Synthetix is a new flavor of decentralized exchange. There are three key differences relative to most other DEXes:

1.Traders trade against pooled community collateral and not any specific counterparty
2.Traders buy and sell synthetic assets, marked to market by offchain oracles

3.Traders have native access to derivatives and investable baskets

The SNX token acts as a foundation and backbone for this model. Before traders can participate, SNX investors stake their tokens to mint liquidity for the network. When traders execute a transaction, they pay a fee to trade against the stakers. A trader's profit adds to the global debt pool and a trader's loss subtracts from it.