Synthetix – the synthetic asset issuance protocol – released its product roadmap featuring a range of new upcoming products leveraging the DeFi protocol.

We're really excited about all the upcoming product developments on https://t.co/FDbOs9UadQ — here's an outline of what's in store. Get ready for derivatives trading on Ethereum to be shaken up! https://t.co/4uiRK4hNP0 — Synthetix ⚔️ (@synthetix_io) March 10, 2020

The past year for Synthetix has been filled with exceptional growth and product releases. Since 2019, Synthetix has released v2 of the Synthetix.Exchange, a range of new Synths and index tokens, and most importantly, directed a significant amount of effort into securing the protocol.

By ironing out bugs and ensuring the protocol is secure enough to handle tens of millions in volume per day, the team can now direct their focus towards scaling and marketing Synthetix products at large.

With that, the team announced upcoming product releases to help improve and grow the userbase over the course of the year.

Some highlights from the roadmap include:

Traditional asset classes (Q2, 2020) With the recent ChainLink migration, secure price feeds will open-up a huge range of new opportunities for the protocol. Secure price feeds will enable Synthetix users to trade ETFs to Gold then into an inverse crypto index product with a few clicks.

(Q2, 2020) New Synths (Q1, 2020) Synthetix’s new asset listing framework allows for rapid releases for a number of crypto assets to the platform, allowing the protocol to capture a new userbase with its expanded asset offerings.

(Q1, 2020) Leveraged Synths (Q2, 2020) Leveraged trading is one of the most popular products for many centralized exchanges. By offering permissionless leveraged trading on synthetic futures, Synthetix is able to compete with the billions in volume captured by traditional crypto exchanges.

(Q2, 2020) Binary options (Q3, 2020) Binary options are simple trading instruments for hedging. The growing liquidity in the Synthetix’s debt pool will allow traders to immediately take large positions with no counterparties. This design opens up the potential for Synthetix to capture billions in trading volume given the lack of existing crypto-native options products.

(Q3, 2020) Advanced order types (Q2, 2020) Synthetix Exchange (sX) currently only offers market orders, limiting the potential for the exchange and its userbase. The team is working on building an advanced order engine which will support limit, stop loss, stop limits, and other advanced order types.

(Q2, 2020) Trading Incentives (Q2, 2020) Given the massive success of Synthetix’s monetary policy changes, the team is planning on embedding the exchange with SNX-based trading incentives to drive new user growth. The incentives will be taken from the asset’s native inflation and diverted into a weekly pool, allocated pro-rata to traders based on trading volume.

(Q2, 2020) ETH/DAI/BTC Collateral (Q2, 2020) The recent addition of Ether collateral has seen a positive response from the broader community. There are still a few things needed to be improved to streamline this mechanism and optimize it for traders, however, the additional collateral types drastically increases the protocol’s economic bandwidth for synthetic assets. The next phase will introduce new improvements where traders will be allowed to borrow sUSD against ETH. Once this upgrade has been launched, Synthetix will aim to launch DAI and BTC collateral types.

(Q2, 2020) Synthetic Futures (Q3, 2020) Synthetic futures, an asset that allows traders to open leveraged long and short positions for any supported asset, is expected to drive a massive amount of trading volume given the state of CEX futures offerings. With the addition of synthetic futures, it opens up the potential for leveraged trading across multiple asset classes, including cryptoassets, equities, and commodities. It is expected that leverage initially will be capped at 10-20x, but due to the liquidation design, Synthetix’s approach will enable far higher leverage in the future than currently supported on most platforms.

(Q3, 2020)

Key Takeaways

With the release of its upcoming 2020 product roadmap, the future of Synthetix is looking bright. After successfully securing the protocol from frontrunning and other attacks over the past few months, the protocol is ready to scale its userbase and begin to capture a slice of the trillions in value from traditional derivatives market.

The 2m SNX distributed to stakers who were good actors is in the process of being sent out. All the details here! https://t.co/ozSZ6cWZDR — Synthetix ⚔️ (@synthetix_io) March 11, 2020

By introducing ETH collateral (along with DAI and BTC), Synthetix is expanding its capacity to support synthetic assets If the team successfully launches these products in a secure fashion, the permissionless nature of the protocol and sX will allow it to grow its userbase and trading volume to that of major centralized exchanges.

We’re extremely excited to see how Synthetix evolves in the coming year as the team looks to release a suite of new products and continue to decentralize the protocol’s governance.

To stay up to date with Synthetix, make sure to follow them on Twitter or join the Discord to jump in on the discussion!