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The Final Hours of Synapse X

August 28, 2024

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Dear reader,

I hope you are doing well. You might be thinking, Louka, we haven’t heard from you in a long time! (or not, some still want me gone; I am sorry to announce that I am still here!) I understand, and if you want reasons, I have many. The main one is that I have been very busy with work and going through some difficult times. However, I have finally had some time to reflect on these past two very tumultuous years. It is currently 2:00 AM and my blissfully caffeinated headspace makes it easy for me to write. My sleep schedule has suffered greatly, bite me.

This post talks about the period immediately preceding Synapse X’s discontinuation and talks about my perspective of things as they unfolded. Now that the dust has settled and I am now more able to distinguish between what can be talked about and what cannot be talked about, I decided to write this. Most of this information was already discussed publicly in some shape or form, but it wasn’t collected in one central spot. Hopefully, it will elucidate a few things for you information-hungry people. It also briefly talks about some other things that were happening at the same time, and I also want to offer some of my own perspectives on that.

I also want to mention that I cannot answer all questions. I am still doing sensitive work, and sensitive work always come with limitations on what I can say. However, I will talk about all the things I am sure I can talk about, and on that you can trust me I will be fully transparent.

What was Synapse 3.0 all about?

Synapse X 3.0, originally titled Synapse X 2020 (obviously, that codename didn’t stick given the length of its development), was a completely new exploit that we decided to build from the ground up after a version of the Synapse X source code was released to the public in October 2019. It was supposed to be the successor to Synapse X and fix most of its technological debt that was accumulated over the years, such as its poorly organized codebase, the very much duct-tapped website infrastructure, and security measures whose integrity we were uncertain of. It would also allow some of our new talent to actually make design decisions pertaining to the exploit’s foundations (e.g. which libraries to use) instead of having to learn and use some deprecated old crap that should have been replaced eons ago.

You may have noticed that as late as early 2023, Synapse X 3.0 was still in development. Yes, even we were surprised at how long it was taking. The main and most obvious reason why boils down to our desire to have a completely autonomous updating experience, where the exploit could essentially update itself without relying on too many hardcoded values that we would need to manually retrieve and put into update data. Some things were easy to automatize within the exploit itself, while some others were more complicated or too ridiculous to roll in; the more complicated parts were moved into internal tooling that would be scheduled to run immediately after a version of the Roblox client was pushed to their CDN. By the time we discontinued Synapse X, only half of our desired automaton was done and there was possibly many more months ahead of us that would have been spent exclusively automating the update process.

Interface

Other than the development of automaton, the interface was also a big reason why it was taking forever. The original Synapse X interface was a textbox, some tabs, and some buttons, which was increasingly seen as too primitive to an audience of people that were growing accustomed to the bells and whistles of some competing exploits. Because of this, we sought to develop not only an interface that would be on par with the competition but also exceed all possible expectations, which is not necessarily a simple undertaking, because an exploit is not that complex of a program, there’s not that much you can do to elevate the user experience beyond just looks. However, we still came up with a slate of really cool features, most of which was implemented prior to discontinuation, such as:

Synapse Silicon

A somewhat radical idea that was in the process of being designed but was eventually shelved was Synapse Silicon, which was meant to be our answer to free exploits. Silicon’s purpose was to offer a free execution engine to script developers that they could distribute alongside their scripts. Essentially, independent, fully standalone scripts that wouldn’t require a user have an exploit already installed for their use, secured by our new iteration of SecureLua and powered by the exact same engine that would have been used in Synapse X 3.0.

Of course, there were some limitations. For starters, the compiler wouldn’t be included in the Silicon distribution of the execution engine, so people couldn’t just go and make an executor downstream of ours. This didn’t really mitigate the problem of scripts potentially using virtual machine such as Fione or Rerubi, so we modified our plan to have script sources individually analyzed and approved by an expanded team of moderators (which we, anyway, had to plan for since we were going to have Syp).

