The Defiant - DeFi Podcast

Kain Warwick—DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix and Infinex—is back on The Defiant Podcast with Camila Russo for a no-BS conversation at a pivotal moment: Infinex just ran its INX token sale and is heading into its TGE.
We get into:
Why Kain believes DeFi’s biggest bottleneck isn’t “more decentralization,” but UX + distribution

The hard lesson OG DeFi learned: users won’t “learn to love complexity”—the product has to be holistically better

The INX sale controversy: $2,500 cap → cap removed, one-year lockup stays, and why he says the sale “didn’t need to happen” (but still closed)

What he’d do differently: market-driven pricing for locked vs. liquid tokens (and why he thinks the liquidity premium is brutal right now)

Kaito / InfoFi: how incentives turned crypto Twitter into slop—and why he thinks it “blew up the public square”

What INX actually does: early access, fee discounts, governance—and what demand looks like from power users

Infinex’s product roadmap: Safe support, hardware wallets, integrating “competitors” like Hyperliquid, and the real metric he watches—share of wallet

The bigger vision: a one-stop, non-custodial front-end that can serve both whales and newcomers (and why that’s the only way DeFi competes with fintech)

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In this interview, Camila Russo sits down with Danny Ryan — former Ethereum Foundation researcher and a key leader behind Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake — now Co-Founder & President at Etherealize, to talk about the next big wave for crypto: institutional adoption of Ethereum.
Recorded in Buenos Aires during Devconnect, Danny breaks down why the mood inside banks has flipped from “we can’t touch crypto” to “if we don’t adopt it, we’ll be left behind.” We dig into what institutions actually want beyond ETFs, why the biggest opportunity isn’t “tokenizing assets” but rewiring markets from first principles, and why privacy is table stakes for institutional-grade onchain finance.
We also cover the regulatory whiplash of the last few years, what’s changed, what still needs to be written into law, and why Danny believes Ethereum is uniquely positioned for serious capital markets infrastructure.
Key topics:
Why banks suddenly have Ethereum FOMO

The difference between “tokenizing assets” vs rewiring markets

Where the biggest inefficiencies are (credit, fixed income, esoteric institutional markets)

Why privacy + ZK are essential for institutionsCoordination problems, incentives, and who doesn’t want markets to upgrade

Ethereum’s edge: neutrality, uptime, decentralization, and security

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In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Chris Storaker sits down with Alex Garn, Chief Product Officer at Borderless, to unpack how stablecoins are quietly transforming cross-border payments — and what it actually takes to move money at scale across jurisdictions.
Alex walks through Borderless’ role as an orchestration layer for global on- and off-ramps, why the company stays out of the flow of funds, and how a single API can replace dozens of fragmented integrations across local regulators, liquidity providers, and banking partners.
We explore why stablecoins are moving beyond trading and DeFi collateral into real-world enterprise payments, where they already outperform legacy rails on settlement speed, transparency, and custody — especially across emerging market corridors like Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The conversation also digs into the hard parts: liquidity constraints by corridor, KYC and compliance friction, why US–EU payments still favor SWIFT, and whether incumbents like Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT are more likely to be disrupted or to acquire their way into the future.
Finally, Alex shares his outlook on regulatory clarity post-GENIUS, the coming wave of corporate stablecoin adoption, and why distribution — not branding — will determine which stablecoins ultimately win.
00:00 — Intro: Alex joins The Defiant Podcast
01:30 — From DeFi & data science to stablecoin payments
04:10 — What Borderless does: orchestration vs custody
07:10 — Why cross-border on/off-ramps are still fragmented
10:00 — Stablecoins beyond DeFi: real enterprise payment use cases
12:45 — Treasury management, payouts, and B2B adoption
15:30 — Liquidity realities: when $10M+ stablecoin payments work
18:10 — Why US → Latin America leads stablecoin adoption
20:30 — Where stablecoins don’t win (yet): US–EU & SWIFT
22:50 — KYC as the biggest bottleneck in crypto payments
26:00 — Self-custody, bank risk, and corporate treasuries
29:30 — Stablecoins vs SWIFT: speed, cost, and settlement
33:00 — Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT, and the M&A race
36:40 — Regulation after GENIUS and global spillover effects
39:40 — What enterprise adoption looks like in the next 2–3 years
42:30 — Stablecoin fragmentation, liquidity, and consolidation
45:00 — Closing thoughts: what excites Alex most about the future

For consumer crypto to thrive it needs to embrace financialization to deliver a better experience, and maker sure crypto disappears everywhere else. Projects doing this right sit in an emerging sector called fantech. In this episode of the Avalanche Ecosystem Series, we explore the rise of Fantech: a new category where sports fans, music fans, creators, and event-goers become participants in real digital economies.
From loyalty programs and ticketing to creator monetization and on-chain rewards, we look at how these experiences get a 10x lift when they go onchain, and why Avalanche is emerging as one of the leading infrastructures powering this shift.
The episode opens with a real story from the Champions League final and expands into a global look at how blockchain is quietly reshaping fan engagement, payments, and ownership at scale.
Featured conversations:
Rain — using stablecoins to power global consumer payments and rewards
Uptop — building wallet-based loyalty for major sports teams
The Arena — enabling creators to monetize directly through social crypto
Tixbase — rebuilding ticketing with on-chain transparency and fan identity
In this episode:
Why loyalty and rewards are a multi-billion-dollar global marketHow on-chain points and fan engagement differ from traditional programs
Why ticketing may be one of the most natural consumer use cases for blockchainHow creators and fans are earning, not just speculating
Why Avalanche’s architecture is uniquely suited for consumer-scale apps
Why the future of consumer crypto won’t feel like crypto at all
Chapters:
00:00 – The Ticket That Didn’t Work
01:30 – What Is Fantech?
04:00 – Payments as the Base Layer
06:30 – Loyalty Goes On-Chain
10:00 – Social + Fan Economies
13:00 – Fixing Ticketing
17:00 – Why Avalanche Works for Consumers
19:00 – The Future of Fandom
Subscribe for more deep dives into crypto, DeFi, and the technologies reshaping finance and the consumer internet.

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams joins us right as the UNIfication (Unification) proposal has moved to a final governance vote—a sweeping plan from Uniswap Labs + the Uniswap Foundation that would activate protocol fees, introduce a programmatic UNI burn, and realign how value accrues across the Uniswap ecosystem. We go deep on what’s actually inside the proposal (and what isn’t), why this moment feels like the end of one DeFi era and the start of another, and how years of “regulation by enforcement” shaped Uniswap’s product decisions—down to Hayden’s firsthand experience with debanking, legal pressure, and the chilling effect on builders. What we coverWhy UNIfication is being pitched as a once-in-a-cycle reset for UniswapThe real mechanics of the fee switch(es) (plural) and how the “token jar” burn design worksThe perceived tension between UNI token holders vs. equity/VC value capture and whether this vote changes thatWhy Uniswap wants to shift from “best frontend” to protocol-first infrastructure (APIs, ecosystem engineering, aggregator hooks)How Unichain fits into the broader strategy—and what “near-free trading” could mean in practiceGovernance backlash: is Uniswap becoming more centralized or more decentralized?Context: the vote is live! Hayden shared that the UNIfication proposal is now in the final governance vote stage.Subscribe for more founder-level conversations at the intersection of DeFi, regulation, and market structure.