At What Price Freedom? Stopping ‘All-Out Crime’ in Crypto Market Making – Ep. 809

As DeFi continues to evolve, the challenge of finding a balance between decentralization and protection from all manner of exploits persists.

The founder of Infinex, Kain Warwick, joined the show to talk about:

• How crypto market makers have at times veered into “all-out crime”
• What market making looks like today
• Playing chart games with token allocations
• What Kain looks at when evaluating tokens
• Why Binance kicked a MOVE market maker off its platform
• The $JELLY attack on Hyperliquid and the problem of centralization in DeFi
• What problems in crypto Kain is attempting to solve with Infinex

Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com

Thank you to our sponsors!

• Bitwise

Guest:

• Kain Warwick, founder of Infinex App and Synthetix
• Previous appearances on Unchained:
• 2025 Will Be a Year of Crypto Competition. Can Ethereum Make a Comeback?

Links:

Crypto Market Making

• Kain Warwick: Discussion about market makers
• Binance: What happened with MOVE on Binance
• Coindesk: Binance Offboards Market Maker That It Said Made $38M Profit on MOVE Listing
• Bloomberg: Citadel Securities Plots Jump Into Crypto Trading After Trump’s Embrace

Hyperliquid

• Unchained: Hyperliquid Saved Itself a $15 Million Loss, but Sparked Criticism

Infinex

• The Block: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick launches Infinex
• The Block: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invests in Infinex’s Patron NFT sale as total amount raised hits $67.7 million

Timestamps:

👋 0:00 Intro 

💭 03:30 Thoughts on crypto market makers

🙊 05:54 ICO-era market makers engaging in ‘all-out crime’

🦹 09:33 Extracting value in an inefficient market

💸 11:28 How crypto market making has evolved in recent years

😨 16:53 The low float meta problem

📊 19:49 Why Kain evaluates tokens on FDV rather than market cap

⁉️ 25:06 What happened with MOVE on Binance

😱 31:14 Citadel as a market maker?

🥷 35:48 The $JELLY attack on Hyperliquid and the problem of centralization

🔧 44:59 The problems Kain is trying to solve with Infinex

🌎 54:13 Building a web vs. mobile app

👂 56:17 Echo group integration with Infinex

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