Okay, we're rolling. Kane Warwick, founder of Infinex, welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me. You're a guy who really doesn't need an introduction, but I'd like for you to tell us anyway, but I want to kind of go backwards rather than how you got into crypto. I'd like know why you stay. Why are you still in crypto? Yeah, that's a that's a very challenging question, I suppose. Glutton for punishment, I guess. I think I think like, there's an element of of just liking hard problems. And cryptos is still full of hard problems. There's so many problems that we need to work on. You know, it's it's an industry that has so much potential. and so much upside, but we, you know, because it's so early, we've gotten stuck in dead ends, right? And when you get stuck in a dead end from a tech perspective, it requires someone to really step up and, you know, say, okay, I'm going to fix this problem, right? And we see that a lot. You know, you see, you see someone say the current equilibrium is broken. I'm going to work really hard and try and fix this thing, right? And I think that, you know, in particular with crypto, because barriers to entry are so low, there is a big onus on people who see problems to like step up and actually try and fix them. Because it's very easy to make money in crypto, just going along with the status quo. But I do think that, you know, there again, there's an onus on, especially those of us who've been around crypto for a little while, to like identify the problems and try and fix them. And do you feel that's your responsibility? I feel like in this very narrow slice, right? Of, you know, I've seen what DeFi looks like. I've seen why we built it the way that we did. I understand all the path dependency about how we got here. And so, you know, I feel like I'm in a position to try and address some of those issues, I guess, with, again, a set of trade-offs that to me resonate, right? Like there's different trade-offs that different people might choose, but, you know, in my case, still trying to maintain non-custodial you know, on chain aspects of crypto to get people using crypto. You know, I could have just said, fuck it, I'm just going to go and build another centralized exchange. But I felt like there was an opportunity to do something slightly different that would get a similar result for the end user. So that's that's been kind of what's driving, you know, this latest project, I guess. And the latest project is Infinex. Before we get into that, I'm going to read something, maybe get your reaction and then kind of get into Infinex a little bit more. So this is from Simon. I don't know who this gentleman is, but he said something pretty provocative about Infinex. He said, in the midterm, Infinex will outclass tier two exchanges and low tier platforms. In the long term, Infinex will surpass giants like Binance and Coinbase. Infinex will disrupt the current Launchpad ecosystem. Hardly anyone will use front ends of DEXes and bridges anymore, but automatically use their tech via Infinix. Infinix will become the DecaCorn, will become a DecaCorn at some point. And Infinix will be the first go-to DeFi app for hundreds of millions of users, including non-Web3 natives. So that's really a huge endorsement for Infinix, yeah. What's your reaction to that? And maybe we can get into some of the user-centric problems that you're trying to solve with Infinex. So I think that it's directionally correct. The assessment is directionally correct in the sense that the current status quo. is not satisfactory and is not stable. We're not in a stable equilibrium. This idea that a technology that enables decentralization and non-custodial storage of assets would be co-opted by a bunch of databases for the sole purpose of better UX is kind of insane. It's been going on for over a decade now that centralized exchanges have dominated crypto. And we've made inroads at different times. We've gotten better, brought people on chain and built a lot of infrastructure that runs on chain to let people do crypto transactions. So someone will solve this problem. Like in my mind, it's inevitable, right? And as I started building Infinex, I realized like how inevitable it was, like how much the infrastructure was pushing us in this direction to try and resolve this equilibrium. And I think that, you know, the status quo was very powerful in the sense that it's sometimes hard to even like think about how the world could look differently. right? And there's certain things that you just kind of come to accept, right? So the existence of centralized exchanges and you know, the role that they play in everyone in crypto's lives, right? Because no one really is able to avoid centralized exchanges, almost everyone has a centralized exchange account. You know, it's It's extremely dominant and it just feels unassailable. Like of course Binance will be around forever or Coinbase or whatever, right? You know, even funnily enough, I'm in a couple of groups and one of them is, you know, one of the Coinbase, Cabal, Bass groups, right? And they love Bass, obviously, you know, they love Aerodrum, they love, you know, Moonwell and all of these platforms, but they also love Coinbase. And so it's kind of interesting, right? It's like, yeah, but Coinbase is the best of a bad bunch and, they're moving on chain and they're doing all this good stuff. you know, it's like, okay, cool. But we understand, right, that Coinbase needs to cease existing. And I think that that's something that, you know, people, even a couple of years ago would have said, well, that's crazy, you know, especially towards the start of this like FTX ascendancy, this idea that, know, FTX was going to dominate crypto and it was going to be the biggest, you know, platform in crypto, the biggest company in crypto. And, you know, really undermined the value prop of centralized exchanges. So we need to figure out a way through this equilibrium. We need to disrupt it and we need to bring people on chain. But the way we've been doing it has