Crypto has 4 years to grow so big ‘no one can shut it down’: Kain Warwick, Infinex
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Kain Warwick, the Australian behind decentralized perps protocol Synthetix and now UX layer Infinex, says the clock is now ticking for crypto to grow fast enough to reach the point where no one could ever try to shut it down again.
Speaking to Magazine at Nears Redacted conference in Bangkok, Warwick says the crypto industry specifically his latest venture, Infinex has four years to break into the mainstream.
If we can get mass adoption in the next four years, which I think is achievable, and bring everyone onchain, and we have hundreds of millions or even billions of users, the jobs done you cant shut it down.
Infinex is Warwicks bid at solving the risks that come with centralized platforms seen in the multibillion-dollar implosions of FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager Digital without sacrificing the normie-friendly features many of these platforms once offered.
In short, Infinex is positioning itself as a CEX killer, a platform that seeks to offer the user-friendliness of centralized exchanges with the transparency and user control of decentralized finance. Given that Infinex operates from a single office in Sydney, its not actually uncensorable, although that shouldnt be a big problem.
At the moment, the platform is non-custodial, so even if someone goes and nukes the Infinex platform, censors it, DDoSs it, or takes down AWS, you can still go to the chain and get your assets back.
To Warwick, the end goal of Infinex, or of any robust crypto platform, is to scale to a level where the level of demand can practically outweigh any legitimate attempt to nuke it.
It’s the Uber model, right? Make it so useful that you cant shut it down.
Infinex scaling up, betting on passkeys to replace seed phrases
As of right now, the Infinex platform is still very much in its infancy. While users can perform a limited number of swaps, bridge assets and play crypto-themed minigames, they still cant trade assets like they would on a major centralized exchange such as Coinbase or Binance.
But thats coming soon. Warwick says Infinex will look to list the top 500 crypto assets by market cap in early 2025 when it releases an updated version of its platform. It just announced a partnership with Near Protocol to use its chain abstraction technology to make decentralized crosschain swaps as easy as pressing a button.
One of the core features Warwick hopes will bring retail users onchain is the use of passkeys, which he believes should replace the antiquated security model of seed phrases across the industry.
The worlds largest tech companies, including Google and Apple, already utilize passkeys. You sign up with your usual email, which is associated with your biometric data in a secure enclave on your device. This means you can log in securely to a crypto account without needing to go through the painful process of setting up a crypto wallet.
A week prior to our interview, a user of Infinex lost 80 Patron NFTs which cost around $400,000 after being drained by a Trojan virus. Warwick says that while Infinex now runs entirely on passkeys, he blames himself for not integrating an NFT market into the platform, forcing the user to withdraw out into the wild.
So, this user pulled their NFTs out of their Infinex account to go and put them on OpenSea or Blur, and while they were sitting in their hot wallet, they got drained because theres a Trojan on their device and theyve put their seed phrase in.
Concerns over passkeys
Warwick says that when he first launched Infinex, he didnt want to rely completely on passkeys, as they were still a novel security method, so he opted to include an onchain security element as well.
If wed just leaned into passkeys a little bit more aggressively, they wouldnt have lost those assets, right? We would be able to onboard all of those assets and not worry about the risk of the onchain component.
Speaking of NFTs, Infinexs Patron sale shook up the venture capital landscape in September, raising over $67 million through the new fundraising model although Warwick said he wouldve preferred that amount be closer to $100 million.
Instead of offering any kind of return at all, the platforms Patron NFTs were marketed solely as a way of allowing investors to support the growth of Infinex.
Unlike most crypto fundraising, no special deals or discounts were offered to venture capital firms, early supporters or insiders, with all investors purchasing Patron NFTs at the same tiered prices.
However Warwick admits that offering the locked Patron with a three year unlock period at 25% of the cost of the unlocked and liquid Patron was a big pricing mistake.
We expected that the regular community members and even a lot of the KOLs would be like, well, I want optionality and I want liquid Patrons. But it didnt play out that way.
Very, very few people chose liquid. It was 2% or something like that. It was such a big discount, and this was one of the challenges.
Warwick says it would have been better to try and figure out the pricing on the open market, but that was too difficult.
Its an NFT. It doesnt do anything. You know, theres three tiers, theres discounts. If we had then said on top of that, and I cant tell you what the price is, it would have just been too hard.
The reality is we got it wrong, and so recently, the [Infinex] treasury just did a distribution to the people who bought liquid Patrons of an extra locked Patron to bring their purchase price down.
Despite getting the pricing wrong, and not raising quite as much money as hoped, it does seem as if the Patron sale was a clever way to get around securities laws, as an NFT with zero promises attached can hardly be said to be a security, even if holders are later rewarded for their patronage with some tokens at some point.
Warwick says the idea wasnt simply a move to skirt securities laws it was his way of taking a stand against avowedly anti-crypto politicians and regulatory agencies who were doing everything they could to crack down on digital assets over the last few years.
I think securities laws are very important for securities because securities are centralized corporations that deliver some value, and theyre opaque, and if you dont regulate them, then people can get wrecked.
But it wasnt even about regulatory bodies and governments saying everythings a security its that they were saying whatever they needed to say to try to kill crypto.
At the point where I realized this was outright warfare, its like, Im sorry. Im not going to sit there and let you shoot at me all day. Im going to shoot back.
So, I looked at this and said, What can we do to optimize for the outcome of getting more people to use Infinex? The answer was: Get more people aligned with the project. Its as simple as that.
