Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On October 11th local time (October 12th morning Beijing time), Synthetix founder Kain Warwick and Bankless founder David Hoffman had an offline real-life fight in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This game is co-organized by Permissionless and the fighting live broadcast platform Karate Combat. Permissionless is a cryptocurrency-themed conference co-organized by Bankless and Blockworks. The conference will give free tickets to the fighting event to users who hold tickets.
From the perspective of conference marketing, it is not difficult to understand why David chose to participate; as for Kain, he had reached a $500,000 bet with David on the scale of Bankless' sponsorship (essentially investment) of his new project infinex.
Around 10:40 Beijing time, the two fighters came out one after another. Judging from the player data and the noise in the arena, Kain was obviously bigger in size, but David was more popular.
Around 10:44, the two officially started fighting. The match lasted two rounds, which was not long, excluding the rest time in between. It was less than 8 minutes until it ended at 10:52, but the match was full of ups and downs.
In the first round of confrontation, both sides seemed relatively conservative at the beginning. The stronger Kain (white pants) had a slight advantage at this time and overwhelmed David (black pants) to start hammering.
However, after entering the second round, perhaps because David had a greater physical advantage, he came from behind and defeated Kain twice, eventually winning the game.
The duel between the two well-known figures in the industry attracted widespread attention from the market. In addition to a large number of community users cheering for the two on the live broadcast channel (the cheering method in the cryptocurrency circle is also unique. When one side is defeated, someone will shout "It's going to be liquidated"...), the prediction market Polymarket opened a betting pool for the duel between the two as early as September 24. As of the time of writing, the trading volume of the pool has approached 60,000 US dollars.
Judging from historical data, Kain Warwick, who has been building a "fighting madman" persona for many years, continues to lead in odds, and his pre-match predicted winning rate continues to be above 60%.
As early as August this year, Kain had challenged his "old enemy" Su Zhu to a fight, but was rejected by the latter.
Odaily Note: The conflict between Kain and Su Zhu has a long history. As early as 2021, when Su Zhu announced that he would give up Ethereum, the two had quarreled on X.
Before the competition started, Kain posted a photo of his physique yesterday, saying that he had finished weighing and was ready to fight at any time. This high morale also inspired Kain's supporters on Polymarket.
On the other hand, David is a bit more reserved. Although he did not show any photos of his muscles, he posted on X: "Everyone ignores the fact that I have more combat experience and training time."
The final result proved that David was not bragging. He won the game, and David's supporters on Polymarket also completed a Jedi counterattack. (The author also made a small profit of 5 U in this wave, and can go to the next local dog.)
After the match, David also gave a speech to express his gratitude for the award and announced that he would review the fight next Monday. It seems that he will have something to brag about for the whole year.