🌎Overview
A universal cross-chain credit layer for busy DeFi Professionals. Borrow, lend and earn from any chain.
Introduction
Synonym is a universal cross-chain credit layer for busy DeFi Professionals. We’re building the cross-chain lending and borrowing experience that users deserve, powered by the Wormhole cross-chain technology stack. Users can earn yield, borrow, repay and withdraw from any chain, all from a single unified interface. Our markets are truly cross-collateralized, meaning users can borrow on destination chains with source chain collateral, all without using other applications to wrap, unwrap and swap cross-chain assets. We also leverage the unique strengths of both Arbitrum and Circle’s CCTP-enabled USDC to improve the performance of our overall implementation.
The State of Cross-Chain Lending
The cross-chain lending sector is extremely underdeveloped. DeFi natives and industry participants have spent significant time and resources building out powerful lending primitives. They’ve done the same with cross-chain infrastructure. At the same time, few teams have managed to deliver a cross-chain money market that is sufficiently easy to use while offering access to chains and assets that users care about.
That said, there has been great progress made in cross-chain DeFi in the last year. Leverage focused and stablecoin centric omnistable protocols have gained significant mindshare and are close to major upgrades and launches. That said, Synonym still sees a significant gap for a highly flexible cross-chain money market to acquire users in both new and existing ecosystems.
We’re building Synonym to be a highly flexible cross-chain lending protocol that can deliver liquidity and borrow volumes into new ecosystems. We believe that inter-rollup and appchain specific transactions will take an increasingly large share of overall DeFi activity (especially among power users) and are building for this future today.
Why Wormhole
We’re building Synonym on the powerful Wormhole xChain technology stack. The xChain stack enables seamless cross-chain transactions via scalable and secure generalized messaging technologies. Wormhole is supported by the Wormhole Foundation which is committed to aggressively growing the Wormhole ecosystem and supporting integrations across dozens of chains. We selected Wormhole over competing messaging technologies based on the following three dimensions:
Transparency: Wormhole is entirely open source and is being built in the open. Competing messaging solutions are not nearly as transparent and have opaque validation libraries or mechanism designs throughout their cross-chain messaging flow. Wormhole’s Guardian system is well understood and is built entirely in the open.
Security Improvements: Wormhole has made enormous improvements to the overall security practices with the organization. Moreover, new features including global accounting, rate limiting and system Governors have been implemented, further improving the security of the system. In our view, all previous risks have been mitigated.
Connectivity: Wormhole is currently connected to 29 blockchains with multiple in-progress candidates at any given time. Synonym is focused on inter-rollup transactions and is aligned with the overall push towards total modularity. Wormhole’s high degree of connectivity and plans to connect even more rollups to one another is extremely valuable to Synonym from an architecture perspective.
Catalysts: The Wormhole ecosystem is on the verge of significant growth and is bolstered by a major ecosystem push from the Wormhole Foundation. Synonym is positioned to be a leading protocol in this ecosystem and will directly benefit from these catalysts.
These and other core decision factors are mirrored in Uniswap’s official assessment of bridging technologies for use in Uniswap’s cross-chain deployments, available here. TLDR: Wormhole is an open source and well understood messaging layer with significant growth potential on the horizon.
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