The 100+ expert speakers at this year’s SmartCon included founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To showcase their thought leadership during SmartCon’s 2022 event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with featured presenters.
After speaking with T-Systems Product Owner Tobias Jung, Malandrino talked to Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix, a protocol that brings derivatives to the crypto market by giving users exposure to real-world assets through synthetics on the Ethereum blockchain.
Warwick explained how Synthetix’s expanding suite of stablecoins goes beyond U.S. dollar-denominated currencies to track various assets including Bitcoin, silver, gold, and commodities.
Synthetix was the first project to integrate Chainlink Price Feeds back in 2019. In a recent episode of Chainlink’s Block Stories docuseries, Warwick described open-source tools like Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure as “one of the superpowers” of crypto, making it easier, faster, and cheaper to innovate world-changing new DeFi products.
“We’ve been working with Chainlink very closely for a long time,” he told Malandrino. “And we work with them on a number of things – cross-chain messaging, oracles, the whole suite of products.”
When asked about the biggest opportunities in DeFi, Warwick highlighted Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the gateway to a new echelon.
“At the moment, we’ve got this proliferation of alternative networks – you’ve got layer-2s, you’ve got different scaling solutions – and one of the things that we still haven’t worked out is how to communicate between them. And so something that Chainlink is really focused on at the moment is figuring out and solving that problem in the same way they’ve solved the oracle problem on a single network.”
Looking toward the future for Synthetix, Warwick described the protocol’s V3 as a complete re-architecture of the entire system that will facilitate faster iteration and experimentation in the creation of new products. “We’re going to have a lot more assets, a lot more different types of assets, different types of derivatives, and basically a much more efficient protocol,” he said.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Kain Warwick on Nasdaq TradeTalks.