not worked. So we need to try something new. What was the, I guess, the thought experiment in your mind? I mean, you're right. It's hard to imagine a world where Binance doesn't exist or Coinbase doesn't exist. But you almost have to imagine that world in order to really start from first principles and identify the key problems that needs to be solved through an application like Infinix or a platform like Infinix. Like you and the team, what was the, I guess, the thought experiments or the thinking behind, like, We need to build something that solves this problem. So starting Synthetix, which is the project that I ran before Infinix, the goal was always to take down finance, to take down centralized exchanges. Anyone building a DEX, whether it's Uniswap or Paradex or 0x or any of those OG exchanges that existed one inch, and there's a ton of them. Our goal, all of us, we were very clear about the fact that we were trying to take down centralized exchanges, yet we didn't. We hit some wall, some upper limit of adoption, right? And different people have kind of tried to model their way through this. Hayden has kind of moved to this mobile first idea and building an app that uses Uniswap, building UniChain, one inch. obviously leaned much more into the aggregation space and some of those projects I mentioned don't exist anymore. They weren't able to get through. And so it wasn't like the idea of taking down Binance or Coinbase or BitMEX or whatever. It was not in our minds. We just didn't know how to do it. We thought we did and we thought that we were doing the right thing. And we, again, we hit this upper limit of adoption. And I think that what, the, you know, the thought experiment for me building Infinix is like trying to work out from first principles, what that was. And the irony was that I didn't even know that it existed when I first started out, I was like, this hasn't worked and I don't know why. And like, you know, there was a lot of things that I believed as a DeFi founder that turned out to be wrong. And as I really started thinking through the process of how we'd approached adoption, I was like, wow, like we really got a lot of things wrong. We were building for the audience we had at the time, which was ideological DeFi early adopters. We never crossed the chasm to mainstream. We never got there, right? And we still haven't got there, but we're closer now. What makes you, well, let me back up. I'm curious about what things did you think you got wrong? You mentioned one of them for the audience that you were building for. And what makes you, I guess, more bullish now that you're on the right track? I guess the question kind of points to some customer development and speaking with non-native users. Like what that process looks like for your team. And what are you learning? So I think the interesting thing is there is a cohort of users that were on chain. We call them lazy whales, right? They were on chain and then they just like flopped onto the beach and they've just been laying there for like years, right? Not really doing anything. They're around, but like they're not chasing yield. They're just like kind of happy to just flop there, right? And those users are actually... such an important cohort for us. Because, you know, you need to ask the question, why did they stop doing stuff on chain? They got burned out. But like, that also begs like, how do get burned out doing a fun, cool thing? And it's like, well, it's fun and cool, but it's also terrifying. Right? It is incredibly hard. You've got to be learning constantly, you've got to be, you know, fearful constantly, right? Of course, they got burned out. Like it's, you know, but so there's this weird, kind of, cognitive dissonance of like, Hey guys, come back on chain. And they're like, yeah, on chains. Cool. We love it, but like, no, thank you. Right. So the question is, how do you get those people on chain? How do get them back on chain? How do you get them doing stuff on chain that in a way that won't cause them to burn out or that will be fun again for them? Right. And the answer is that you need to abstract away a bunch of things. Right. So we're not yet even going for a, you know, a Binance user or someone who has never touched crypto. We're not there yet. We need to bring the people who were in the early days on chain and got burned out from being on chain because it's a bit of a nightmare to be on chain, if we're honest with ourselves. Right. And so removing that is kind of key. Now the persona of Lazy Whales, that something that you and your team came up with in the development of Infinex? Yeah, it's something we sort of discovered, right? We started talking to people and we're like, so what are you doing on chain? And like, you know, they would pretend like they were doing stuff on chain and then you would dig in and you're like, what was the last thing that you did on chain? And they're like, uh, I looked at my balance and it's like, wait a second, like you haven't done anything on chain in a long time. Right. And in fairness, you know, I was kind of in this mode as well. I was, I was in this mode where, um, you know, I had a lot of assets in multi-sigs, um, in Gnosis. It was painful to do transactions. would sign a transaction occasionally, but I wasn't exploring. wasn't experimenting in the way that I had been. And it took going to the Solana ecosystem for me to really get back into experimentation. But I also was like, this is effort. Like this is a concerted effort on my part to like learn about this stuff and like really focus and pay attention to it. in a way that I hadn't been sort of willing to expend that effort, you know, for a while. And it was it was super interesting. I learned a bunch of things. But it was effortful and scary. And there were a bunch of times where I was like, I could break myself so easily here and, you know, send money to the wrong place or get fished or whatever. And so You know, what I realized is, okay, cool. We want to get a lot of these lazy whales back on