Key Takeaways
- SynthetixDAO has voted to create new synthetic stocks that track the price of leading tech stocks.
- Those stocks are called FAANG stocks, short for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.
- The trading platform will reward users who add liquidity to its Balancer pools by paying out SNX tokens.
DeFi trading platform Synthetix has added support for new synthetic assets that follow the price of popular U.S.-based tech stocks.
Synthetix Offers FAANG Trading
Synthetix’s community governance body, synthetixDAO, voted to create new synthetic assets that track the price of FAANG stocks—a shorthand term for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.
The newly added synthetic tokens come just months after Synthetix added a synthetic Tesla stock in February.
Synthetix’s assets can be traded against the sUSD stable coin or other crypto-backed synths like sETH. Due to their decentralized nature, synths allow DeFi users to get price exposure to favorite stocks without requiring a traditional brokerage account.
Though prices are tied to stock performance, Synthetix’s assets are built on Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard like many other crypto tokens.
The assets maintain their pegs using price data feeds generated by Chainlink oracles. At the same time, Synths have an automated mechanism to stop trading when the oracle is not live, which may happen during when underlying market is closed.
Trading Available On Balancer and Kwenta
Synthetic asset trading has now gone live on Kwenta, a Synthetix-powered dApp during US market hours (9:30 am – 4:00 pm ET).
For round-the-clock trading, Synthetix has also made decentralized markets available on Balancer, a popular automated market maker (AMM) that relies on liquidity pools.
“Equities do not undergo any price action during out-of-market-hours, and thus are not tradable through the Synthetix protocol during this time,” the Synthetix team wrote in a blog post. “Therefore offering liquidity via an AMM such as Balancer means there can still be some price discovery and access to the assets outside of this period.”
To incentivize adequate liquidity in Balancer AMMs pools, the team will pay additional rewards in Synthetix Network Token (SNX).
It has set aside 50,000 SNX tokens worth $750,000 for liquidity incentives, thus offering variable yields as high as 600% APR.
Disclosure: The author did not hold crypto mentioned in this article at the time of press.
