Synthetix创始人：错的是DeFi，而不是市场

Synthetix 的创始人 Kain Warwick 认识到去中心化交易平台的性能与其对衍生品市场的预期影响之间存在脱节。尽管 Synthetix 建立了一个强大的低费用平台，但由于交易者对 DeFi 缺乏需求以及“构建它，他们就会来”的方法不足，未能吸引大量用户群。

Synthetix founder Kain Warwick awoke one morning in May last year with a realization: “Something’s wrong here. We’re approaching this in the wrong way.”

去年 5 月的一个早晨，Synthetix 创始人 Kain Warwick 醒来时意识到：“这里出了点问题。我们正在以错误的方式处理这个问题。”

After launching Synthetix Perps v2 in late 2022, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick expected the new decentralized perpetual futures exchange would take a massive bite out of the Binance-dominated derivatives market.

在 2022 年底推出 Synthetix Perps v2 后，Synthetix 创始人 Kain Warwick 预计新的去中心化永续期货交易所将在币安主导的衍生品市场上占据一席之地。

Six months later, Warwick woke up one morning to the realization that wasn’t going to happen for two reasons: 1) Most traders still don’t want to use DeFi, and 2) The “build it, they will come” mantra is stupid.

六个月后，沃里克一天早上醒来，意识到这不会发生，原因有两个：1）大多数交易者仍然不想使用 DeFi，2）“构建它，他们就会来”的口号是愚蠢的。

“If you’re doing something the same way and expecting different results — that’s insane. That’s the definition of insanity. And so, my view was we need to change this up,” recalls Warwick.

“如果你以同样的方式做某事却期待不同的结果——那就太疯狂了。这就是疯狂的定义。因此，我的观点是我们需要改变这一点，”沃里克回忆道。

Synthetix Perps v2 — launched just days before Christmas in 2022 — was created to take on centralized perp platforms. It introduced a “first-of-its-kind” off-chain oracle system that minimized the risk of frontrunning attacks and significantly reduced trading fees. The exchange also touted deep liquidity, one of the bigger friction points for DeFi. 

沃里克因成为比特币企业家和豪华房地产投资者而成为新闻焦点。 (Domain)Synthetix Perps v2 于 2022 年圣诞节前几天推出，旨在对抗集中式 Perp 平台。它引入了“同类首创”的链下预言机系统，最大限度地降低了抢先交易的风险，并显着降低了交易费用。该交易所还吹捧了深度流动性，这是 DeFi 的更大摩擦点之一。

“The volume was really good, the execution was great, and people were getting good fills,” says Warwick, but “the volume of Binance versus DeFi perps was still 95 to 5.”

Warwick 表示：“交易量非常好，执行力也很好，人们也得到了很好的满足。”但“币安与 DeFi Perps 的交易量仍然是 95 比 5。”

“I actually woke up one morning in May, and I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’”

“实际上，五月的一天早上，我醒来时就想，‘这里发生了什么事？’”

This line of thinking eventually led to his latest crypto project, Infinex, a front-end wrapper he hopes will gloss over the awkwardness that comes with DeFi with all the benefits of self-custody and control. 

这种思路最终催生了他最新的加密项目 Infinex，这是一个前端包装器，他希望能够通过自我托管和控制的所有好处来掩盖 DeFi 带来的尴尬。

Warwick hopes the new user-friendly layer will encourage more traders away from centralized exchanges and platforms, which had a particularly bad year in 2022. 

— Infinex (@infinex_app) 2023 年 12 月 16 日Warwick 希望新的用户友好层将鼓励更多交易者远离中心化交易所和平台，这些交易和平台在 2022 年经历了特别糟糕的一年。

“Crypto history is littered with people losing other people’s crypto,” Warwick tells Magazine. 

“加密货币历史上充斥着人们丢失他人加密货币的情况，”沃里克告诉杂志。

The premise behind Infinex is simple: Replicate the easy-to-use experience of centralized exchanges but with DeFi in the form of Synthetix Perps v3 as its backbone. Traders can do away with clunky transaction signing and wallet setups, needing only a username and password.