chain, but we need to do it in a way that makes it easy for them and they don't need to think about it. And, you know, they've got different issues, like whales and OGs have different issues. One of the main issues is your assets are spread everywhere. And so, okay, I want to do, you know, I see something on crypto Twitter and a lot of them are still on crypto Twitter, right? LARPing is being on chain and doing stuff and you're paying attention, right? but they will see something on crypto Twitter and they'll go, no. And so it's like, how do we get that interest that, know, their interest, they're like, there's a new thing, right? How do we get that interest and allow them to really quickly go, no, that's okay. I've got some USDC. I'm going to click a button and go and do the thing, right? That's the goal. Just make it as easy as possible. If you see a thing, you can just quickly go and do it, right? And that requires a lot of behavior modification and like reeducation and you know, a bunch of stuff that that is important about like ingraining new habits of how to interact on chain, which we're in the process of doing. the, the persona of lazy whales fun, kind of funny, cause I think you, you and totally had a, had a exchange about this today. And I just want to read that just to kind of share with the audience so that they understand what, lazy whale potentially looks like. because of my position, I don't even trade on chain every once in a while, I'll do a USDC USDT $1 swap to test priority fee pricing. And then your response was, I'm actually not surprised to hear this, to be honest. So many OGs don't actually do things on chain. Dust off your Infinix account, sir. You'll find it's quite magical to be on chain again. Now, I guess the return of magic is pretty special. Is that the vision that you have that get these not just lazy whales, but people that have felt burnt out from chasing yield and doing a million kind of, know, like all these transactions we have to... and bridging and this and that. It's draining, like it's very, very draining. And yeah. to put out that ad with the like little device, like it just works right with the one button. And then someone like created the like 18 actual real buttons that you have to press to do the thing. Right. and, and it's like, why are you lying about this? Like literally, like you're, know, someone in their marketing teams, like it just works. You click a button. It's like, that's the last button, bro. Like that's the last button. You had to click a bunch of buttons to get there. And, you know, look, I don't know that totally is like, that feels like a bit of cope to me. Like, I don't know what his, what exactly what he said meant was like, because of my position, I don't know what that means. Right. I, I'm not even sure that he knows what it means, but, the reality is that we haven't made it easy even on his own chain for him to just be on chain, you know, Um, and, and we can make that easy. We have, we've made, you know, just buying a meme coin or whatever, right? Like, and, know, this is the interesting thing. And it kind of, it happened to Vitalik a little bit, I think, um, where he got to this point where he was too worried about doing things because it would seem like an endorsement. Um, and I, talked to him about this last year and said, you know, it's important that you endorse things. Founders want to be endorsed. by you. You you're the leader of Ethereum, right? And I think this is true about totally as well. You know, founders want him to be using their protocols. I'm sure they ask him all the time, right? So, okay, now, maybe he feels like he shouldn't be using, you know, stuff on chain for some reason. Maybe there's some, you know, regulatory reason. I don't know, again, I don't know what he meant by because of my position, but If we assume for a second that it's just like, it's not easy for him to do stuff and you know, whatever, we can fix that problem. We have fixed that problem. We can make it easy. So, you know, if someone launches some cool new yield bearing token on Solana, Tolly should be able to just go and buy a thousand bucks of it in like really one click, right? You know, we're not there yet, but you know, we're probably down to like three clicks. You've to log in and then you've got to search for the asset and then click the button and buy it. So I think that it's another example of someone who should be on chain, but we haven't made it easy for them to be on chain. Yeah, I went to grad school with this guy named Aza Raskin. I don't know if you've heard of him. His dad invented the Mac and he subsequently later wrote a book called Humane Interface. And he's known for a phrase that I've kind of remembered all throughout my career. He said that the best interaction is no interaction. And it's pretty profound if you think about it. know, Bezos kind of said the same thing as like the best kind of Perk like buying experience on Amazon is where you don't have to call customer service and have something to do. Like you don't want to deal with it. You just want to buy it, get it, move on with your life. And it sounds like you're taking a similar approach in abstracting all of the kind of the nitty gritty kind of non-value added steps that are required right now. Let's talk about that as you think about Infinix from a product perspective, user experience. Like, what were those things that you wanted to eliminate from the user experience? You know, what's interesting is, and this is, think, a holdover from DeFi, right? There are a bunch of requirements that you feel, I feel, and I think DeFi builders feel, right, are important or critical, right? Or like showstoppers, right? Like, no, no, no, it has to do this thing, right? And one of the things that I think... is a huge impediment to UX is this idea of interoperability. That anyone should be able to turn up with any wallet on any DAP and sign any transaction. And it's like, OK, cool. So if that's a requirement for us, right? that any arbitrary combination of things