Synthetix founder reflects: the team has entered a negative feedback loop and will re-run for the council election

This article is an original piece by Chain Catcher, authored by Gu Yu.
In July 2020, the synthetic asset protocol Synthetix dissolved its foundation, transitioning to a community governance model and establishing a delegated governance council known as "The Spartan Council," which has seven open seats, each elected through Snapshot voting. This council will function as a representative democracy, authorized and controlled through token delegation.
However, recently, Synthetix has underperformed in the market. Delphi Digital researcher The Larry found through data analysis that the project significantly lags behind Mirror Protocol in terms of trading volume, fee income, and user count. Meanwhile, the price of Synthetix tokens has dropped about 76% from its peak earlier this year, making it one of the projects with the largest price decline among mainstream DeFi projects.
Today, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick reflected on the project's decentralized governance performance, stating that after the Synthetix community decided to move towards decentralized governance, the community advised him not to run for the initial council to better facilitate the transition. Subsequently, he began to step back from daily decision-making, handing over management to the council, while losing contact with core contributors. However, starting in early May, Kain Warwick realized that the team was experiencing a negative feedback loop, with several core contributors expressing their frustration to him.
Kain Warwick stated that he had not previously recognized the significant internal conflicts among engineers, unclear priorities, and growing frustration. "The root cause of this situation is that while I had previously led the core contributors, they are now effectively leaderless, and the council is not authorized to manage the core contributors, nor is there anyone to take over my previous role."
"As the former leader of the core contributors, I intentionally created an extremely flat structure to prevent core contributors from gaining too much power in Synthetix and undermining our nascent decentralized governance," Kain Warwick said. "While core contributors continue to perform well on their core priorities, many are intensifying their efforts to solve problems, there is no clear process to facilitate this and ensure appropriate resource allocation to address these issues."
Therefore, Kain Warwick decided to run for the council and help coordinate the implementation of the roadmap for the remainder of 2021, while establishing a clearer organizational structure and leadership team among core contributors. He also plans to propose a risk committee composed of council members, core contributors, and external stakeholders to ensure that risk management is integrated into all aspects of the protocol.
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