Next Wave of New Crypto Users Could Choose DeFi Over CeFi, According to Synthetix Founder Kain Warwick

Synthetix (SNX) founder Kain Warwick says there’s a chance that the next wave of people adopting crypto could end up preferring decentralized applications over their traditional centralized counterparts.

In a new interview on Real Vision Crypto, Warwick says decentralized finance (DeFi) markets may have gotten a little overheated in 2021 as investors became overly optimistic about what the sector could achieve.

Today, however, Warwick says that DeFi has mostly caught up to market participants’ expectations with a slew of developments and ecosystem growth.

“We’re a couple of years into [a bear market], and I think the reality is that the optimism about what DeFi would be able to deliver got ahead of the actual tech, and it’s taken us a couple of years to catch up.

And so I think if you look over the last six months, a lot of different DeFi protocols that were around in 2017-2018, have gotten to this point where I think that they are actually competitive with their CeFi (centralized finance) competitors, which has just not been a thing that we could really claim historically.”

With the industry and technology in better shape than in the previous market cycle, Warwick says there is now a decent chance that decentralized options can attract more new users than their centralized alternatives.

“So the next step in my mind, we’ve got a bunch of people in crypto that are still here, and being able to credibly capture that audience to within DeFi and get them off centralized exchanges, is the first step.

If we can do that, then the next wave of people that come in, whenever that happens, 2024-2025, I think we’ve got a decent chance of not having them get siphoned off into frauds and Ponzi schemes and things like that. We can actually keep them in DeFi where it’s ideally much safer and the transparency is there.”

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