can be put together to do a transaction on chain, on Ethereum at least. What's the trade-off there? Right? Because there's an implicit trade-off. And that's the thing that I think from an ideological perspective, we just said, yeah, there's trade-offs, but they're fine. We're not even going to interrogate them, right? And the trade-offs are like, The trade-offs are horrifically bad. Like they're horrifically bad, right? You just in principle cannot create a good user experience if one of your requirements is that the thing, like just look at wallet interfaces. Like I remember when... When your ethers first like rolled out there, like, you know, little wallet thing, and you could kind of pick from a list of there's like a hundred now, right? Like you could make that wallet selection screen. So scroll to infinity now, right? Like find the, find your wallet and like work it out. And then people were like, okay, well, that's really annoying. We don't want to have to like scroll through a bunch of wallets. So what if we just like hop onto the same API as a different wallet, right? So phantoms just like, we'll just use MetaMask. And then the dApp's like, wait, are you MetaMask? Are you phantom? And it would get, you know, super confused. And it's like, guys, there are so many issues with having this like universal interoperability, right? Once you control the full stack. And you know, this is a very Apple like thing, right? If you want to build good software, you know, you've got to build the hardware, right? You can't just turn up and buy some off the shelf thing and be like, yeah, we'll just install this on anything and see what happens. Like you want to control the end to end experience, you need to control the full stack. And so we said, look, you know, and there are trade-offs with this, right? But we were comfortable with those trade-offs and we've gone in sort of eyes wide open to these trade-offs and The reality is that people are really happy with them because the user experience is better. so removing the requirements that don't make sense. And also I will say that we're in a slightly privileged position to be able to remove these requirements because of all of the work that has been done in DeFi over the last five, six, seven years where there are alternatives. I wouldn't want a world where Infinix was the only alternative. I do want a world where there is this open DeFi web where you do have interoperability. But that's the world we've been stuck in for the last four years and haven't been able to break out of. So we need to see our way through that and cross that chasm to more mainstream adoption, including a re-adoption by our own OGs who have stopped doing stuff on chain because it's so painful. Let's talk about those trade-offs and building kind of the vertical stack and owning the end-to-end customer experience. What were some of those known trade-offs? I imagine security versus user experience is one. So the main requirement, and this was a process, when we first started Infinex, I still had a list of 50 defi requirements that were nonsense, that I had not yet been able to unwind from my psyche. But the core requirement that we have not let go of is this idea that it needs to be non-custodial. We need to not be able to take your money. And also, we need to not be able to a non-negotiable. non-negotiable that like, otherwise we're just building Binance again. Right. And we've had that it's not, you know, it's, not the long-term stable equilibrium in my mind. Right. The long-term stable equilibrium is we have very usable non-custodial interfaces where you can't get robbed. And we have a wide variety of them. I don't think this is a winner take all in the same way that we've always had like 10 exchanges that had meaningful adoption. Right. I think we'll be in a situation where we have, you know, five or 10, at least in the short term, different Infinex like interfaces that are trying to bring people on chain in different ecosystems with different approaches, with different trade offs. But my view is that in order for those to sort of qualify, right, as, as, you know, except as an acceptable next step out of this existing, you know, status quo. They must be non-custodial. If they're custodial, it's like you're just LARPing as, you're Binance again, but trying to like hide it or something like that. Right. So, we need to have that as the core goal. And then with that single goal, we need to replicate the UX of a Binance or Coinbase. Right. You know, and we can improve things, of course, right. But we need to be at least as good as they are. at doing the things that the average person wants to do. Got it. So first principle that's non-negotiable is non-custodial. And then what about other trade-offs like security versus usability? Did you have, I guess, a matrix and you just kind of plotted through which ones are more important than the other? I mean, you know, as I said, there was a long list of requirements, right? And then it was like, actually not real, not real, not real, not real. And it was just like crossing off requirement after requirement after requirement, sometimes through like a lot of psych, psychic pain, right? Being like, no, this has to like, can't let, and then I was like, actually that's dumb. Well, let's talk about that process because some of these things are quite entrenched, right? Like in your mind, it's like, this is real. Like we must have this, but it turns out you don't. How did you arrive at that and like the thought process that you and the team went through? I think what we, you know, I had all of the requirements in my head from building in DeFi, right, for a long time. So that was the easy part. I'd already learned all the requirements, right? And so I would be like, no, no, no, we have to do this, right? This is an important thing. So one of the examples, right, is like censorship resistance. We kept trying to be censorship resistant. And then I realized that actually it doesn't matter. there's a very important distinction between