Infinex 背后的前提很简单：复制中心化交易所的易用体验，但以 Synthetix Perps v3 形式的 DeFi 作为骨干。交易者可以摆脱笨重的交易签名和钱包设置，只需要用户名和密码。

The idea is to give traders the benefits of DeFi and CEXs without any of the drawbacks, like having your funds “misappropriated” by a “super awkward CEO.” But as Warwick points out, even users burned by FTX didn’t jump aboard the DeFi train.

这个想法是为了让交易者享受 DeFi 和 CEX 的好处，而不存在任何缺点，比如让你的资金被“超级笨拙的首席执行官”“挪用”。但正如 Warwick 指出的那样，即使是被 FTX 烧毁的用户也没有跳上 DeFi 列车。

“The reality is that the vast majority of users went straight from FTX back to Binance, and that, to me, was really kind of a bit shocking.”

“现实情况是，绝大多数用户直接从 FTX 返回币安，对我来说，这确实有点令人震惊。”

Infinex is yet to become available for public trading. 

Infinex 尚未可供公开交易。

When it was first announced, Infinex was expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2023 but only managed to release a closed alpha by the holiday season.

首次宣布时，Infinex 预计将于 2023 年第四季度推出，但只在假日季节发布了封闭的 alpha 版本。

In March, Infinex suddenly announced it had “suffered a security incident,” though no user, treasury or working group funds were at risk. Moments later, Warwick announced he had taken over as the Working Group Lead for Infinex. 

今年 3 月，Infinex 突然宣布“遭遇安全事件”，但没有用户、财务或工作组资金面临风险。不久之后，Warwick 宣布他已接任 Infinex 工作组负责人。

Infinex is now expected to launch sometime around ETHGlobal, which is slated for May 2.

Infinex 目前预计将在 ETHGlobal 前后推出，时间定于 5 月 2 日。

Warwick admits he was wrong to think that simply building a solid decentralized trading platform with low fees would be enough to attract a herd of new traders. 

沃里克承认，他认为仅仅建立一个稳定的、低费用的去中心化交易平台就足以吸引一群新交易者是错误的。

“We had taken this very purist technocratic view of: ‘We’re going to build this the right way, and the world will eventually learn that this is right. We’re not wrong, the market’s wrong,’ sort of approach,” says Warwick.

“我们采取了一种非常纯粹的技术官僚观点：‘我们将以正确的方式构建这个，世界最终会知道这是正确的。我们没有错，市场错了，”沃里克说。

“The reality is that the market is not wrong; the market can’t be wrong in some very real sense,” says Warwick.

“事实是，市场并没有错，而是市场没有错。从某种意义上说，市场不可能是错误的。”沃里克说道。

The Synthetix founder has built a career on knowing when things aren’t working out as they should and pivoting to plan B — and then C. 

这位 Synthetix 创始人的职业生涯就是知道事情何时没有按预期进行，然后转向 B 计划，然后是 C 计划。

Geneticist to B-list punk rocker

Warwick may be known as “the father of modern agriculture” today — a reference to his foundational role in popularizing yield farming, which resulted in 2020’s DeFi Summer — but it took quite a few massive life pivots for that to eventually happen.

二线朋克摇滚歌手的遗传学家沃里克如今可能被称为“现代农业之父”——指的是他在普及单产农业方面发挥的基础性作用，这导致了 2020 年的 DeFi 之夏——但他经历了相当多的人生重大转变才实现这一目标。最终发生。

Now 42, he’s the son of Australian tennis champion Kim Warwick and the oldest sibling to three younger brothers, all of whom followed him into crypto and Web3.

现年 42 岁的他是澳大利亚网球冠军 Kim Warwick 的儿子，也是三个弟弟的长子，他们都跟随他进入了加密货币和 Web3。

At 14, he already had his first taste of entrepreneurship, setting up a tennis racket-restringing business at his parents’ tennis center. 

凯恩·沃里克的父亲是前职业网球明星金·沃里克。 （澳大利亚网球协会）14 岁时，他就已经第一次尝到了创业的滋味，在父母的网球中心创办了一家网球拍固定器公司。

“For a 14-year-old, [it was] very successful; I would say I was making quite a bit of money.”

