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

Unchained

Laura Shin

News, Tech News, Business News

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, thank you for supporting Unchained, where we do our best to help you stay on top of Crypto News.
0:07.0	If you enjoy the show, we'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment right now to leave us a five-star review.
0:13.5	This helps other listeners discover Unchained.
0:16.5	And who knows, you may hear me read your review on an upcoming episode.
0:22.6	I tweeted this. I was like,
0:29.5	this is just the start. The first time someone was able to kind of put toxic flow into the vaults, I was like, they only escalate from here, which is true. And we're seeing it, right?
0:35.3	Once people see that there's money to be made,
0:38.0	then they will now be probing everything, right?
0:42.7	Every single angle, every single potential exploit,
0:45.9	they'll keep doing it, right?
0:47.3	And so my view was that this was going to escalate,
0:49.9	they were going to find other flaws,
0:51.8	and it is a really challenging thing to have a live system that
0:56.0	you know you there's a trade off between locking a thing down and making it exploitable and making
1:01.2	it useful and you have to find that trade off space in real time it's a nightmare
1:15.0	hi everyone welcome to unchained your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featured quotes from listeners on the show. Today, we have comments
1:20.3	responding to my interview with Doug Colcott about the jelly attack on hyperliquid. On X, Joshua
1:26.2	Carlson says, quote, it's either decentralized or it's not.
1:30.3	A platform should not claim it is fully decentralized if at any moment humans can intervene
1:35.6	to change the rules or circumstances in its own or others favor. What's the difference between
1:41.1	that and a human at a bank deciding that it's no longer going to let people withdraw their money or make trades or turn off the system for a day or two while
1:48.9	it fixes its risk posture?
	...

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