Fireside Chat with Kain Warwick

Transcript

[Music] all right with this we are ready for our next interview uh I personally excited for this one because not only is he a local but he's been in the space for so long that we've seen so many things kind of come and go and there's a really cool reflection of kind of how to take advantage of what's Happening Now and make that even better for everybody else so next up I want to bring on Kane from infinix to have a discussion on all things consumer in crypto please welcome Kane on stage thank

you so Kane most people know you from Haven and synthetics mainly Haven right I think so most Australians know you from from Haven uh the rest of the world for synthetics but here it says you're from infinix and this is something you've been working on for about a year so my first kind a question to you is what is infinix and why are you spending a lot of time on it uh yeah that's a that's a good question um I guess the tldr is we're trying to solve um a lot of the ux issues that we encountered with synthetics um and we are essentially looking to abstract away

the complexity for the new users who I guess were coming a couple weeks ago but maybe not coming anymore um as of the last couple of weeks of price action but um hopefully we'll at some point emerge all of these you know uh the masses that are coming we need to make uh crypto accessible to them and so there's a whole bunch of complexity that we're trying to solve for basically and maybe to be more specific does this take the form of being an exchange or is it a collection of kind of products and features that let you do all these things with better ux so it started off as uh essentially a front end for synthetics right um you know I had this view that we had gotten to a point where

a lot of the protocols were good enough to compete with centralized implementations um you know whether it was pers or spot or or whatever um you know things like Unis swapper very much as good as binance spot trading uh but still a little hard for the average person to use um so the idea was that if we're there we're the users like why is the majority of uh of crypto still happening on a centralized database you know cz's uh cz's platform um and and the answer to that has to be ux like there's no other so we're ask saying centralized exchanges are bad they're

just good at ux compared to decentralized exchanges exactly like you know I think central exchanges definitely served a purpose you know going back to even Mount Gau like if if centralized exchange had you couldn't build a decentralized exchange back then that was the first problem right um and if centralized exchanges hadn't have existed you wouldn't have had the level of adoption that we have now but at a certain point we need to wean ourselves off centralization and actually use crypto to do crypto if you know in 20 years we're still having all of crypto transacted on a database some something's very wrong there so the I guess the part that I kind of find interesting here is if

feels like you're saying that ux is kind of one of the biggest bearers and and that's 100% understandable I mean if you are to just trade a single thing right now you got to First be on the right chain approve something make sure it's it's signed then get the quote and then make the Swap and then hope that works and if it doesn't try the last two steps again uh definitely definitely more steps than pressing Market bu or limit by but I would have assumed that the biggest issue would have been the fact that centralized exchanges are just slow in terms of supporting the newer things um is that bundle into ux for you or is that a separate issue how do you kind of

think about the weights there of supporting things that people want to do versus things that are just big enough that exchangers think that they you should do yeah I think it's a it's a good question like there's no there's I think there's no denying that within defi or just onchain generally that there's a lot more stuff to do right um and so you know from a from a like product perspective or feature perspective we have more features on chain than you could really replicate in uh a centralized exchange um so that's a huge Advantage but we still have more people on centralized exchanges than we do have on Chain by a significant margin um and so you know product isn't really

going to do it and neither is safety I mean we you know if post FTX everyone who was on binance who went to FDX just was like YOLO straight back to binance then we've missed the mark right like if if that was not sufficient incentive for people to get on chain then they're just not going to do it and so uh you know my view was that we have the tech we've got the features we've got the safety of onchain in terms of self custody we've got all of these things and yet it hasn't happened so someone needs to figure out what's missing and create that kind of missing component um and I think you know a lot of people know this is not like a a crazy out there idea right people have been trying to do

chain abstraction ux improvements Etc it just turns out it's incredibly hard um you know I started out and was like surely this will take a couple of months and we're still here A year later and still grinding it it is a really hard thing to do well um but I think we we at least are getting pretty close on the infinex side so so what's uh what are kind of couple examples of the ux improvements that you're making on infinex that compared to what we do now are last steps Yeah we actually did a a demo um uh last night um so I I kind of clicked through the entire thing last night um for the first time and afterwards I think we've been living in this this bubble certainly in infinex um for you know the last 6 n months where

