Kain Warwick: The Anti-Authoritarian DeFi Founder
Kain Warwick is a pioneer DeFi founder who’s always been against authoritarian regimes. In 2018, Warwick founded Synthetix (formerly Havven), a platform that allows users to trade tokens that mirror the prices of other assets, including gold, stocks, and traditional currencies.
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Kain Warwick Before Becoming a DeFi Founder
Kain Warwick was born in 1989 in Australia and grew up in a home with strict discipline. Warwick is the oldest of four brothers. His father, Kim Warwick, was a professional tennis player who won big competitions, including the 1981 Australian Open.
In a film by Chainlink, Warwick says that coming from a competitive family has been one of the reasons he always wanted to be the best at anything he does. From an early age, Warwick valued personal independence. At 13 years old, he started making his own money by restringing tennis rackets at his parents’ tennis center, increasing the business’s profit by over 60%. The job brought him around $60,000 to $100,000 yearly until his parents took it back so he could focus more on school. According to the entrepreneur, this experience was a driving force behind his will to be independent and build new things.
Interested in science, Warwick studied biology and genetics at the University of New South Wales, only to find out later that organic chemistry was not the right profession for him. 18 months after his studies, he left the university to join his friend's US startup, where he worked as an IT manager. However, the company ran into problems and closed, after which Warwick did different types of jobs, working as a tennis coach and starting a band where he played the guitar and sang. In 2014, Warwick founded Blueshyft, an Australian startup that offers an iOS-based network where users can easily pay for digital goods and services, including buying cryptocurrencies. According to Warwick, most of Blueshyft’s revenue in 2017 came from cryptocurrencies. In 2018, the entrepreneur switched his focus from Blueshyft to the digital assets industry.
Kain Warwick’s Career in Crypto
In 2011, Warwick first learned about Bitcoin from the news website Slashdot. Initially, he wanted to install Bitcoin mining software but then dropped the idea. Several years later, Warwick returned to researching blockchain technology and the crypto market. In 2018, after stepping down from Blueshyft, the entrepreneur founded a new company called Havven, created to operate as a decentralized payment network for cryptocurrency purchases. Havven’s dual-token design included the stablecoin eUSD and the HAV token, used as collateral. By locking up HAV tokens, holders would receive eUSD and could use the stablecoins in various financial applications.
During the ICO of its native token HAV, Havven raised around $30 million in February, according to data from CoinFi. Later, the platform transitioned from using eUSD to creating a series of stablecoins pegged to different assets, including nUSD, nEUR, and nGBP.
In November 2018, Havven announced rebranding to Synthetix. In a blog post, the project team explained that Synthetix allows the creation of various types of synthetic assets, shortly called synths pegged to the price of fiat currencies, precious metals, indices, and even other cryptocurrencies. As an outcome of the upgrade, Havven’s native token HAV was rebranded into SNX, while nUSD, nEUR and other assets into sUSD, sEUR, etc. Synthetix has become one of the most popular platforms in DeFi, and at the time of writing has more than $390 million total value locked (TVL) according to Defillama.
If you want to learn more about Synthetix, give a read to our review of the platform.
Kain Warwick’s most recent project is Infinex, launched on May 12, 2024 to improve user experience in DeFi. An Infinex account serves as a cross-chain wallet for users removing the need to use multiple wallets for different chains. The Infinex website says the app enables the use of Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base, and other chains without seed phrases, bridging, and gas fees due to in-app integrations. At the time of writing, the Infinex TVL is over $60 million.
Kain Warwick About Crypto’s Future
Kain Warwick is known as a blockchain advocate who believes in the technology’s role in the future. He compares skepticism about blockchain to skepticism about gravity, stating:
For someone who is skeptical whether blockchain is going to be something that is transformative…It doesn't matter whether you believe it. You can not believe in gravity, but gravity is still going to bring you to the ground
The entrepreneur enjoys experimenting and coming up with new ideas. He’s particularly engaged in DeFi as this part of the crypto industry offers users more privacy and independence. Warwick is an active member of the crypto community, frequently participating in events as a speaker and interacting with members through various channels.
Warwick believes that for DeFi to gain more traction, the industry needs to simplify the user experience, which is the goal of his Infinex platform. Referring to the future, he mentioned:
Competitions in markets are the way the world progresses. When you have efficient, open, transparent markets, you have the ability to innovate as a society, and when you lower the barriers of entry, you just get a better world. You can’t even imagine the things we’ll be able to do. This is genuinely going to change the world
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