text: Synchrony is a state of the art decentralised asset management platform utilizing a sophisticated suite of analytics and machine learning algorithms to evaluate and optimize sets of on-chain instruments producing single-click solutions for diversifed exposure to an ecosystem’s primitives. The core features powered by the platform are copy-trading and composable indices, both facilitated by a friendly Defi Farmer’s market — a place to interact with the whole Solana blockchain from one location. It sounds complicated but Synchrony Simplifies Defi with A.I.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: we are excited to kickstart the first of the week with a special AMA from SynchronyFi. This is a project that enables users to research and perform in-depth analysis into other users’ wallets!
  We have with us today @SerFrae (Architect and Co-Founder), @mrplckles (Dev and Co-Founder), @mauricefromnyc (Marketing Lead), and @Med_amine_id (Developer)!
  Welcome to the OIG Channel! Our first 4 person TG Panel 🎉🎉🎉
  Frae | Will never DM for $: Hi my name is Andrew, friends call me Frae, I’m a co-founder and Chief Architect for Synchrony. I’ve been a Software Engineer and Algorithmic Trader for close to a decade for tier-1 financial institutions. Have always been around and loved computers. The first trading bot I wrote executed orders based on a random number generator that would alter the buy/sell weight after each successive “coin flip” — it didn’t make any money.
  Built everything under the sun for such institutions (including Citibank and Ageas) from data warehouses to Machine Learning and Big Data Systems but I specialize in algorithmic portfolio management solutions and execution platforms (funds, OTC bonds and ETFs). And I was a director at one of Hong Kong’s largest fintech companies.
  Known Andy for close to a decade through his brother John — Andy tried to get me to degen into Defi last summer, but I’m lazy and Andy was (or maybe is?) profitable, so I just wrote a bot to replicate all his transactions in my own wallet the rest is history.
  Andy K: My name is Andrew as well, but I go by Andy. I am the co-founder and chief analytics engineer. I have been in operations, application development and marketing for over a decade. I started out at a Berkshire Hathaway company as the director of the R&D department developing applications and systems for the company and their customers. While there, I got into Bitcoin during a research project for compliance and started trading crypto in 2010. After Berkshire I moved on to a digital marketing agency as the Operations Manager doubling the size of the business while deploying internal systems and processes. I’m also a serial entrepreneur with lots of experience with startups.
  All of the above experience has given me a diverse background in systems & application development as well as a long history with crypto.
  I have known Andrew for a long time through my brother. I’ve been bugging him about defi for a while now and we got together in February to start Synchrony.
  Med Amine ID: Hey everyone my name is Mohammed, or Med for short. I am a full stack dev and data engineer at Synchrony. I was born and raised in Morocco, and earned my software engineering degree in France before getting my masters in data analytics in Poland.
  I worked for a financial and cybersecurity company as a software engineer focusing on security and quality assurance. I was always active in the data engineering community and won multiple hackathons related to data analytics and blockchain.
  I wrote my first smart contract in 2018 and since then I have been working on multiple blockchain projects after meeting Andy, and last year we worked with ASX (Australian Securities Exchange) on a DAML project.
  Today I focus more on integration with other protocols as well as UI/UX and everything related to data analytics.
  maurice◎ synchrony: yoyoyoo my name is maurice, I am Synchrony’s marketing, community, and communications lead. i was born and raised in nyc where I ran my own design house doing small scale production in the garment center for private clients, mostly doing denim and technical garments, right out of high school and into my mid-20s when I made a pretty big shift into project & retail management in the cycling industry (it was always a passion and fashion had lost its lustre). I have been in or around crypto since 2011/12 when I had neighbours mining BTC on home computers — I have basically been a “believer” ever since.
  providence brought Andy and i together when we happened to be in the same city at the right time. It's a dream come true for all of us to be working in crypto full time and we know you will see that sentiment come through not only in today’s AMA but in what we’re all building here at Synchrony.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: This is amazing! We are all excited to have each one of you here — it’s an honour for such a talented group to grace our channels all at once!
  So perhaps to keep this simple, I’ll throw a question out, and perhaps each of you could take a turn answering?
  Lets jump straight into one of the key areas of your project, copy-trading. Can you simplify for our community what On-Chain copy trading is?
