In February 2018, Australian-born Kain Warwick established Havven, a stablecoin project, through an initial coin offering. Havven later changed its name to Synthetix and rose fast to become a significant player in the decentralized financial market. The Synthetix platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain and is one of the most significant decentralized finance ecosystems, specializing in minting and generating synthetic coins.
He is also the co-founder and CEO of Blueshyft, an Australian retail payment network servicing over 1,200 outlets. Blueshyft has become Australia’s most prominent cryptocurrency payment gateway, handling tens of millions of dollars in transactions. Additionally, Warwick was a guitarist and vocalist for the band The Lie Society from October 2005 until September 2009 and was an assistant tennis coach at The Bay Club Company from September 2002 to August 2005.
Warwick has mentioned that the first three months of 2021 were critical for the Synthetix project. Much-discussed capabilities like “synthetic shares” for United States firms like Apple, Tesla, Facebook and Google, crude oil as well as crypto exchanges like Coinbase were made available in February 2021. As part of the Synthetix v3 migration event, Warwick led work to install and test a layer-2 version of the Synthetix platform and a thorough rewrite of the protocol’s escrow contracts. In July 2021, the new layer-2 exchange was launched under Warwick’s supervision that allows synthetic Ether, synthetic Bitcoin and synthetic Link, with more assets to follow.
Warwick has reportedly invested millions of dollars in cryptocurrency firms, including $7.5 million in Upshot, $3.2 million in Hashflow and $6.7 million in Opyn. Warwick was a non-executive director of Blueshyft, a member of the Blockchain Australia Advisory Council, and a member and investor of the Burger Collective advisory board as of May 8, 2021.
Warwick tweeted his support for the Ethereum ecosystem and expansion ambitions in December 2021. He felt it will be tough for the embryonic ecosystem to compete with Ethereum after most of the platform’s infrastructure is migrated to layer 2 in 2022 and tokens are issued. He added that users shouldn’t have to wait for the expansion plan to be fully developed.
Still, everyone is now putting their emotions and money into public chains like Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Solana, which are all known as “Ethereum killers,” but this status may soon change. However, in Warwick’s perspective, investing money into an Ethereum killer is an inefficient use of resources.
As a market player, he encouraged everyone in the Ethereum community to band together and do more for new layer-2 users. He also believes that due to a group of experienced developers, not merely because they favor decentralization, a growing number of users will recognize the substantial benefits of layer 2 in 2022. This year, Synthetix will create a fully on-chain composable perpetual futures market with a top-tier user experience and unrivaled liquidity on the high-performance Optimistic Ethereum mainnet.
Sydney, Australia
DeFi
University of New South Wales, Bsc in Genetics
Synthetix
