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 Near’s 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 job’s done — you can’t shut it down.”
Infinex founder Kain Warwick at Near’s Redacted conference in Bangkok (Andrew Fenton)
Infinex is Warwick’s 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, it’s not actually uncensorable, although that shouldn’t be a big problem.
“At the moment, the platform is non-custodial, so even if someone goes and nukes the Infinex platform, censors it, DDoS’s 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 can’t 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,…
..