Another limitation involved the “making this crap profitable” aspect of development. After much discussion, we concluded that Silicon would be offered in two tiers to developers: a fully free tier that would require users to see some ads while the script loaded, and a pay-as-you-go tier that would have no ads at all but would necessitate the payment of a fee factored from DAU. Our expectation was that developers would initially release their script on the former plan (as they wouldn’t have much cash at first), then eventually transition to the latter plan as they would have the requisite revenue to let go of ads. They could, of course, forever remain on the first plan if they wanted to as that would have resulted in some revenue for us anyway.

Silicon, however, was shelved late during Synapse X 3.0’s development because it required a completely parallel development effort and a substantial restructuring of our authentication. Our team was growing, but not at the rate that would have allowed a separation of the team into two divisions, one for Synapse X and one for Synapse Silicon. Therefore, Silicon was shelved.

Subscriptions

Synapse X 3.0 was meant to be a subscription-based product. This was a difficult decision we had to make based on financial projections for the next few years, which determined that the cost of our infrastructure would eventually outgrow the revenue we were making. This was somewhat expected, because even though our activity kept growing, our pace of growth didn’t and neither did our revenue. However, we thought that we would never hit this ceiling, and that our growth would somehow accelerate at some point. Sadly, it never did, and we eventually had to announce subscriptions. We thought it was going to be highly controversial and we prepared accordingly, but we didn’t expect that people would try to actually harm us because of this.

We really fucked up in the beginning because we didn’t really align on which terms to use to describe what Synapse X 3.0 was, and therefore we used the terms update, product, and rewrite interchangeably. Even though “3.0” made it seem like it was an update, it was fundamentally a completely new product (remember that the codename was originally Synapse X 2020, not 3.0), and therefore users were expected to create new accounts, redeem a new copy, and sign a new contract. Synapse X 2.0 was going to be discontinued, then replaced with Synapse X 3.0. Very late into development, we thought of renaming Synapse X 3.0 to Synapse XL to reflect its nature as a new exploit, but the name was debated and eventually forwent since it would disturb our existing marketing and potentially confuse people even more.

Website

The new Synapse X 3.0 website was beautiful. Not only the homepage, but also the support system, which was an absolutely enormous project complete with its own ticketing system, live-updating moderation panel, detailed logs system, and even a complete remake of Nolt↗ for feedback. We implemented a single sign-on mechanism that allowed the Synapse X 3.0 client to authenticate sessions using the website as a login mechanism, which would have technically allowed others to make applications that used Synapse accounts as a source of identity (“Login with Synapse” would have sounded nice, right? Eh, maybe not).

What was the V3rmillion disappearance all about?

The V3rmillion administration was looking to sell the website and move on for a good year or two before the sale was eventually completed. I believe certain events (e.g. the raid of a website that was similar in function to V3rmillion) moved thing along, but the intent to get rid of the site was definitely there for a while.

Synapse was actually the first to be contacted, immediately prior to Script-Ware (or perhaps we were both contacted at the same time and we were told we were the first? No idea). They told us that they would be glad to sell the website to us, having been good partners for multiple years now, and that they were just waiting for us to give them a price figure. Of course, this was not a light decision to make, so we told them to wait for some time as we discussed the matter privately.

The decision, taken in basically ten minutes (but delivered 14 days later to give us ample time to revise our decision if need be), was a resounding no. First, V3rmillion was way more useful as a completely separate entity, because then we wouldn’t need to bother with maintaining its own moderation team, additional infrastructure for a website that ran on antiquated forum software, and any miscellaneous legal crap. Second, it was pretty much guaranteed that the competition would have acted like monkeys by throwing their shit everywhere and accusing us of furthering what they thought was a monopoly over the exploit market, leading to a schism and possibly the formation of a competing website backed by competitors.

We felt that having the website ran by a competing exploit, but staying complacent to their ownership of it, was more advantageous than having us running the website ourselves and seeing them depart for their own separate community. It was much better to have a confluence of multiple exploiting communities in one central spot than a divided exploiting community in multiple spots, especially from a marketing and word-of-mouth point of view. I mean, look at the state of things as they are right now. Are they really better than they were prior to the acquisition of V3rmillion by a bunch of ill-intended gamblers?