“对于一个 14 岁的孩子来说，[这]非常成功；我想说我赚了不少钱。”

By age 16, he’d started helping people with tech problems for extra cash. 

16 岁时，他开始帮助人们解决技术问题以获得额外的收入。

“I had this tension of like, ‘love technology, love computers.’ I was building computers,” he says. “I’d go around and set up networks for people and WiFi back in the day.”

“我有一种紧张感，就像‘热爱技术，热爱计算机。’我正在建造计算机，”他说。 “当时我会四处走动，为人们建立网络和 WiFi。”

A high-school science lover, he graduated with visions of becoming a geneticist, studying it at the University of New South Wales. 

作为一名高中科学爱好者，他毕业时梦想成为一名遗传学家，并在新南威尔士大学学习遗传学。

“You know, genetics really interested me… science was probably my best subject in school. I had always loved science,” says Warwick. 

“你知道，遗传学真的让我很感兴趣……科学可能是我在学校最好的科目。我一直热爱科学，”沃里克说。

But he realized pretty soon that genetics wasn’t for him and dropped out 18 months into the degree to join a friend’s tech startup in Seattle. When that didn’t pan out a year later, he founded a punk rock band with a friend. 

但他很快意识到遗传学不适合他，并在获得学位 18 个月后退学，加入了西雅图朋友的科技初创公司。一年后，当这一切没有成功时，他与一位朋友创立了一支朋克摇滚乐队。

He’d dress up in Victorian-era clothing as the guitarist and vocalist for The Lie Society, a punk-rock band that ended up with a pretty decent local following.

他穿着维多利亚时代的服装，担任“谎言协会”的吉他手和主唱，这是一支朋克摇滚乐队，在当地拥有相当不错的追随者。

“The biggest venue we played was like 1,000 people or something like that. So, you know, we’re not playing stadiums by any stretch, but we opened for some national touring acts.”

“我们比赛最大的场地大概有 1000 人左右。所以，你知道，我们无论如何都不会在体育场演出，但我们会进行一些全国巡演。”

“We were just getting to a point where, I think, like, if we had really focused on it and got it out there, we could have done a little bit better,” he adds.

“我认为，我们刚刚到达这样一个阶段，如果我们真正专注于它并把它实现出来，我们可能会做得更好一点，”他补充道。

But Warwick eventually moved back to Australia and started a career in retail. 

但沃里克最终搬回澳大利亚并开始了零售业的职业生涯。

Trying to mine Bitcoin at Harvey Norman

“The first time that I ever came across crypto was a Slashdot post, a very famous Slashdot post,” says Warwick. 

凯恩·沃里克（右）的乐队“谎言协会”。尝试在 Harvey Norman 挖掘比特币“我第一次接触加密货币是 Slashdot 的帖子，一个非常著名的 Slashdot 帖子，”Warwick 说。

At the time, around 2010 or 2011, he was working at an Australian electronics retailer, Harvey Norman, which sells computers, furniture, washing machines, refrigerators and other household goods — definitely not the crypto entrepreneur origin story you were thinking of.

当时，大约在 2010 年或 2011 年，他在一家澳大利亚电子零售商 Harvey Norman 工作，该公司销售电脑、家具、洗衣机、冰箱和其他家居用品——绝对不是你想象的加密货币企业家的起源故事。

The post, found here, detailed an early upgrade to Bitcoin, which eventually made it to the front page of Slashdot. It’s seen as one of the first articles to alert the wider tech community to Bitcoin. 

这篇文章详细介绍了比特币的早期升级，最终登上了 Slashdot 的首页。它被视为最早向更广泛的技术社区发出比特币警报的文章之一。

“I had been on Slashdot for at that point many years, and it was the post that launched Mt. Gox,” says Warwick. 

社交新闻网站 Slashdot 上一篇关于比特币的著名帖子。 (Slashdot)“那时我已经在 Slashdot 上很多年了，正是这个帖子推出了 Mt. Gox，”Warwick 说。

Warwick even tried to set up Bitcoin mining software on a row of display PCs at his store to make use of the free power.

