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KW Kain Warwick Founder of Synthetix and Infinex, two projects in decentralized finance.

“There's actually a much more elegant solution that the clanker found in like seven seconds. You spent your whole life doing this, and then the clanker is just so much smarter than you. And literally, it was like, why don't you just use the token authority to create an approval to transfer the tokens?”

Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026

“There's actually a much more elegant solution that the clanker found in like seven seconds. You spent your whole life doing this, and then the clanker is just so much smarter than you. And literally, it was like, why don't you just use the token authority to create an approval to transfer the tokens?” — Kain Warwick, Unchained

Context

Kain Warwick recounts how Synthetix had long believed it couldn't recover tokens stolen in the Binance hack without rewriting token state. 'Clanker' is his word for an AI model, which spotted a much simpler route.

Transcript

Unchained Around 31:16 into the episode
Kain Warwick

It's not baked into the

Adam Sadowski

…now for it's really the first time this has been possible to have like a neutral infrastructure that has proven high integrity where developers, risk managers, protocol teams can implement their own custom logic into these off-chain systems that integrate with the on-chain component of the system.

Kain Warwick

All right. Let's let's go through a couple more of the incidents here. So one involved synthetics. So I can. I can speak to that directly. So, so we got up, and I think like 20, maybe 20 million or 25 million or something like that. Uh, SNX, it's like solidly like 10-15% of the total supply of SNXs on Binance, right? So, anything happens to Binance, I'm like, definitely that's waking me up, right? So, um, so it was my morning, and I was like, okay, let's figure out what's going on here. Um, you know, we identified the wallet, uh, I think it was about 9 million SNX had been stolen. Um, but because synthetics has historically said, eh, there's nothing we can do, um, they didn't bother to do anything with it, they just let it sit there. They're probably like, yeah, we got years before these guys figured their shit out, right? Um, but unfortunately, it was it was not to be um, because we were like, All right, hang on a second, this is clearly North Korea, the biggest hack in history. Like, we cannot sit here and do nothing. Like, let's go back to first principles and ask the question…

Taylor Monahan

Oh. And I was like,

Kain Warwick

no, no, no, we can't do that. Literally, like, this is in the office. People were talking. And I was like, no, no, no, that wouldn't work. We can't do it because it wouldn't work. And one of the guys is like, Opus is pretty convinced that it would work. And I was like, fuck that guy. He doesn't…

Taylor Monahan

Oh, we can just create a new approval. Yeah. It just created a

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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