Kain Warwick: The Anti-Authoritarian 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.

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. 

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 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:

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: