Synthetix is based in Australia, Synthetix launched a seed funding round in September, 2017 to develop the concept of a self-contained stablecoin payment network. They then kicked off their public ICO on February 28, 2018 and by the end of the ICO on March 7, 2018, they had met their goal of $30,000,000 USD. Synthetix was rebranded from Havven on November 30, 2018. Synthetix is led by a multidisciplinary team of 13 individuals. The project was founded by Kain Warwick, who previously co-founded blueshyft, one of the largest digital payment networks in Australia. The CTO is Justin Moses, who also serves as the Director of Engineering at MongoDB. Synthetix aims to address the problem that companies running centralized payment networks such as PayPal, credit card networks, or the SWIFT banking network have “absolute control over the value within the network, so any transaction conducted within them may be blocked or reversed at any time.” According to the Synthetix white paper, “Although this is ostensibly designed to protect users, it introduces systemic risk for all participants. If the network is compromised or its owners cease to behave benevolently, no party can trust that the value in their account is secure or accessible.” This is theorized to work because anyone who holds SNX tokens in escrow will be incentivized by Synthetix rewards derived from network transaction fees that will be distributed “in proportion with how well each issuer maintains the correct Synths supply.” When a Synthetix escrow user puts their SNX in escrow, USD-stabilized Synths will be automatically put up for sale on a decentralized exchange at a price of $1 USD. To release escrowed SNX, the user must buy back the Synths issued (also at a price of $1 USD) at which point the Synths will be burned. The Synthetix system uses an algorithm to adjust network fees, and therefore dividends, to SNX holders to incentivize (or disincentivize) the holding of SNX in escrow smart contracts, and thus, the creation of Synths. The theory is that this will cause users to mint and burn Synths in the appropriate amount based solely on supply and demand.
Mainframe is the platform for decentralized applications. Resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption, the Mainframe network enables any application to send data, store files, manage payments, run tasks, and more. With the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable. We build with five fundamental principles as our guide. The Mainframe network is the messaging layer for the new web. This goes beyond human-to-human messaging. There are many use-cases and applications for reliably, privately, and securely routing data packets through the Mainframe peer-to-peer network. Mainframe is resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption. With the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable. We build with five fundamental principles as our guide. The Mainframe platform is a developer-friendly SDK providing all these services in a secure peer-to-peer fashion. It is designed to be modular and pluggable, so developers and users can configure which projects they prefer to use for the underlying service layers. Our mission is to delight developers by providing an SDK that is well-documented, supported and backed by strong developer communities. Because it is not always clear which projects will gain the most momentum, and because developers often have varying preferences, we feel that it is important to design our underlying service architecture to be modular and pluggable, allowing developers and users to configure which projects they prefer to use for each service layer and abstracting away as much of the differences as possible. A single medium of exchange in the form of Mainframe tokens (MFT) is also used to improve the developer and user experience. Where underlying service layers cannot be retrofitted to accept MFT, we will implement atomic swaps between native service-layer tokens and MFT.