Synthetix's Kain Warwick: What it Takes to Scale an Ethereum DeFi Protocol

This week, we sit with Kain Warwick, DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix. In some ways, last year wasn’t a great one for the synthetic assets protocol. As many DeFi projects boomed, SNX’s price and TVL dropped. Kain says he was too optimistic about how soon Synthetix would be able to scale with optimistic roll-ups. If he were to do things again, he would probably use Polygon first and move to Optimism once the solution was ready. But last year was also a time to build on a strong foundation. He’s looking forward to the months to come, when all of that effort hopefully comes to light, with the protocol fully live on Optimism, with perpetual swaps expected to be launched too. He’s a firm believer that Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions will capture the most value being built in DeFi and web3. Thanking our podcast sponsors: Zerion Zerion is Mission Control for Web3: an intuitive DeFi portfolio manager, multichain tracking & trading and the best place to show off your NFT collection Matcha: Matcha makes sure you’re getting the best possible price by routing orders across all the various DeFi exchanges, now with an integrated fiat on-ramp. Start trading at matcha.xyz/defiant Nexo.io: Nexo is a crypto lending and exchange platform where you can buy cryptocurrencies at the touch of a button and start earning double-digit annual interest that is paid out daily. Unstoppable Domains: Go to unstoppabledomains.com and replace your long, complex wallet address with YourName dot crypto, dot x, dot nft or a range of other endings for as low as $5.