What’s wrong is DeFi, not the market.

Syntex founder Cain Warwick woke up one morning in May last year and realized, “There's something wrong here. We're approaching this the wrong way.”

After launching Synthetix Perps v2 in late 2022, Synthetix founder Cain Warwick expects the new decentralized perpetual futures exchange to take a big bite out of the Binance-led derivatives market.

Six months later, Warwick woke up one morning to realize that wasn't going to happen for two reasons: 1) many traders still don't want to use DeFi and 2) the mantra is “build it, they will come.” Stupid

If you are doing something the same way and expecting different results – this is madness. This is the definition of insanity. And my view was that we have to change that,” Warwick recalls.

Synthetix Perps v2 – launched days before Christmas 2022 – was created to handle centralized perp platforms. It introduced a “first-of-its-kind” off-chain blockchain that reduces the risk of front-end attacks and significantly reduces transaction fees. The exchange also highlighted deep liquidity as one of the biggest sticking points for DeFi.

“The volume was great, the execution was great, and people were filling up well, but the ratio of Binance and DeFi perps was still 95 to 5,” Warwick said.

I woke up one morning in May, and I was like, ‘What's going on here?' I was like

This line of thinking eventually led to the latest crypto project, Infinex, which is said to mirror the anxiety that comes with DeFi while also offering the benefits of self-protection and regulation.

Warwick hopes the new user-friendly layer will encourage more traders away from central exchanges and platforms, which had a particularly bad year in 2022.

“The history of crypto is full of people,” Warwick told the magazine.

The premise behind Infinex is simple: replicate easy-to-use centralized exchanges but with DeFi as the backbone with Synthetix Perps v3. Traders can eliminate transaction signature and wallet setup, requiring only a username and password.

The idea is to provide traders with the benefits of DeFi and CEXs without any obstacles, such as “misappropriation” of your funds by “the most disgraceful CEO”. But as Warwick points out, even users burned by FTX haven't jumped on the Defy train.

“The reality is that most users have switched from FTX to Binance, and that was a shock to me.”

Infinex is yet to be ready for public trading.

When first announced, the Infinex was expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2023, but managed to release a closed alpha during the holiday season.

In March, Infinex announced that it had suddenly “experienced a security breach” despite the fact that no user, treasury or working group funds were at risk. Moments later, Warwick announced his appointment as head of the Infinex working group.

Infinex is now expected to launch in the ETHGlobal area, which is scheduled for May 2.

Warwick admits it was a mistake to think that building a decentralized trading platform with low fees would be enough to attract new traders.

“We took this very technocratic attitude: ‘We'll build this the right way, and the world will eventually learn that this is right.' We're not wrong, the market is wrong,' says Warwick.

“The reality is the market is not wrong. Basically, the market can't be wrong,” Warwick said.

Syntax's founder made a career of recognizing that things weren't working as they should, and he turned to B — and then C.

A geneticist for a B-list punk rocker

Warwick may be known today as the “Father of Modern Agriculture” — referring to his seminal role in promoting productive farming, which led to the Diffie Winters of the 2020s — but it took quite a few major life blows for that to eventually happen.

Now 42, he is the son of Australian tennis champion Kim Warwick and the older sibling of three younger brothers, all of whom have followed him into crypto and Web3.

He made his first entrepreneurial venture at the age of 14, setting up a tennis racket repair business at his parents' tennis center.

“For a 14-year-old, [it was] very successful I would say I was making a little money.

At the age of 16, he started helping people with technology problems for extra money.

“I had a ‘love technology, love computer' tension. I was building computers,” he says. “During the day I went and set up wifi networks for people.”

A high school science enthusiast, he studied at the University of New South Wales and graduated with a vision of becoming a geneticist.

“You know, genetics really interests me… science was probably the best subject in school. I've always loved science,” Warwick said.

But he soon realized that genetics wasn't for him and skipped 18 months into his degree to join a friend's tech startup in Seattle. A year later, when that didn't happen, he formed a punk rock band with a friend.

He had a local following as the guitarist and vocalist for The Lie Society, a punk-rock band in Victorian-era clothing.

“The biggest venue we played was like 1,000 people or something like that. So, you know, we're not playing stadiums by any means, but we've opened for some national tours.”

