Let’s Talk Cardano: Kain Warwick on the Past, Present, and Future of DeFi

The Let’s Talk Cardano series offers a reliable forum for examining how decentralized infrastructure shapes new financial models. Each episode highlights the practical foundations of Web3 systems and the builders who introduced concepts that now define decentralized finance. Our latest conversation features Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, who reflects on the origins of synthetic assets, early stablecoin design, and the evolution of perpetual futures in DeFi.

Kain’s first encounter with blockchain’s potential emerged during the DAO hack. Watching thousands of participants coordinate in real time revealed the power of smart contracts and the scale of shared digital infrastructure. From this point forward, he began exploring ways to connect traditional payment systems with emerging crypto rails. Early work included BlueShift, an Australian platform that enabled cash-based Bitcoin payments before he fully transitioned to smart-contract development.

Building the first crypto-collateralized stablecoin

Kain’s first major protocol, Havven, launched in 2018 as one of the earliest crypto-backed USD stablecoins. The architecture relied on:

• Endogenous collateral: Users deposited the Havven token (later SNX) into a smart contract.
• Over-collateralization: Borrowers could issue roughly 20% of the collateral value in stablecoins.
• Centralized oracles: At the time, decentralized price feeds were not available on Ethereum.

These early systems operated before modern liquidity and infrastructure existed. ERC-20 stablecoins were scarce, AMMs had not yet emerged, and most trading remained ETH-denominated. As the ecosystem matured, Havven evolved into Synthetix and introduced a new idea: synthetic assets that track multiple denominations beyond USD.

Expanding to multi-asset synthetics and protocol-level challenges

Adapting the model to multiple currencies required a method to track user debt across assets without incurring unbounded computation costs. Synthetix implemented a deterministic on-chain process that recorded each network-wide change, allowing the system to calculate individual debt at any point in time.

As synthetic assets became more volatile, the protocol experienced debt inflation and required new risk-management measures. Synthetix ultimately introduced a debt-jubilee mechanism and transitioned from centralized oracles to Chainlink, then to Pyth, to improve resilience.

Toward decentralized perpetual futures

Synthetix later shifted focus to a perp DEX architecture. Perpetual futures offer leveraged exposure without expiry, and decentralized versions require robust collateral structures, insurance mechanisms, and transparent on-chain accounting. Modern implementations combine off-chain matching with on-chain settlement and use liquidity pools, such as SLP, to backstop trader payouts with verifiable transparency.

What comes next

Kain’s latest project, Infinex, targets one of DeFi’s most persistent barriers: user experience. By simplifying onboarding and reducing operational complexity, it aims to bring decentralized trading to a broader audience while maintaining an open, permissionless infrastructure.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify or watch on YouTube to explore how early stablecoin experimentation shaped modern DeFi architecture and where synthetic markets may evolve next.