censorship resistance and being non custodial. Right. And one thing that was even more interesting about that is as I started unwinding what being censorship resistant really meant, right. And whether we'd achieved it internally to use the the Oldman meme. We hadn't, we had not achieved censorship resistance internally in DeFi. All of our front ends are running on AWS. We tried to like pin stuff to IPFS and it was a nightmare. And we're like, this is that like, this is too bad. We can't let people use this. Like DAPs are bad enough, but like that was like a, you know, a bridge too far. And so we just all accepted that all of our DAPs running in AWS. They're all using DNS. They're all using like existing internet infra that is absolutely censorable. So then you go, okay, well, you know, you can just go directly on chain, right? So at least they're non-custodial, but then you go, hang on a second. If this is, if you can censor Aave by shutting down the front end, right? And people are forced to go on chain to interact with it, then... Is there a middle ground here where it's like, we're going to give you better functionality, but that functionality could be taken away, but your assets can't be taken away. Like, is that a part of the trade off space that is acceptable? And we kind of over and again, through a lot of like psychic pain and suffering, I was able to get myself to a point where I was like, yes, that's actually okay. Right. If we can onboard someone to crypto and then this, you know, If you look at the Uber story, I think that it's a really interesting story from the perspective of like the challenges that they had from entrenched interests that were trying to push back. And they had this multi-front war. It wasn't like it was a single universal battle that they were fighting, right? In every single city that entrenched interests that they had to deal with, like on a case by case basis, different personalities or whatever. And they would send these groups to like create a beach head, right? A group of like five or 10 people to create a beach head in that city and just like steamroll them. Right. But the end goal, the thing that they realized was if you had sufficient demand from users, then the entrenched interests would lose. All it took was having enough demand from users and they would fault because they would see the writing on the wall that like, if everyone wants this thing, you're, you can't be the person who's like, no, sorry. You can't have this new technology because I'm being paid by the taxi medallion guys. Like it's just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Right. and so we, we got to a point where we were like, okay, if we can build a thing that is so useful to people. that they want it, then it probably won't be censored. Adoption is the best antidote to censorship. If you can get enough demand from people, then it makes it really hard to censor something. We saw this in the crypto wars, like the original crypto wars in the late 90s, that more utility was the thing that allowed everyone to kind of break the back of this regime that was trying to stop the export of cryptography. It was like, do you want people to be able to do things online and have privacy and send emails? And all of a sudden people were like, yes, I want that. And then it's like, well, you need this thing. And if you're not allowed to, you know, export that technology, then you're not going be able to do all this cool stuff that the internet is enabling. And it was just like game, like it all kind of unraveled over the course of a couple of years, right? It was a huge fight for a long time, but utility is what broke the back of the censorship. Right. And, you know, so I strongly believe that utility in crypto is the thing that will break the back of this anti. crypto sentiment that we've been fighting for the last three or four years. Now, obviously we have a new regime, there's a new world or whatever, but we also still have Europe as much as it's a joke, right? Europe doesn't love crypto and we need to figure out how we're going to push through adoption there. There's going to be other localized battles for the hearts and minds of crypto users. So there's a lot of work, but the key thing, the thing that we've seen in every technological adoption cycle, is user demand is the thing that will break the back of entrenched interest trying to prevent adoption. I think you said a quotable there. Adoption is the antidote to censorship. I think there's a lot to unpack there, but let's maybe switch to something to a piece of messaging that I think is quite important that I wanna kinda talk about. You use post-CEX era in some of the messaging that I've seen for Infinex. us what you mean by that and what your vision is. So Bitcoin emerged from the mind of Satoshi. And there was no infrastructure for doing things except for the Bitcoin infrastructure. You could send Bitcoins to people. It was all peer-to-peer. It is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It's right there in the title of the white paper. Right. The idea was to remove middlemen so that individuals could transact, you know, in a censorship resistant way value online. And it's still one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind in my mind. Right. This ability to leverage the internet to be able to transact with this kind of bearer asset. It's magical. Right. But Peer to peer transactions are not easy to do. And they're annoying and they require like level of education around the tech and you know, especially when the system is nascent and it hasn't built up a lot of info, right? So what happens 20 minutes later? Someone turns up and says, hey, come to my website. send all your bitcoins here and I'll make a market and you know, it'll be great. Right. Now, you know, there were a few different places where this happened, right. You know, obviously you had more peer to peer stuff, right. Like Silk Road, dark web markets that were more tour like or, you know, torrent like in their approach to