DeFi Token Synthetix Soars 10% as Community Mulls PEPE Market Launch

By Liam J. Kelly

Synthetix’s native token SNX is off to a heady start Thursday morning, rising by around 10% overnight.

It now trades at $2.42, per CoinGecko, up 9.3% on the day. Despite today’s bullish impulse, the token is still down more than 91% from its all-time high set in February 2021.

The token doubles as a governance tool, letting users vote on various proposals and a staking service.

One of the original DeFi projects, Synthetix is a decentralized derivatives platform built on Ethereum and Optimism. It allows users to spin up liquidity pools for tokenized versions of commodities, such as gold or oil, as well as add novel spins to some of the more popular cryptocurrencies.

These days, it’s also become an infrastructure provider, powering pure-play trading platforms such as Kwenta and Lyra. Users staking SNX, for instance, provide liquidity for Kwenta and earn fees for doing so.

Today’s price rise comes on the heels of two key proposals from the Synthetix community. Synthetix Improvement Proposal (SIP) 2014 and 2015, if passed, would open eight new markets for synthetic versions of several notable cryptocurrencies.

The most notable market is likely the community’s interest in integrating the mega-popular meme coin Pepecoin (PEPE).

Kwenta also hinted at listing PEPE, as well as other tokens mentioned in proposal 2014 like the token powering the NFT marketplace BLUR, as well as the newly-launched layer-1 token SUI.

Both SIPs have so far been met with unanimous approval, with the vote concluding in two days.

Around the DeFi market

After SNX, heavyweight lending and borrowing platform Aave has also enjoyed a hefty 5% rise over the past 24 hours, followed by Uniswap’s native token. UNI rose 3.4% overnight.

The native token powering the speedy layer-2 solution Optimism rose around 6% over the same period, too.

Notably, both Kwenta and Lyra are Optimism-based trading platforms.

To incite the adoption of the Ethereum scaler, Kwenta also offers users additional rewards in the OP token simply for trading on the platform.

As for Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is up by just 1%, hovering around $1,800 at press time.

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