V3rmillion, today, is dead. It’s basically a zombie now. Most of the good people, the so-called “OGs”, that were on the previous site moved on to greener pastures, some of whom I am still in contact (I salute Loyola; I salute IHML; I salute Malenz; I salute Animus). Whatever is left of it is a shadow of its former self, even though it still technically fulfills its purpose as a somewhat central community of Roblox exploiters.

What is the Roblox partnership all about?

Note: This is my own personal perspective of why this partnership came to be, and reflects my own opinions and my own interpretation of the situations that were. Perhaps others have different interpretations and different feelings, who knows, but we all came to agree that this was a good thing, and that it was definitely worth pursuing, so it happened.

Bitdancer summarizes it best: Roblox came to respect our skills, and we came to understand their vision.↗ But I guess even that requires some degree of explanation, so let me expand on what was meant here. After all, I actually worked on this statement alongside the Roblox team.

In the times preceding Synapse X’s discontinuation, I felt that the company suffered massive cognitive dissonance. We were all equally disappointed that after all this time, we were still working on a Roblox exploit. We had people - extremely talented people - and instead of working on something more noble, they spent our time and effort on a Roblox exploit. We understood that working on a Roblox exploit wasn’t the most moral of things. And over time, we came to identify more and more with the people fighting against exploits than the people that were developing and using them.

As you may remember, Synapse X was impacted by a series of vulnerabilities in the year immediately preceding its discontinuation. These were rapidly discovered and patched, and as far as we know, not a lot of people were affected. It must be known that these vulnerabilities were developed by mostly the same team of people, with mostly the same intent, and with the blessing and aid of some competing exploits. You know, water under the bridge, so I won’t name them and I hope them best in whatever they’re doing now, but regardless it caused us to position ourselves differently. We realized that we were no longer “just another exploit”, we became something else completely to the competition, a kind of wholly different entity to be attacked instead of competed with. This, of course, made us realize two things:

  1. We were of a much different moral caliber; even though we were disappointed in some of our own immorality, we were still of higher standing than the competition.
  2. We no longer identified as exploiters, but rather as people attacked by exploiters.

These two elements converged and we could no longer reconcile ourselves with the community. It was at this very moment that we took the prospect of canceling Synapse X and moving on very seriously. Still, we couldn’t just cancel Synapse X, because for some us, there was literally nothing else. We were no longer teenagers just throwing their reverse engineering experience together to make some funny hack for the people of our age, we were now grown-ups with responsibilities and we couldn’t just abandon what was a stable source of income for some of us. Therefore, as much as we hated ourselves, we kept going at it, because that’s all we knew. We were stuck, but hoping for a better world. Doesn’t that describe some of us well?

Then, I wrote a blog post on my really old blog that discussed some of these elements, mainly about the cognitive dissonance we all shared. Then, that blog post made the rounds, and eventually someone at Roblox read it, and they saw that we too opposed exploits, in a way, just in our very special way. So, again, Bitdancer summarizes it best: Roblox came to respect our skills, and we came to understand their vision.

The broader state of things

If you’re an exploiter reading this (doubtful, but maybe since you probably have a lot more free time as you wait for your ban to expire), I really recommend that you stop exploiting. Not just because exploiting is bad (it is bad and that alone should be justification to stop), but because it’s no longer what it used to be. The golden age of exploiting, as it was between 2013 and 2016, is gone, but the community today is still haunted by the ghost of its former self. There is no longer any fun, the only things you can really do is hurt others now.

All the new exploits are garbage. Their adherence to the so-called “UNC”, Script-Ware’s stillborn joke of a pretend standard, is irrelevant and mostly performative as the vast majority of scripts are still written in the old conventions that ProtoSmasher established way back in 2017. Their developers have no understanding of Windows internals and only possess a shallow understanding of reverse engineering. They compile duct-tapped Frankenstein codebases like how self-made crackhead chemists in rural Sonora follows a recipe to cook methamphetamine: downloaded from the Internet, and will probably blow up in your face.