沃里克甚至试图在他店里的一排显示电脑上安装比特币挖矿软件，以利用免费的电力。

“We had an IT guy at Harvey Norman who was a really super switched-on guy […] and I went into Harvey Norman one day in 2011 and said to him: ‘We should run Bitcoin mining on this thing [the display PCs].’”

最近的照片显示了哈维·诺曼商店的内部。 （谷歌地图）“我们在 Harvey Norman 有一位 IT 人员，他是一个非常活跃的人 [...]，2011 年的一天，我走进 Harvey Norman，对他说：‘我们应该在这件事上进行比特币挖矿 [显示电脑]。'”

He didn’t end up getting the IT guy to come around, and they’re both probably kicking themselves over it today after Bitcoin hit nearly $74,000 in March. 

他最终没有让 IT 人员改变主意，在 3 月份比特币触及近 74,000 美元后，他们今天可能都在为此自责。

By 2015, Warwick had gone deep into Bitcoin. He launched his own online retail payment firm, Blueshyft, which allows customers to pay cash over-the-counter for digital goods and services, including Bitcoin. That service still runs today. 

到了 2015 年，沃里克已经深入研究了比特币。他创办了自己的在线零售支付公司 Blueshyft，允许客户在柜台支付现金购买数字商品和服务，包括比特币。该服务至今仍在运行。

“I was still the BTC-maxi mindset of like ‘Bitcoin is the valuable thing here,’ and I didn’t really care about other stuff. Like, I thought Ripple was a scam.” 

“我仍然持有 BTC-maxi 心态，认为‘比特币在这里是有价值的东西’，我并不真正关心其他东西。就像，我认为 Ripple 是一个骗局。”

But Warwick changed his tune just over a year later. While on paternity leave after the birth of his daughter, he got bored and started to go down the “rabbit hole” of “old Vitalik posts” about the possibilities of Ethereum — prediction markets, stablecoins and Maker. 

但一年多后，沃里克改变了态度。在女儿出生后休陪产假期间，他感到无聊，开始钻研“旧 Vitalik 帖子”中有关以太坊可能性的“兔子洞”——预测市场、稳定币和 Maker。

“That was when I was like, ‘Wow, this is the thing that everyone in Ethereum thinks is going to work, which is Maker.’”

“当时我就想，‘哇，这是以太坊中每个人都认为可行的东西，那就是 Maker。’”

Warwick ended up borrowing the central stablecoin idea of Maker and launched the Havven initial coin offering in 2018, which became Australia’s largest ICO, raising $30 million. It completed the offer in just 90 minutes, thanks to early pre-sale investors. 

Warwick 最终借鉴了 Maker 的核心稳定币理念，并于 2018 年推出了 Havven 首次代币发行，该发行成为澳大利亚最大的 ICO，筹集了 3000 万美元。感谢早期预售投资者的帮助，它仅用了 90 分钟就完成了报价。

But the market spoke again when the project failed to gain traction amid the depths of the bear market that year. He pivoted Havven into Synthetix, which retained the idea of posting collateral to mint a stablecoin in the form of SUSD but added the idea of synthetic tokens.

— kain.eth (@kaiynne) 2024 年 3 月 14 日但是，当该项目未能在当年的熊市深处获得牵引力时，市场再次发声。他将 Havven 转向 Synthetix，该公司保留了提供抵押品以 SUSD 形式铸造稳定币的想法，但增加了合成代币的想法。

Deserving his nickname

Synthetix is a decentralized network built on Ethereum (and now Optimism and Base) for issuing and trading synthetic assets, or “synths,” that track the value of real-world assets. 

Synthetix 名副其实，是一个基于以太坊（现在是 Optimism 和 Base）构建的去中心化网络，用于发行和交易合成资产（或“合成物”），跟踪现实世界资产的价值。

The platform’s Synthetix Network Token, or SNX, is used to collateralize and issue synthetic assets, and SNX holders were incentivized to stake as much as possible by being given a portion of synth trading fees and extremely high inflation rewards. Rewards were also given for providing liquidity on Uniswap and Curve, which served as the catalyst for the degen food farm-fuelled “DeFi summer” of 2020. 

