Synthetix Retired sUSD at $1. Holders Got 80 Cents, Locked Until 2027.

Synthetix shut down its own stablecoin this summer. The sUSD contract was frozen, a holder snapshot was taken on June 26, 2026, and everyone holding the token was handed a claim on four SNX per sUSD.

On paper that is a dollar back for a dollar in. The proposal that authorized it priced SNX at $0.25. SNX has not traded at $0.25 since early June.

What SIP-423 Actually Decided

SIP-423 was introduced on June 12 by Kain Warwick and Benjamin Celermajer and carries an "Implemented" status. It covers sUSD on Ethereum mainnet and Optimism. The mechanics are short enough to state in full: freeze the contract, take a snapshot of balances, mint new SNX, and pay every eligible holder four SNX for each sUSD they held at the cutoff.

The exchange rate is fixed. It values sUSD at its intended $1.00 and SNX at $0.25, and it does not float with either price afterwards. A holder of 10,000 sUSD is owed 40,000 SNX and nothing else, whatever SNX does between now and delivery.

Delivery is the part most summaries skip. The SNX sits locked from June 26, 2026 to June 26, 2027. Linear vesting starts on that second date and runs for another year. Claims are processed through a receipt contract on Ethereum mainnet, and the SIP is blunt about what happens if you sleep through the window: "Any unclaimed receipts after 6 months will expire worthless."

The Payout Was Never a Dollar

Run the arithmetic on snapshot day. SNX closed June 26 at $0.2009, its lowest print in months, down from $0.2457 three days earlier. Four of them came to $0.804. The $0.25 reference price baked into the conversion sat about 24 percent above where the token actually traded when the balances were frozen.

Seven weeks on, nothing much has changed. SNX is at $0.1995, which puts one sUSD entitlement at $0.798. The claim has hovered between 79 and 93 cents for the entire period, and it has never touched the dollar the ratio implies.

Now flip it around, because this is where the deal looks different. When SIP-423 was working through governance in mid-June, sUSD itself was changing hands near $0.25 after a 61 percent drop over thirty days. Against that, 80 cents of SNX is more than triple the market. Holders who had written the position off got a real recovery. They just cannot touch it until the middle of next year.

236.5 Million New SNX

The mint is visible in the supply figures. SNX circulating supply sat at 344.5 million from mid-May through July 5. By July 8 it read 581.0 million. That is 236.5 million new tokens, an increase of about 69 percent, issued inside a single week.

Divide those 236.5 million by the four-to-one ratio and you get roughly 59.1 million sUSD covered by the conversion. DefiLlama's last reading for sUSD supply was $69.8 million. The gap of around $10 million is the size of what did not make it into the snapshot, which brings us to the exclusions.

The price barely reacted. SNX went from $0.2312 on July 5 to $0.2206 on July 8, a move of under five percent against a supply increase of more than two thirds. Locked tokens do not press on an order book. They press on the calendar.

The sUSD That Got Left Out

Synthetix's migration documentation is direct about it. Positions automatically excluded from the snapshot include LP positions containing sUSD, the sUSD Pre-Deposit Contract, and other deposit contracts holding the token. The SIP puts the same point more sharply: once sUSD is retired, sUSD held in LP pools, vaults or other deposit contracts cannot be recovered by claimants.

There is a manual path. Affected holders contact Synthetix support with their wallet address, the network, the platform name and the pool details. Support reviews eligibility and, if it clears, instructs the holder to send their LP tokens to a specified Treasury wallet. The underlying sUSD value then enters the conversion. Holders using a Gnosis Safe on Optimism have a second hoop: they need to nominate a deposit address on Ethereum mainnet, because the receipt contract lives there.

That is a support ticket standing between a retail user and a four-figure claim, filed a year before the tokens move. The people most likely to miss it are exactly the ones who did what DeFi told them to do and put their stablecoin to work in a pool.

Two Data Feeds Stopped Telling the Truth

CoinGecko's sUSD price last updated on June 27, 2026, the day after the freeze, at $0.0086. That figure is a feed that stopped receiving transfers and never moved again. Anyone reading it as a live quote would conclude the token is worth well under a cent, when the actual entitlement behind each unit is about 80 cents held in escrow.

DefiLlama went quiet three days earlier. Its sUSD series ends on June 23, 2026, at $69,836,695, split $46.7 million on Ethereum and $23.1 million on Optimism. One oddity sits right before the cutoff: supply had been flat near $52.4 million for over a month, then jumped to $69.8 million on June 20, six days ahead of the snapshot. Synthetix has not published an explanation for that single-day move, and the tracker went dark before showing what came next.

If You Still Have sUSD in a Wallet

• The snapshot is closed. Buying sUSD on a secondary venue today buys nothing. Eligibility was set by the balance you held on June 26, 2026, not by what you hold now.
• Pool and vault positions need a ticket. If your sUSD was in an LP position, a vault or the pre-deposit contract on either chain, it was skipped by default and only a support review brings it back in.
• Put June 2027 in your calendar, twice. Once for the lock ending and claims opening, once for the six-month expiry that follows. Receipts left unclaimed after that window are gone.
• Your recovery floats with SNX. The ratio is fixed at four tokens; their value is not. SNX is down 71 percent over the past year, and holders carry that exposure through the lock without the option to sell.

The Date That Actually Matters Is June 26, 2027

SNX has absorbed a 69 percent supply expansion at a roughly flat price, which reads like the market has decided the dilution is someone else's problem. Postponing dilution is not the same as absorbing it. On June 26, 2027, more than 40 percent of the token supply starts becoming claimable, held by people whose original position was a stablecoin they wanted out of, then vesting into the market over the twelve months after that.

The wind-down itself was the right call. A synthetic dollar that spent months near 25 cents was doing nobody any good, and paying holders above market in equity beats pretending the peg was coming back. What the design does is convert a stablecoin failure into a token supply problem with a known date on it, and that date is now less than a year out.

The primary documents are worth reading if you hold a claim: SIP-423 for the terms, and the missing-balance page for the process when your sUSD is not showing up.