There is an incredible amount of people stuck in the past. Exploiter celebrities unable to move on, developers now devoid of meaning and identity, community addicts now without a site, and many more. A lot of them are trying to hang onto threads hanging from the vestiges of the past, but I say this in complete frankness, transparency, and honesty, that you need to let go. Why do you even stick around? What other reason do you have, other than that you identify or profit from this scamming, this fraud, the criminality? Is exploiting so respectable that it’s a cause to dedicate yourself to? Just move on, let go, do something else of your life man.

Synapse continues to exist. We are still doing things, working on things. We have new projects in the work, as our message on the old Synapse X site said, but it may take some time until we can actually reveal them. We are working side-by-side with Roblox to improve their security and mitigate exploiting, as Bitdancer said. It’s work we love very much and have great familiarity in. We also made new friendships and met amazing new people that we will cherish forever.

If you want to keep in touch with Synapse, I suggest you check out our website from time to time↗. It’s currently empty, but in time, it will eventually feature a listing of recent news as things start to move faster. For now, however, that’s where we stand.

Personal notes

I am no longer the person I was, or rather tried to be, on V3rmillion. No, really. Most people remember me as an asshole and yes, I definitely was one. With a community literally knee deep in toxicity, one of the most efficient ways to cope was to be an incredible cynic. I still retain some traces of assholeness here and there but I try to vacate it as much as I can.

My politics were fucked up on V3rmillion. I am no longer the big radical that I tried to portray myself as. It is entirely true when they say that you grow more conservative as you mature.

I was criticized often for making long essays that were difficult to understand. I can tell you that this was absolutely not on purpose. I like writing, as can be evidenced by my body of works exceeding the hundreds of thousands of words. I just like taking the contents of my mind and putting it in text. I don’t care for the complexity of vocabulary, or the actual message being conveyed, or the length of what ends up being. I have thoughts and I want to put pen to paper. Most didn’t bother reading what I actually wrote and I didn’t really care, because the object was to write, not necessarily to tell people things. When I wanted to tell people things, I was concise. When I wanted to partake in my hobby, I took my time and wrote as long as my mind allowed. I didn’t really give a shit when people told me what I wrote was too long, if you complain about reading then really the post was probably not destined for you anyway.

I really miss a lot of the people I met on V3rmillion. I had a lot of great friends, and I wonder where they are now. Sometimes, people come to me and I have completely forgotten them. I don’t have a really good memory, my apologies. If you knew me and want to talk to me, feel free to contact me over Discord at loukamb or on Telegram↗.

Also, I want to shout-out Latte Softworks↗ (in no way related to Synapse Softworks but we take credit for inspiring them to use Softworks in their name) and its figurehead Reggie for hosting the last bastion of intelligence and sanity in the exploiting community, you know, the one that doesn’t want to harm people and are only interested in the fun technical stuff instead.

Conclusion

One last thing: Synapse stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, we became big, but I am telling you in all honesty and in respect to a good friend that it was ProtoSmasher that came up with the perfect recipe for an exploit, itself building upon Elysian’s own innovations, and without ProtoSmasher’s contributions, Synapse wouldn’t have went anywhere. Chirality’s Seven introduced a new way of looking at script execution, but ProtoSmasher introduced the environment that made execution powerful.

I truly believe that we massively improved upon ProtoSmasher’s ideas. We eventually doubled the power that an exploit could have, and introduced many of our own functions and our own paradigm. But ultimately, it was ProtoSmasher that revolutionized exploiting and created the potential for the growth of this community, no matter how bad it got in the end.

When I see some dipshit exploit claim that they revolutionized exploiting, I get irritated, because only ProtoSmasher did. Synapse simply expanded its scale. Now today I only wish that exploiting could die, because every time someone tries again, they just make it worse.

Thank you for reading!

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