He added: “If we had focused on him and got him out there, I think we were getting to a point where we could have done a little bit better.”

But Warwick eventually returned to Australia and started a retail business.

Trying to mine Bitcoin on Harvey Norman

“The first time I discovered Crypto was a Slashdot post, and it was a very popular Slashdot post,” Warwick says.

At the time, around 2010 or 2011, he was working at Australian electronics retailer Harvey Norman, which sold computers, appliances, washing machines, refrigerators and other household items – certainly not the crypto entrepreneur's origin story you'd imagine.

The post found here details an early upgrade to Bitcoin, which eventually made it to the front page of Slashdot. It appears as one of the first articles to alert the wider tech community to Bitcoin.

“I've been on Slashdot for years to that point, and it was the post that started Mount Gox,” Warwick says.

To take advantage of the free energy, Warwick tried to set up Bitcoin mining software on a series of PCs in his shop.

We had a great guy in Harvey Norman […] And one day in 2011, I went to Harvey Norman and said: ‘We have to mine Bitcoin on this thing. [the display PCs].

He didn't end up getting an IT guy around, and both are probably kicking themselves today after Bitcoin hit nearly $74,000 in March.

In the year In 2015, Warwick dived into Bitcoin. He founded his own online retail payments company, Blueshift. That service still works today.

“I was still a BTC-maxi mentality, like ‘Bitcoin is the only thing of value here,' and I didn't care about other things. Like, I thought Ripple was a scam.”

But Warwick changed his tune a year later. While on paternity leave after giving birth to his daughter, he got bored and started going down the “rabbit hole” about “old Vitalik's posts” about the possibilities of Ethereum – prediction markets, stable coin and creator.

“That's when it was like, ‘Wow, this is something everyone in Ethereum thinks they're doing, and it's a maker.'”

Borrowing the maker's central stable coin idea, Warwick launched Havven's initial coin offering in 2018, which became Australia's largest ICO, raising $30 million. Thanks to pre-sale investors, it completed the offer in 90 minutes.

But the market again spoke out as the project failed to pull through the depths of the bear market that year. He introduced Haven into Synthetics, which retained the idea of ​​a stable coin for the Mint in the form of SUSD, but added the idea of ​​synthetic tokens.

He deserves his nickname

Synthetix is ​​a decentralized network built on Ethereum (and now Optimism and Base) to mine and trade synthetic assets, or “synths,” that track the value of real-world assets.

The platform's Synthetix Network Token, or SNX, is used to reserve and issue synthetic assets, and SNX holders are encouraged to offer as much structured trading fees and super-inflated rewards as possible. Liquidity awards were given to Uniswap and Curve, which served as catalysts for the defunct agri-fueled “DeFi Summer” of 2020.

Warwick is not sure if he will be recognized though.

“There are a million ways all these things come together,” he said.

“Like, even back then, you had something called transaction mining. This was another form of early crop farming – centralized exchanges gave their mark to the trade, basically, which is not so different from farming.

The Compound COMP token is another one credited with helping start the farming craze.

“So, you know, my view is that there's always a beginning with these things. It was like, he was the first one who actually worked and got things locked and motivated, so people remember.

Getting used to scams

Asked if he feels responsible in any way for carpet-pulling, Ponzis and straight-up scams, Warwick says it's an ugly but necessary part of creativity.

“Overinvestment is a price we must bear as a society. When you invest too much in things, you may be deceived. But the alternative is to invest, and if you invest, you will get nothing new.

Warwick similarly argues that, even with many ICO “pump and dump” scams, the ICO boom has been a “net gain” for crypto.

“If you look at all the great projects that have come out since then, I think the rate at which they signed up for ICOs was better than traditional business. [funding]. Yeah, of course, there were scams and stuff going to zero and stupid or whatever. This is a function of overinvestment,” says Warwick.

But the only option is to invest, and that investment will kill you as a community. There is no need to over-invest in innovation.

Subscribe

A very engaging read in Blockchain. It is given once a week.

Felix Ng

Felix Ng first started writing about the blockchain industry through the lens of a gambling industry journalist and editor in 2015. Since then, he has moved on to cover the blockchain space full-time. He is very interested in blockchain technology, an innovation aimed at solving real-world challenges.