Synethix founder Kain Warwick has given a date for when the decentralized exchange front-end and self-custodial account system Infinex is set to go live after several delays from its expected Q4 2022 launch. 

Infinex is targeting an official launch on May 13, Warwick said on May 2 at the ETH Global conference in Sydney, Australia.

Warwick said May 13 would mark the launch of the Infinex Account, which is described by the Infinex team as a "collection of cross-chain smart contracts that can be controlled, secured and recovered" by way of  Web2 authentication such as an email address login. 

Synethix founder Kain Warwick targets mid-May launch for Infinex DEX image 0 Source: Infinex

Warwick said that Infinex — which began as a decentralized front-end to access Synthetix liquidity and trading features — had evolved to become a more broad-scale platform aimed at reducing the barriers that prevented people from onboarding into DeFi. 

“There’s no denying that within DeFi or just on-chain generally that there's a lot more stuff to do. From a product perspective, or feature perspective, we have more features on chain than you could really replicate in a centralized exchange.”

Despite there being a greater diversity of applications on-chain, Warwick noted that crypto users were still utilizing centralized exchanges for crypto-related financial activity by a “significant margin.”

He explained despite the flaws of centralized exchanges being surfaced by events such as the collapse of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, crypto investors still didn’t make the leap into DeFi and instead opted to move to competitor exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase.

For Warwick, the barriers preventing users from onboarding into DeFi couldn't be traced back solely to products nor did it fall back to promises of increased safety. Instead, these onboarding issues were primarily rooted in issues with user experience.

He explained that Infinex would function as the "UX layer," offering a more centralized exchange-like interface for users to engage with decentralized applications on a range of blockchain networks including,Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Solana.

“It’s a really hard thing to do well, but I think we are at least getting pretty close on the Infinex side.”

Warwick added that Infinex would utilize social passkeys to enable users to log in via Web2 applications — such as a Google account — and reduce the “friction” that typically accompanies a standard Web3 user experience.

“The core component is you will have an account that you will own — it’s self-custodial — but you will be able to effectively login to that account via Web2,” Warwick said.

“The starting point of [Infinex] you can have an account, and then you can deposit into that account to earn governance points,” said Warwick. He added there would be a points-farming game that would run for the month following the launch.

On March 13, Infinex suffered a security breach which saw Warwick quickly take over as head of the project’s working group.

Synethix founder Kain Warwick targets mid-May launch for Infinex DEX image 1 Source: Infinex

Speaking to Cointelegraph Warwick said the security vulnerability was “part of the reason” Infinex’s launch — initially targeted for Q4 2023 — was delayed.

The security vulnerability was a social engineering attack that saw hacker gain access to a password vault, Warwick said. From there, they were then able to get into the protocol’s DNS store and modify Infinex’s DNS.

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“There were no funds at risk because we weren’t live — but just from learning a lesson sort of thing — even prior to being live, that just shouldn’t be able to happen,” he said.

“I came in and I brought a couple of other people in and we burned all of the systems to the ground and rebuilt everything from scratch. It’s now one of the most secure environments I’ve ever worked in.”

Warwick shared that the May 13 launch date is the proposed launch date that has been provided to Infinex's governing DAO — the Infinex Council — which still needs to vote on-chain to approve the launch.

He said he was confident the council would approve — but the decision starts and ends with the council.

Following Infinex’s launch, Warwick hopes to see it crack $50 million in total value locked and attract 10,000 genuine users within the first 30 days.

“We have 200,000 people on the waitlist but a lot of those are sybils, airdrop farmers and bots. We do think there’s a solid 10,000 [genuine] users on that list,” he said.

“If we have 5,000 to 10,000 people and 50 million of TVL — I feel like we’ve done something right.”

Warwick added that if the current market cycle were to remain bullish he expects to see “hundreds of thousands” of users join Infinex within a year of its launch.

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Additional reporting by Felix Ng.

Update (9:12 am UTC): This article has been updated to include further details of the Infinex platform.