we have an expectation that you click a button and it does a thing but it does it on chain rather than in a database um and the first time I remember seeing that was the uni Pig demo um so you know Unis Swap and optimism did this demo which is what got me down the optimism Rabbit Hole um many years ago where they just had an embedded browser wallet to allow you to do things and it was cool for two reasons one optimism at that time was super quick right it was like you know Zs block times or what I mean it wasn't really a blockchain but whatever um and so it was like instantaneous finality plus you had an embedded browser wallet and I was like wow this is just a web 2 app it feels like you know being on Facebook can't

tell the difference literally identical and so that was for me the first time where I was like okay if we can get to that point then we'll we'll be there right but obviously there's a whole bunch of stuff that has to you know work scaling Etc and so I was clicking through this demo and I got to the end of it and I was like I feel like I've kind of scoped myself into an expectation of no signing no trors no Hardware wallets no weirdness where it just happened and I was like wow like this is it's real it's real like you know you just click a button and something happens and so I I think that the uh the Improvement isn't necessarily in doing anything amazing that people have never seen before it's

doing the things that people see every day in web2 land but with the benefits of blockchain in the background right with the the self- custody and and all of that stuff and so having a a layer on top that just makes it as easy to not better not different literally the same as a a database or a web 2 app that you would click a button and something happens if you get to that point it actually shouldn't even be surprising it shouldn't be weird it shouldn't be like oh my God this is mind-blowing it should just be like the status quo cool exactly great I pressed the button I got the thing I was supposed to and I save seven minutes for things to not go from one

place to another well so I feel like a big part of so let's say if you were to kind of do what you're doing now five years ago or four years ago when when the unipig demo came out uh that seems like a very obvious way of course like if I had a a fullon professional trading experience UI that that did all these things and behaved like a a centralized exchange and it was on on optimism that would have been super cool and that would have been proven that like the scaling is there everything is cheap and fast but now we have already over 20 l2s there's probably 20 on optimism alone and then arbitrum and a bunch of them have more and you're kind of

already crossing the three-digit Mark probably will be at four digits by the end of the year uh maybe sooner and the goal here is to still offer that same consistent experience how the hell do you do that when you have to think about assets for multiple chats so we certainly don't make our lives easy in crypto right like as soon as we solve one problem we're inventing the next problem to solve um I think though that certainly on the evm side and and we are also doing Salon sticking to we're doing salana as well um you know we're we're supporting multiple chains out of the box um we're we're leveraging usdc I think once you've got at least on the evm side a pattern that you can apply um

in terms of how to integrate other chains how you approach what a protocol integration looks like and you've got a framework and a platform to build that into it does get a little bit easier um even to the point where this morning someone uh someone hit me up on Twitter and they're like hey I'm building this thing and I saw what you guys are doing at infinex and it's super exciting because we're trying to do you know chain abstraction and account abstraction and all this stuff and my answer to them was if we do our job at infinex you actually shouldn't need to build the front end at all like that's the ultimate goal right go and build a protocol because I promise you person I was talking to on Twitter uh the effort that it will take for them to get this

working today is going to be a huge distraction from just building it's like a stepping so it's not even the main product that they're trying to trying to build and just build a protocol it yeah maybe for our audience like what is chain abstraction uh chain abstraction and and kind of there's multiple interpretations of it too so how do you define it at infinex I think the first step of chain abstraction is allowing people to get their funds where they need to be without them really needing to understand the the kind of uh technical process there whether it's bridging or or whatever and so you know we've got um like bridge aggregators and things that you know make it easier to move funds

around but there's still a sort of understanding that you need to know the uh the destination that you're going to and why right um so the first step for me that actually abstracts chains away is I want to know the job that I need to do okay I want to I want to get Bonk right that's the thing that I'm look for there's some eth Maxis uh in the front row that are upset right now let's say uh so I want to get Bonk for whatever reason right for whatever dumb reason um I don't want to then go from the end state to having to learn about Wormhole Bridge or soccer or whatever

