Synthetix: The Ethereum DeFi Project That Is Viral This Week

The Ethereum community welcomes a new prospective project – named the Synthetix (SNX) project – which comes along with a token and an impressive technology behind it. If you haven’t heard about this project in the ETH news, you are not alone.

It all started going viral when the popular Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (16z) bought up approximately $235,000 USD worth of SNX this week. This buy caused the token and its price to acutely surge by 38% but also put Synthetix (SNX) in the spotlight as something new and something groundbreaking.

All of this caught the attention of the crypto economy users who haven’t previously crossed paths with this project. When it comes to the value locked in it, it is currently at $66.9 million and the project has surged into the 3rd place on the tracker site DeFi Pulse.

Simply put, Synthetix (SNX) is a platform that is built atop Ethereum and one that is designed to host on-chain synthetic assets – known as Synths – which are basically ERC20 tokens tied to the value of real world assets like stocks, indices and beyond.

As the news showed, the platform started out as a stablecoin project which was dubbed Havven. The whitepaper’s effort still refers to the project – but a rebrand occurred earlier this year, causing the Synthetix mainnet to launch again this spring.

The SNX token is right now the native currency of the Synthetix Network, powering the creation of Synths. The project’s builders last December described it as:

“The platform uses a token called SNX (the Synthetix Network Token), and holding this token allows you to create Synths. You do this by locking SNX into a smart contract and minting Synths against this value. In order to ensure Synths are fully backed, the system will only you to issue a fraction of the SNX value you lock.”

All of this suggests that Ethereum DeFi is on the rise and that Synthetix is just the latest comer to push up the prospects of the Ethereum DeFi space.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned website DeFi Pulse also noted that the total value locked in DeFi (denominated in Ether) crossed the 3 million ETH mark for the first time ever.