  Andy K: Copy-trading is the, usually automatic, replication of the trades made by a leader or signal provider in your own trading account. On-chain copy-trading is the same thing but with the ability to trade/transact on on-chain instruments. The key difference between traditional copy-trading and on-chain copy-trading is the ability to utilize any wallet on-chain as a leader wallet instead of only those vetted and permitted by a service provider.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very interesting concept. So on-chain copy-trading utilizes the full transparency of the blockchain. Really have not heard of this being done before!
  We read that you have three different formats of your copy trading. Please explain these, how they work, their key features and explain which protocols are suitable for who?
  Frae | Will never DM for $: Copy-trading on our platform comes in three different flavours:
  Blind / Naked — Proportional replication of all the transactions a leader wallet makes. There is a large degree of risk associated with such a strategy and usually only suitable if a user trusts whoever the leader wallet is — an example could be me Naked-following Andy — I trust Andy, if he starts yoloing into shit coins I can walk across the room and slap him.
  Parameterised — defining a copy-trade wallet’s behaviour by setting the values of certain parameters a copy-trade wallet uses to govern its behaviour. This includes, but is not limited to — take profits, stop losses, transaction frequency, price divergence tolerance. These parameters are mostly to support index-controlled behaviour and while they can be utilised in isolation, they are best used in conjunction with indices.
  Index Driven — Indices can be used to govern the copy-trade wallets behaviour — the wallet will only copy-trade tokens/instruments that are present in the index. Copy-trade wallets can be governed by more than one index as long as they are thematically homogenous — relating to one “asset class” i.e. tokens, liquidity pools, yield farms. Indices are fully configurable allowing an extreme level of control. Synchrony, however, provides sane defaults based on a user’s risk profile. This is what most should be using
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Oh man, I have so many questions right now… But you might not want to be Blind / Naked following me unless you want an endless amount of meme coins in your wallet 👀
  How are you going to gamify your copy trading concept? Have you got anything in place, competitions or league tables to both incentivize users and traders and also highlight the best traders to follow?
  maurice◎ synchrony: oooooohhhh gamesssss
  Andy K: oh this is a good one :)
  maurice◎ synchrony: Bounty hunting- We are going to reward users who find profitable wallets. Users who use our platform to find good wallets will be airdropped SCY and those wallets will be showcased.
  Leaderboard/competitions- Users will compete for the most profitable trades and the top wallets will be showcased on the leaderboard. Leaderboard wallets will be airdropped SCY.
  Achievements/Accolades- Users will be able to have public achievements and accolades that will eventually allow for cosmetic bonuses to the user’s dashboard.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow. I can really see how a community can get behind this. especially when you start gamifying community leaderboards and such. It creates so much friendly competition within the system. Very very well thought out mechanism guys!
  Your Indices are something which I am particularly intrigued by. This is something frequently used by investors in the traditional finance world, they are seen as reducing risk and giving consistent gain, so why do you think this has not been replicated in the crypto world?
  Andy K: We love indexes too!\
  Frae | Will never DM for $: Index calculations are “open-source” so the issue isn’t with the complexity of an index itself. Indices seem simple to execute on the surface /w a smart contract — certainly they are analogous — the same way you can scrutinize a smart contract’s code much the same way you can an index’s calculation methodology, however, implementation is actually far more complex requiring constant high-quality data streams aggregated from multiple sources to remove single points of failure. A lot of projects, therefore, rely on oracles or must maintain such data structures on-chain themselves, this isn’t a small task and is certainly cost-prohibitive on Ethereum in its current iteration. There is also the caveat of rebalancing an index — exceedingly difficult to do in real-time not to mention to do so dynamically (changing the underlying components of an index). Additional consideration also has to be made to capitalise on the mechanics that make them attractive to institutions in traditional finance — as hedging strategies and arbitrage opportunities. I think a lot of projects start off building indices thinking its going to be an easy / simple protocol only to discover the underlying complexity of the required components later on.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Great stuff @SerFrae! I wish I was technical enough to grasp all of that, but I guess that’s why we leave developing up to the geniuses!
  Would you say you have progressed and built on traditional index investing? What features have you added that are unique or are advanced in comparison to traditional index investing?
