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Home > The Defiant > Why OG DeFi Failed | Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix
Podcast: The Defiant
Episode:

Why OG DeFi Failed | Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix
Category: Technology
Duration: 00:54:22
Publish Date: 2026-01-30 21:14:31
Description:

Kain Warwick—DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix and Infinex—is back on The Defiant Podcast with Camila Russo for a no-BS conversation at a pivotal moment: Infinex just ran its INX token sale and is heading into its TGE.

We get into:

  • Why Kain believes DeFi’s biggest bottleneck isn’t “more decentralization,” but UX + distribution

  • The hard lesson OG DeFi learned: users won’t “learn to love complexity”—the product has to be holistically better

  • The INX sale controversy: $2,500 cap → cap removed, one-year lockup stays, and why he says the sale “didn’t need to happen” (but still closed)

  • What he’d do differently: market-driven pricing for locked vs. liquid tokens (and why he thinks the liquidity premium is brutal right now)

  • Kaito / InfoFi: how incentives turned crypto Twitter into slop—and why he thinks it “blew up the public square”

  • What INX actually does: early access, fee discounts, governance—and what demand looks like from power users

  • Infinex’s product roadmap: Safe support, hardware wallets, integrating “competitors” like Hyperliquid, and the real metric he watches—share of wallet

  • The bigger vision: a one-stop, non-custodial front-end that can serve both whales and newcomers (and why that’s the only way DeFi competes with fintech)

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