🎙 Synthetix's Kain Warwick: What it Takes to Scale an Ethereum DeFi Protocol

This week, we sit with Kain Warwick, DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix. In some ways, last year wasn’t a great one for the synthetic assets protocol. As many DeFi projects boomed, SNX’s price and TVL dropped. Kain says he was too optimistic about how soon Synthetix would be able to scale with optimistic roll-ups. If he were to do things again, he would probably use Polygon first and move to Optimism once the solution was ready. 

But last year was also a time to build on a strong foundation. He’s looking forward to the months to come, when all of that effort hopefully comes to light, with the protocol fully live on Optimism, with perpetual swaps expected to be launched too. He’s a firm believer that Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions will capture the most value being built in DeFi and web3.

Kain was building back in 2017 when most of today’s projects weren’t around. We discuss how DeFi has changed in that time. He thinks Switzerland-based foundations, and “labs” style companies are on their way out as the infrastructure to start out as DAOs right away is already here. The fact that projects can now launch at the furthest end of the decentralization spectrum, thus mitigating some regulatory risk, means tokens can more directly be tied to protocol value. To me, it seems like DeFi has been building the tools and structures that will allow it to shed more and more vestiges of traditional startups and legacy finance. 

The podcast was led by Camila Russo, and edited by Alp Gasimov. Transcript was edited by Owen Fernau.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.