  Andy K: In terms of the Synchrony composed indices there isn’t all that much too new other than being able to index on-chain instruments such as liquidity pools, yield farms and stake pools. We are currently working on expanding the calculation methodologies to be able to evaluate any arbitrary dataset so that you could potentially create an NFT index. With respect to the community built aspect however — I feel as if this level of composable and modular index is definitely something new and exciting.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: An NFT index would be absolutely insane. Having that level of granularity amongst different cohorts within blockchain is pretty damn revolutionary.
  Can you tell us a little about the different indexes you will offer in regards to who will be creating them and how will they function and be used?
  Andy K: We will offer a few Synchrony-specific indexes for our users- in terms of composable indexes users will be able to customize most parameters. As we continue to roll this out we will add more features and functionality users will be able to customize. for example- time ranges to evaluate over etc.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Unreal. This is an excel-wizard / power-query user’s wetdream but on the blockchain.
  We find tracking our trades and looking at large amounts of data to be confusing and time-consuming, Can you tell us a little about Synchronys on-chain data analysis and how it is user friendly but also provides a user with a useful trading tool. How important is this function to a trader?
  maurice◎ synchrony: andy’s typing up a storm
  Andy K: Time is everybody’s most valuable asset. everything should be optimized around this.
  We only have one second per second of bandwidth, but there is MUCH more than 1 second of digestible information being created at any moment. This means that it is imperative that data not only be clear but also layered with other data or provide denser information loads. We do this by consolidating what the user will want to look into 80% of the time into one dashboard. Not only can you see standard on-chain data, we are also developing a wallet trust coefficient that will help provide a unique metric into how profitable and trustworthy a wallet is.
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: AMAZING. You guys are blowing my mind with this interview, truly.
  Okay, my four-headed horsemen of the blockchain apocalypse. At this point, we’d like to turn it over to the Community Questions provided on Twitter! You gents were very gracious in your AMA prize pool, and there will be 3 winners that you have hand-selected 🙂
  COMMUNITY TWITTER QUESTIONS:
  Twitter question 1)
  Andy K: We will be building on EVM compatible blockchains next! likely layer 2s on ETH and other projects like DOT ;)
  maurice◎ synchrony: and we’re blockchain agnostic, albeit we love Solana
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: UNREAL. I don’t know how you guys find time to sleep 🤔
  Andy K: we dont LOL
  maurice◎ synchrony: brrrroooooooo
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: 😂
  maurice◎ synchrony: hahaha andy and i woke up at 530 and 630 am respectively just for you fine folk
  Twitter Question 2)
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Okay okay, for our second question. I think you might have this one @mauricefromnyc:
  maurice◎ synchrony: 🤔 so my background leads me to pull inspiration for our marketing and promotion from a lot of other sectors
  we’re focused on brand building and brand identity, with that comes a strong community focus
  one of our commonly used phrases is a rising tide lifts all boats
  our mission and values will show through all of our marketing efforts…also i think we have some awesome things in store
  crypto marketing is sort of a new frontier — we think we have a gameplan to switch up the status quo
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Yes, having been given a sneak-peek into this gameplan. I can definitely concur that awesome things are on the way 👀
  Twitter Question 3)
  Andy K: We do have a roadmap to incorporate TA into our site. We will have Trading View integration setup at some point in the near future. We will also be reaching out to our leaderboard wallet members and highlighting them and their strategies. As always we will be growing this and building this for the community so as we find things that are more beneficial to the community we will build those components out!
  We also have a Wallet Trust Coefficient that will be an integral part of this. We will have an article coming out soon that helps explain our logic here :)
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing stuff gents. You truly have so many corners covered it is extremely impressive to watch you operate.
  Well! This about sums up our time with SynchronyFi! Any final words you would like to leave with our community gents? 🙂
  Andy K: Thank you guys for the support! if you have further questions please check out our discord :) discord.gg/synchrony
  maurice◎ synchrony: so we’ll be holding a weekly Fireside Chat (Community AMA) weekly on our discord server discord.gg/synchrony
  Saigon 💎 | OIG: Awesome! Thank you guys so much for joining us today. We hope to be able to join that Live Discord AMA at some point in the future 👀
  Andy K: absolutely! thank you guys for hosting us!
  maurice◎ synchrony: yes please!!!!!!!!! all love — we’re sending positive vibes to everyone here
  Andy K: Looking forward to building Synchrony out for this community!