things. And that's a world where I think, you know, the adoption curve could have gone in that direction, right. Where it was all very peer to peer. But the reality is that a centralized service like middlemen exists for a reason, right? They make the world more efficient. so, you know, someone turned up and said, send me all your Bitcoin and it's going to be great. You can do all this cool stuff inside my platform. Um, and it's going to be faster and better and cooler or whatever. And then it's all gone. Right. And you, and you know, you would think after Mount Gawks that like, if there wasn't some very powerful centralizing force in all of us in how people coordinate that we would have gone, okay, lesson learned. Never again. We can never send out Bitcoin to some random guy into his website. Like let's learn our lesson and we'll take the three or four or five years or whatever it'll take to build all this P2P infrastructure and get it working. But no, we just like some other dude turned up and was like, put it in my box. And so we had this moment in time where we sort of could have almost learned the lesson and we didn't for a lot of reasons, very obvious reasons to do with human psychology. and everything, right? And that was the start of the sex era. The failure of Mt. Gox and the failure of us to respond to the incentives and say never again and just allow the next box to turn up and say, yep, throw your Bitcoins in here and you can do stuff. That started the sex era and we're still in it. Now, I would say probably like 2017, 2018 was maybe like the peak. Maybe 2019 was the peak of the centralized exchange era in the sense that like what the percentage of crypto transactions, right of transactions that happened value exchanges that happened in the crypto ecosystem that was happening on centralized exchanges was at its peak. And then post that in 2019, you know, the rise of DeFi summer through 2019 into into 2020. There was a little bit of, you know, a pullback. in that centralization, right? And, you know, we had, I guess, a moment where it looked like we might be able to replace centralized exchanges. But then, as I said at the start of our conversation, we hit this wall, this adoption wall, which was that you needed to be an early adopter. need to care about the tech, either ideologically or for tech's sake, right? to be willing to put the effort in to learn how to do all of this stuff to be able to even adopt the technology. And so, versus Binance, that was not going to work. So if we're going to replace centralized exchanges and usher in this post centralized exchange era where we don't put our crypto inside some guy's box on the internet and we maintain our own self custody and we do things on chain, we need better UX. That's been the thing that has prevented adoption and prevented this transition away from centralized exchanges. Gotcha. I want to tell you a story and then I'd love for you to explain Swidge in the context of this story. So prior to me entering crypto, a long time ago, I used to do lots of a, I was a lean manufacturer and did a lot of Kaizen events at hospitals and factories and I worked at Amazon for a while. And one of the, the kind of Kaizen events that, that was pretty popular was to do time and motion studies. And so in hospital, for example, if you're a nurse and you're caring for a patient, you know the number of times that you touch a thing actually matters. How many steps matters. And if you're able to shave off just a few minutes from the care of a patient, it allows you to do something else. Maybe care for the patient for another patient. And so these time and motion studies, they can become quite complex, but that's part of the problem. is that there's sometimes in the system too much complexity, which then means it takes more time, more steps. And then when there's more steps, there's more potential for error and all of that affects the patient. And so maybe take the story I just shared in the context of SWIDGE and tell us kind of what the thinking is behind SWIDGE and what steps SWIDGE eliminates. So, you know, one thing that I think is interesting there is like, if you're a nurse, it's not your hobby. You're not just turning up to the hospital to like, you know. hang out with a couple of patients and do some stuff for a few hours and then take off. It is your job, you're being paid to be there. And so whether it's efficient or not, you're going to be there. You're going to work your way through things. Ideally, you want it to be more efficient than less efficient, but you don't have a choice on some level. That's your career. That's where you're paid to go to work and do a job. For most people in crypto, it's not their job, it's a hobby. And so there is a break point in terms of adoption where if something is too inefficient and too complex, people will just stop doing it. So the goal of what we've built with Switch is to make it easy enough, make it efficient enough that you can go from seeing a thing or your friend telling you about a thing or your Uber driver or whatever to doing it in as few steps as possible. Right. And also in a way that doesn't require you to learn anything new. You interact with, uh, infinite in the same way that you interact with Facebook. You click buttons and things, you don't click a button and then like, uh, you know, database query pops up and you need to like start, you know, modifying the SQL to like figure out how it's crazy or like check to make sure that the button's doing what it says that it will do. Right. Like, you know, there's all this wild stuff that happens in crypto that would not be acceptable anywhere else. Right. Um, and I think one of the reasons for that is incentives. People are incentivized, even though it's your hobby, right? You'd also get paid to do it. And so it's this weird situation in between the nurse who's paid to be there and has to be there no matter how inefficient it is and someone who is doing a thing for fun, but there's no financial incentive, right? Crypto, it's like a