)?
As of March 2023, Synapse (SYN) is listed on well-known crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase Exchange, Kraken, KuCoin, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, Gate.io, Huobi, Uniswap, Bitget, BKEX, LBank, MEXC, Phemex, CoinEx, BitMart, Bitrue, BTCEX, XT.COM and more.
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