Crypto has 4 years to grow so big ‘no one can shut it down’: Kain Warwick, Infinex

Cain Warwick, the Australian behind decentralized Perps protocol synthetics and now “UX Layer” Infinex, says now is the time to rapidly evolve to the point where no one will try to shut it down again.

Speaking to the magazine at the Redacted conference near Bangkok, Warwick said the crypto industry – specifically his latest venture, Infinex – has four years to go mainstream.

I think mass adoption is possible in the next four years, and if we get everyone on the chain, and we have hundreds of millions or billions of users, it's done – you can't shut it down.

Infinex's Warwick bid is to address the concerns that come with centralized platforms — seen in the multibillion-dollar FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager Digital — without sacrificing many of the “typical” ideal features of these platforms.

In short, Infinex is positioning itself as the killer of CEX, a platform that seeks to provide user-friendliness through decentralized financial transparency and user control. As Infinex operates from an office in Sydney, it's not really unsophisticated, although this isn't a huge problem.

“Currently the platform is not custodian, so if someone goes and hacks the Infinex platform, censors it, DDoS it, or takes AWS down, you can still go to the chain and get your assets back.”

For Warwick, the ultimate goal of Infinex, or any other strong crypto platform, is to push the level of demand to a point where it can exceed any legitimate attempt to “enable” it.

“It's the Uber model, right? Make it so useful that you can't turn it off.”

Upgrading Infinex, betting on passwords to replace pedigrees

Currently, the Infinex platform is still in its infancy. While users can play certain swaps, bridge assets, and crypto-themed minigames, they still cannot trade assets on a major centralized exchange like Coinbase or Binance.

But that will come soon. Warwick said Infinex aims to list the top 500 crypto assets by market value when it launches its updated platform in early 2025. It has announced a partnership with NearProtocol to make decentralized cross-chain switching as simple as pressing a button using chain abstraction technology.

One of the main features that Warwick expects to bring retail users to the chain is the use of passkeys, which he believes should replace the antiquated security model of the industry's pedigree.

The world's biggest tech companies, including Google and Apple, use passkeys. Register with your usual email associated with your biometric data in a secure location on your device. This means you can log in securely without having to go through the painful process of setting up a crypto wallet.

A week before the interview, an Infinex user lost 80 Patron NFTs – around $400,000 – after being exposed to a Trojan virus. According to Warwick, Infinex now works entirely on Passport Keys, but it blames itself for not integrating the NFT market into the platform, forcing the user into the wild.

“So this user took their NFTs out of their Infinex account and put them on OpenSea or Blur, and while they were sitting in their hot wallet, they got a Trojan on their device and they put their seed. The phrase in.

Concern about passwords

When Warwick first launched Infinex, he didn't want to rely entirely on passwords because they were still a novel security method, so he chose to include an “onchain security element” as well.

“If we lean towards passkeys in a small way, you wouldn't lose those assets, right? We can access all those assets and not worry about onchain component risk.

Speaking of NFTs, Infinex's Patron sale shook up the venture capital landscape in September, raising more than $67 million under its new fundraising model — though Warwick said he'd prefer that amount to be closer to $100 million.

Rather than offering any kind of return, the platform's “Patron NFTs” are marketed solely to allow investors to support Infinex's growth.

Unlike most crypto fundraising, all investors buy Patron NFTs at the same price and no special deals or discounts are offered to commit capital firms, early backers or insiders.

However, Warwick admitted that pricing the locked cartridge with a three-year unlock period at 25% of the unlocked and liquid cartridge was a major pricing error.

“We expected the regular community members and a lot of KOLs to be like, well, I want an alternative and I want Liquid Patrons. But that's not the case.

“Very few people chose liquid. It was 2% or something like that. It was a huge discount, and that was one challenge.

It would have been better to try and figure out Warwick's value on the open market, but that would have been difficult.

“It's an NFT. It does nothing. You know, there are three levels, there are discounts. If we were to talk about it and I couldn't tell you what the price was, it would be very difficult.

“The reality is we're wrong, and soon, the [Infinex] The Treasury Department distributed additional locked cartridges to those who purchased liquid cartridges to lower their purchase price.

Even though the pricing was wrong, and it didn't raise as much money as it was supposed to, the customer sale seems to have been a smart way to get around securities laws, because NFTs can't be considered a security with zero expectations attached. Although owners will later be “rewarded” for their support by using some tokens.

Warwick said the proposal wasn't simply a move to circumvent securities laws — it was a way of cracking down on anti-crypto politicians and regulatory agencies that have been doing their best to control digital assets over the past few years.

“I think securities laws are very important to securities because securities are centralized corporations that provide some value and are opaque, and if you don't regulate them, people can go broke.”

But it wasn't about regulatory bodies and even governments saying ‘it's all about security' – they were saying whatever they wanted to try to kill crypto. “

“When I realized this was an open war, I said, ‘I'm sorry. I'm not going to sit there and let you shoot me all day. I'm going to shoot back.'

“So I looked at this and said, ‘What can we do to optimize the results to get more people using Infinex?' The answer was: Get more people to agree to the project, it's that simple.”

Tom Mitchell

Tom Mitchellhill is a reporter covering crypto and fintech for Cointelegraph's Asia-Pacific newsdesk. He was previously lead reporter at startup Web3 outlet The Chainsaw. Tom studied philosophy, economics and international relations at the University of Wollongong.