Synthetix Exchange meets the OVM

Battle testing the Optimistic Virtual Machine

Today we are pumped to announce a demo of Synthetix Exchange on the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM)! Synthetix is a synthetic asset issuance and trading protocol, and one of the largest projects on Ethereum. We collaborated to integrate Synthetix with the OVM to battle test the OVM’s key benefits in alleviating issues with high gas costs, slow transactions, and expensive oracle updates.

As part of battle-testing the OVM, there will be a trading competition with a prize pool of 15,000 SNX awarded to the top 20 traders. The competition will run from May 5 to May 19.

Why another demo?

In October 2019, we created Unipig.exchange, the first end-to-end implementation of Optimistic Rollup in collaboration with Uniswap. Unipig proved what was possible, but it was not practical. We sunk major development hours into writing a custom Optimistic Rollup system for Uniswap. It required a custom backend & even custom contracts. There was very little we were able to repurpose from the existing Uniswap codebase.

Now we’re back but this time we battle tested our OVM with Synthetix’s existing contracts, unit tests, deployment scripts, and tools like The Graph and a burner wallet. This time we didn’t build a custom system for Synthetix — we built it for Ethereum. For more info on what’s going on behind the scenes, you can check out our new OVM deep dive here! The next step is to combine the Optimistic Rollup backend built for Uniswap with the OVM node built for Synthetix, and realize the dream of a fully Ethereum compatible layer 2 protocol. We are so incredibly grateful to Synthetix for working closely with us to uncover missing features in our OVM throughout the course of building this demo.

So what’s included in this demo?

This demo will battle test the OVM. This fully-featured, EVM-compliant execution environment, designed for use in our Layer 2 systems, must be a robust, production-ready system on its own — so we’re putting it to the test!

Preliminary Statistics

Oracle update latency:
- Mainchain Ethereum: >15 seconds
- Optimistic Ethereum: ~400ms
Oracle update gas costs:
- Mainchain Ethereum: 394.2k gas
- Optimistic Ethereum: 14.5k gas (calldata usage can be optimized to < 3.5k gas)
Exchange gas costs
- Mainchain Ethereum: 472.2k gas
- Optimistic Ethereum: 3.3k gas
Exchange latency
- Mainchain Ethereum: >15 seconds
- Optimistic Ethereum: ~200ms

Try it out!

Since this is the first time the OVM will be used by real people, we expect there to be issues and outages — please go break it! Our support hours will be from 8AM to 8PM EST every day, and updates will be published from our Twitter. Thank you in advance for your patience as an early adopter, and for your help testing and improving our system. ❤

Links:
- Try the demo
- Join our Discord or mailing list
- Check our website and docs
- Follow our Twitter