Synapse cenaSYN $0.7356

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.

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:

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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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