weird hobby where you get paid to do it. And so people will put up with more bullshit than they would in almost any other hobby, right? But if you make it easy, then you will have more adoption for the hobby. And that's good for everyone, right? Because more people doing stuff in crypto means more adoption, more innovation, more investment. And we will be able to sort of realize the promise of the tech itself. Yeah. What about this? So my understanding with Swidge, it's a swap at a bridge. Is that correct? Yeah, it's a mashup of Swap and Bridge. Yeah, exactly. I love by the way, because you can brand that and it's memorable. What I love about it is, so I led growth at Harmony and Harmony had a big issue with the bridge and over 100 million was, know, by the North Koreans. And bridges are scary. Like they are absolutely terrifying, right? What I love about Swidge is you abstract lots of things to where All you care about now is just, I wanna buy Barra with, let's say, Sol, in the current world, I would have to, first of all, approve, so cross a bridge, but approve the transaction, actually move Sol over to Barra, to Barra chain, buy, and then, and if I wanna go back, then I gotta do the same thing, just the other way. Here, you're eliminating multiple steps, and, But what it does is it allows you to focus on what you really want, which is, just want Barra. Exactly. And even more so though, right? You skipped a step, which is an assumption which a lot of us make, right? Which is that you have an EVM wallet. What if you're a Solmaxie and you've never done an EVM transaction? And for whatever reason, bear was the thing where you're like, all right, I've faded everything in eight land. I've faded optimism, faded, arbitrary, faded polygon, faded everything, but bear I'm in right? Like these guys are cracked and I want to, I want to get access to it. Okay, cool. But you've never set up an EVM wallet. You've only been in Solana at that point. You've got to get out a new wallet. You've got to figure out a seed phrase again. Remember you like maybe you set up your slalom wallet two years ago and you looked up how best to do it But you only did it once two years ago And so now you're like do I write down my seed phrase? Like is it okay to put it in my password manager? You can't remember exactly the process and now you're like, it's not worth it It's not worth it, right? Whereas if you have an Infinex account, even if you've never interacted with any EVM chain, you just go, I won't bear it. Click a button, done, right? So even for all of us who have multiple wallets and you've got a stockware wallet and a Cosmos wallet and all of this stuff and it's already all set up, it's annoying. But for someone who's never done anything in Cosmos, it's not annoying. It's like a hard stop. You're done, right? You're not gonna even bother to it. Yeah, yeah. I love that. And I think abstracting the complexity from the user is so admirable and that it's actually coming into fruition in Infinex is really amazing. Tell us about how you plan on growing adoption of Infinex. I believe Kaito is probably part of the strategy as well as the patron NFT. Tell us what you're doing there to grow the community. Yeah, so I think crypto adoption is challenging, right? Because you have a whole layer of incentives over and above normal adoption, right? Normal growth hacking and virality, right, that you have in Web2 products, because it's money. You know, okay PayPal was able to kind of tap into this right and say okay sign up someone will give you $10 Give them $10 and you know spend however much money VC money to get adoption, right? And look, it's PayPal right like it worked right like they invented the idea of paying people to use stuff It's a little bit harder if you're Facebook, right? You need to really have product market fit or Instagram, right? Like you need to really have a good product and make sure that it's well honed and low friction and easy to adopt and all of that stuff in order to, you know, hit virality, right? And really, you know, hack adoption. In crypto, you have money, you can just give people money to do things. Now the downside for that is it's a much more competitive ecosystem. If you were, you know, if, if it was okay to give people equity in early stage startups to use your products, right. And you were in a market where you were, let's say competing for the online photo sharing market. Right. And there were five competitors and they're all just like pumping money into users. Right. And users are just jumping from one to the other, to the other. That sounds like a nightmare. Like who'd want to compete in that market? Right. Like how do you get differentiation when there's like this other incentive laid on top that's much more powerful than the actual product itself. That's crypto. That's everything that we're dealing with. So the noise floor is incredibly high in crypto. You have very strong factors that are distorting the actual underlying incentives for usage. That obscure the adoption. So you don't know whether you've got real adoption or civils or industrial farmers or whatever, right? And so the thing that we are focused on obviously is you're in you're in that environment, you can't sidestep it. You can't, you know, bury your head in the sand and pretend like that's not the case. You need to actually play that game. So you need to have the right incentives for people that's table stakes. If you don't have incentives, then you it doesn't matter how good the product is, it's very hard to get cut through. So you need to have the right incentive structure in place. You know, the the products in crypto that have reached significant adoption without incentives are like you can count them on one hand. You know, have to be in the top point 0001 % of product market fit, utility, user adoption, narrative, you know, alignment, etc. It's very hard to break through that. So we think that we are there from a utility perspective, we're there from the narrative, right? We've got a very powerful