From the first time the East Indian Dutch Company traded there has always been a market where a person can go to speculate on the price of goods or simply buy & trade them.
Today trading is done by a broker. A person always needs a middleman to get to their desired investment.
If the market experiences too much volatility trading could be halted leaving people holding bags that they would like to sell off. There are many shortcomings when it comes to the traditional market.
The goal of Synthetix is to not only create tokens that represent coins outside of the Ethereum network but to create tokens that represents assets.
Their goal is to create a market where anyone can execute a Forex or Commodity trade. Currently there is a market to trade sNIKKEI /sUSD.
At this time there has been no liquidity and the market remains closed for some reason.
The sFTSE / sUSD market is also closed do it is not clear to me why that is so at this time. If you know the reason feel free to comment on the situation.
When these markets are fully functional and opened to the public it will be a great leap forward.
The United States Dollar is represented by the token sUSD that is backed by an astonishing 800% collateralization ratio.
To put it simply if you lend out $1000 dollars of SNX to the protocol you will receive 100 sUSD.
The high collateralization is in order to preserve the USD to sUSD peg in times of high price volatility.
The higher collateralization makes sUSD much more stable than DAI. Which has recently faced problems with their smart contracts.
The team behind Synthetix has also created the Curve protocol which provides on chain liquidity.
Currently the most traded asset on Synthetix Exchange is sETH.
sETH stands for ETH longs. These long positions currently hold the value of $7,151,036 USD. The market is young do it holds a lot of potential.