该平台的 Synthetix 网络代币（SNX）用于抵押和发行合成资产，SNX 持有者通过获得一部分合成交易费用和极高的通胀奖励来激励尽可能多的抵押。 Uniswap 和 Curve 上提供的流动性也获得了奖励，这成为了由 degen food farm 推动的 2020 年“DeFi 夏天”的催化剂。

Warwick isn’t so sure if he deserves all the recognition, though. 

不过，沃里克不太确定他是否值得所有的认可。

“There are a million ways all of this stuff came together,” he said. 

（凯恩·沃里克）“所有这些东西有一百万种方式组合在一起，”他说。

“Like, even at that point, you had what they called transaction mining. This was another earlier form of yield farming — centralized exchanges were giving out their own token for wash trading, basically, which isn’t all that different to yield farming.”

“就像，即使在那个时候，你也有了他们所谓的交易挖掘。这是另一种早期形式的流动性挖矿——基本上，中心化交易所正在为清洗交易提供自己的代币，这与流动性挖矿并没有什么不同。”

Compound’s COMP token is another one credited with helping to kick off the yield farming craze. 

Compound 的 COMP 代币是另一种被认为有助于掀起流动性挖矿热潮的代币。

“So, you know, my view is that there’s always a prior start with these things. It was just, it was the first one that really worked and kind of locked things in and got momentum, so people will remember it.”

“所以，你知道，我的观点是，这些事情总是要先开始的。只是，这是第一个真正有效的方法，它锁定了事情并获得了动力，所以人们会记住它。”

Get used to scams

Asked whether he feels in any way responsible for rug pulls, Ponzis and straight-up scams that followed, Warwick says it’s an ugly but necessary part of innovation. 

习惯骗局 当被问及他是否认为自己对随后发生的拉扯、庞氏骗局和直接骗局负有任何责任时，沃里克表示，这是创新的一个丑陋但必要的部分。

“Over-investment is a cost that we, as a society, must bear. When you’re over-investing in things, you will get scammed. The alternative, though, is under-investing, and if you under-invest, you get no innovation.”

“过度投资是我们作为一个社会必须承受的成本。当你过度投资某件事时，你就会被骗。然而，另一种选择是投资不足，如果投资不足，你就得不到创新。”

Warwick argues that similarly, even with the multitude of ICO “pump and dump” scams, the ICO boom was a “net benefit” for crypto.

沃里克甚至还制作了几款以他的名字命名的 NFT。不幸的是，他通常是一张普通卡。 （X 和 OpenSea）Warwick 认为，类似地，即使存在大量 ICO“拉高和抛售”骗局，ICO 繁荣对加密货币来说也是一种“净收益”。

“If you look at all the great projects that came out of there, I think the hit rate for ICOs was better than traditional venture [funding]. Yeah, of course, there were scams and things that go to zero and dumb stuff or whatever. That’s a function of over-investment,” says Warwick. 

“如果你看看那里出现的所有伟大项目，我认为 ICO 的命中率比传统的风险投资[融资]要好。是的，当然，有一些骗局和归零的事情和愚蠢的事情或其他什么。这是过度投资的结果。”沃里克说。

“But again, the alternative is under-investment, and under-investment will kill you as a society. You need to be over-investing in innovation, not under-investing.”

“但同样，另一种选择是投资不足，而投资不足将会杀死整个社会。你需要对创新进行过度投资，而不是投资不足。”

Felix Ng

Felix Ng first began writing about the blockchain industry through the lens of a gambling industry journalist and editor in 2015. He has since moved into covering the blockchain space full-time. He is most interested in innovative blockchain technology aimed at solving real-world challenges.

— kain.eth (@kaiynne) 2024 年 3 月 25 日 BitcoinDeFimarketssynthetix Share Share Share Share Felix Ng Felix Ng 于 2015 年首次通过赌博行业记者和编辑的视角撰写有关区块链行业的文章。此后他开始报道区块链领域全职。他对旨在解决现实世界挑战的创新区块链技术最感兴趣。另请阅读