the bridge is right I just want to be able to go from I have let's say Pepe right and I want Bonk right and I want the platform that I'm on to understand the pathway through that for me and be very opinionated about it and just get me there right and so you know what we have today the the sort of discussion around chain abstraction is like this very rudimentary thing I think it needs to be a Step Beyond that for it to actually work for the average user everyone in here chain abstraction is fine you don't even need chain abstraction really like you're kind of comfortable to Just Bounce Around chains and Bridge and do all kinds of stuff but for the average person walking out

around the pier that's just not going to work them to get Bonk yeah they can't get Bonk and that's a big problem we need to solve that problem for uh well speaking of bck um you recently held uh meme Global Sydney 2024 the first of many I take it with that name um how kind of do you think about meme coins alog together and uh what they enable um you get in the world of kind of consumer crypto interactions yeah I think meme coins nfts gamey all of that stuff for me is in uh a category of um assets I guess which Taps into more of like a

um human emotion cultural you know idea um which is much more interesting and accessible and addressable to the average person than D5 right um you know D5 Finance like Financial engineering is not that interesting to not there's just not that many people that that find it deeply interesting 99% of them yes yeah the the vast majority of people it's impactful like finan is impactful to everyone everyone here needs to be able to use a credit card or have a bank account or be able to convert onchain funds into feied or or whatever if you can't do that your life's going to be rough right um but it's not something that people are

thinking about every day like we are in this room or a lot of us are um but the average person doesn't care whereas a game or a movie or music or something like that like that is something that the average person is passionate about and and really cares about and so I think memes are um maybe the the most like simplistic connection between financialization and tokenization of everything and culture and if you if you kind of look at that as why did that blow up you know why is that a GameStop era yeah exactly it's it's you know you've you've kind of uh got this stylized idea of uh of you know um information propagation or whatever

right but then tokenized and and financialized um and so I think that as a uh hook to get people interested um it's it's quite useful and there is something elegant in the Simplicity of it right there's no yield or revenue or cash flow or it's just like is this a dumb cool idea that I want to own or is it not that's it I think just kind of any binary Behavior sort of in a way self collects that group and becomes a lot easier to kind of play with things and nfts were similar right like I I don't think it's that different right nfts are like do I think the you know melting face ape thing is cool or not

right like and some people are like no it's bad it's not cool and some people like it's the best thing I've ever had burn my eyeballs out with lasers like you know do you feel like infex the platform has a a good overlap with taking advantage of what's happening with the the memec coin sort of economy right now and and if so kind of how do you think that fits in yeah I think it does uh you know we were really trying to work out what was the event that we could hold that would be I guess the you know the other side of the pendulum to something like pragma or or you know e Sydney or an e Global event right like a very technical event it's like how do we go to the other side to try and get you know the two sides of the bell curve is

all I'm hearing yes exactly right so um so we did that and and I think the the best feedback that I got from a few people that were there is there were like I was kind of surprised I mean you we had people like gamy who were pretty deep thinkers about you know culture and um there were like I was kind of surprised by the depth of it I thought it was just going to be like a bunch of price charts and number go up and you know it was actually quite a deep conversation at times about different aspects of culture and ideas and you know even things like um you know some of the the initiatives that um gam is running around that they have nothing to do with crypto they just help kind of solve problems outside crypto for society like and it was super awesome

yeah so so yeah I think um you know the event itself was was uh very sort of instructive of that and the people who were there for that event who were non- crypto people were like oh okay there's actually some interesting cool stuff whereas I think if it had been a defi conference they would have been like uh eyes Clays over and also I mean again it's a fundamentally different audience where they know what they want but I think when I talked to a bunch of people there at that event I I was kind of excited about the fact that yes they would they wouldn't call on subscrip to people but they were curious and for them Discovery was more important than kind of making money or kind of benefiting financially from from from something and that I think is like a

unique thing because most people are consumers as why they're called consumers they don't necessarily think about contributing or taking direct advantage of something it's purely entertainment and these are like pretty big initiatives that's the that's the The Tam right like the addressable Market is is and you know go back to like the nft hype and how many people got wrecked uh uh with nfts getting rugged and and drained and whatever like if if we had infinex if infinex does the job that it's supposed to do and we had that back then and in and uh and infinex had an nft