narrative. People are looking for applications. They're sick of, you know, just trying out info for info sake, right? So we've got the right precursors for significant adoption, but then we need to layer on incentives. We have to find a way to do that. What we have done though is been very careful to ensure that we don't do it too early. Because we don't want to distort the signal, right? We don't want to amplify a signal that's not really there and make it look like there's product market fit when there's not. This is very much product market fit game. So we're waiting to roll out incentives until we see some organic traction. And we're seeing that now. We're seeing people come to us and say, I've actually taken all my hot wallets and put them into Infinex because I'm, you know. The third time that I was like, where is that money? Because I want to buy that thing. I'm like, I'm done with this. I'm just putting it into Infinix. then so we're seeing that like organic traction where people are doing the behaviors even without being incentivized. The next step is OK, look at those behaviors. All right, we're going to pay you to empty your hot wallets. So now if you connect your hot wallet to Infinix and put all the funds into it, we will give you incentives to do that. because it's the right behavior, right? Like we've got that viral loop, we've got that behavior loop. Now let's actually layer on incentives. And so it's a very delicate balance between genuine utility and product market fit and the right incentive layers at the right time to amplify it and grow it. It's not an easy thing to do, but we're being very, very careful and judicious about how we approach it to ensure that We don't jump ahead of ourselves and start incentivizing something that's not useful. That makes sense. Tell us about the Kaito campaign. I guess what led to you working with Kaito and how's that going so far? So we try to be in the trenches and we see what people are talking about. And so I saw Kaito popping up and I saw that it was getting a level of adoption and attention. And in crypto, attention is the most important currency. When everyone has a money printer, what they don't have is an attention printer. And so Kaito was very clearly printing attention. They created this shelling point where everyone was focused on this thing. And they'd worked out an incentive structure that was incentivizing the behaviors that they wanted, right, for people to be talking about the specific topics. you know, of course, everything gets gamed. That's fine. And a lot of people look at a system that's being gamed and say, well, it's being gamed, so it's useless, right? But that's not the case. crypto, everything gets game. So if your criteria for something being useful is that it's not being gamed, you're going to have a bad time. Right. So we saw that Kaito was getting both organic and inorganic traction. And we were like, all right, this is the thing that we want to lean into. And so now we've, I think in the next like 48 hours or something, we're going to have a leaderboard for people to talk about Infinix. And that's critical for amplification. When we did the patron sale, we tried to get as wide an option as possible. have, you know, 1500 high value members of the community that bought patrons, you know, from builders to influencers to educators to researchers. Like there's a really wide range of people, but you still need to make sure that they're talking about it. And so, you know, adding on that layer of, okay, there's a game that everyone's playing that's an attention game. And also I've got incentive alignment with Infinex. through the patron sale, now you've got something that could really take off. That's cool. Yeah, I pointed all my Yaps and my smart followers to Infinex, just so you know. Kane, this has been really, really instructive, and I'm excited for you guys. I'm excited for Infinex, and I really look forward to participating and doing what I can to help Infinex be successful. Thank you, yeah, we're excited. I'm excited, honestly, in a way that I probably haven't been since DeFi Summer, like really feeling like we've got a thing that is going to break out and people are gonna be very excited by. And just watching people, you know, when they have that first interaction and go, I get it now, right? Like that's pretty magical. That's really cool. And it sounds like you guys are building in the right way. You're abstracting all the complexity from the user and making it delightful again. And that's, we've needed that, you know, that type of magic in crypto. And I haven't seen that in a while. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. There's still a lot of stuff for us to deliver. There's a lot of utility. know, one of the challenges I think is that there's been so much amazing stuff that's been built. It's this weird, you know, perverse, kind of effect of like, choice paralysis. There's so many different yield farms that I could go into and yield bearing assets that you just go, I don't even want to you know, go down that rabbit hole because I know it's going to be like a two week exercise, right? And so people just go, I'm just going to sit in rap steak. But actually there's like a ton of stuff that's amazing that you could go into. Well, it's funny you say that one of my questions that I actually wrote down was around the paradox of choice because there's so many options and so many yields, know, yield farms people could be chasing that if you build that into the product, and we don't need to talk about this now, we need to end, but it could actually create more complexity. then the outcome of that is, okay, forget it. I'm just not going to deal with it. And then they leave. So finding ways to be opinionated and filtering things is going to be really critical for us. Yeah, yeah. So the curation aspect is going to be really interesting. Well, Kane, thank you so much. And we look forward to supporting you and your team on Infinex. awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.