integration most of that disappears it's just not possible in a platform that is opinionated about how you interact with it it's just a much safer thing right um and you know I don't love this analogy because I was not a big fan of America online um back in the day but you know for the Boomers in the room um especially if you lift overseas like the idea of having a safe Walled Garden around all of the chaos is is actually quite useful as a first step eventually you want to open it up to to everything right like you don't want to have a wall Garden forever but that bridge where someone who is like o online I'm worried about you know I mean we have the exact same setup in crypto which is you kind

of go to coinbase and you buy your first eth and then you wait a second I can try 500 other weird things now I got to figure how do I take it out and now you're no longer well now you're now you're responsible for your own actions yeah and I think the interesting thing with nfts is it just didn't happen that way with centralized exchanges dominating right um you know openc kind of landed it so quickly and and that sort of speaks to your first point around we have the features like one of the features of last cycle was nfts and it was on chain but the consequence of it being on chain was aot lot of people lost a lot of money because they were not prepared to secure their assets and you know they bought a board ape for 100 bucks and then it was worth you know

100,000 or or a million or whatever some did that in the reverse order too I think that's most of us right well I guess speaking of of infex uh it's been a year of development you got to keep talking about the cool things that you're solving so uh I'm going to ask you uh directly well when can we see it yeah that that is a very good question um so as of this morning we finally made a call for uh a date that we're going to go live um 13th of May wow that's 11 days from now 11 days from now um so I'm super excited about that I think we're finally at a point you know it's easy to sit there forever

and want to you know tweak and polish and and perfect um but I think we're at a point where uh getting something out and getting it in people people's hands is going to be more valuable um and so yeah that's that's the plan um and the the launch is basically the launch of the account right so this is the core component you will have an account that you will own it's self custodial but you'll be able to effectively log in that account via web 2 so we're using pass Keys initially um there's some other stuff around uh securing assets and um uh emergency see withdrawals and and things like that for from a safety

perspective um but the starting point of it is you can have an account and then you can deposit into that account to earn uh governance points basically so there's going to be like a governance points farming game for about 30 days awesome um maybe maybe too too optimistic of a question cuz I don't know exactly what I'm looking for as an answer but what are you kind of hoping for when people try this out in two weeks and uh get their account set up is there kind of General expectation for them to sort of either have a great experience or you want to see directly or indirectly kind of happen um how do you defining was uh the idea landed yeah I think the the initial audience is definitely this

audience right um my my assumption is the vast majority of people in this room do not need infinex you're already on chain you know how to transact you can probably you know construct a transaction via an ABI or something like that right um but everyone here um is likely to be an advocate for five or 10 or 50 Downstream people who are not that person they're not technical they're not comfortable you know doing things like that and you know the Dirty Little Secret of uh most of the technical people in crypto is when your aunt or someone turns up and says what should I do I want to buy some Bitcoin you go oh

go on Buy or you know go on coinbase or go wherever right what we want to get to is a point where everyone here in this room is confident enough in the tech and they've dug into it challenged it played around with it gotten gotten really comfortable to the point where you know next Thanksgiving when your aunt is you're asking about Bitcoin at 150k and you know how did she buy it um that you can say we actually go to this platform it's called infinex and it's super easy to sign up and I know that you're not going to get rugged because I've checked out the tech I know how it works it's non-custodial it's what I've you know been waiting for what we've all been

waiting for right is a platform that is both safe and protects the user um and so I think the initial audience of infinex is all of the people in this room who can really pick it apart and challenge it challenge the assumptions challenge the security um Paul just heads up we need an audit next week if that's cool um I know you said you're busy but um I'm sure you'll make an exception for us um so you know we we really want everyone here to dig into it as much as possible awesome I think that's a perfect uh point to add this I think it's a good message for everybody to kind of try this out and uh can we try it out in 10 days so thank you so much Kane and you can find him after this and ask him any

questions I he's going to be around for a while so please please uh please do harass him for all the questions that you have yeah thank you thank you [Applause]