The Infinex Patron Sale wrapped up in September, and now the Patron Distribution is almost upon us, so I'm under pressure to write a retrospective on the sale. Also, I haven't been punched in the head this week, so my brain is working well enough for some long-form writing.
“Why do this weird NFT thing and not a seed round from VCs?”
I have been asked this question many times over the last few months. My quick, sarcastic response was usually, “Why do something easy when you can do something stupidly hard?” But the honest answer is that the easy option is rarely optimal, and the current “easy” option facing most founders leads directly to Goblin Town.
Tokens and crypto are about coordination, and decentralized systems are superior because of their capacity for coordination. The current meta breaks coordination because the incentives are so skewed. Incentive alignment works best when everyone has equal access. When access is gated or throttled, incentive alignment quickly breaks down.
What Infinex is trying to achieve is so audacious that we need the entire crypto community involved. We are ushering in the next phase of our industry, the
”post-CEX era”. Where we no longer rely on centralized systems to intermediate our crypto transactions, if we are going to tear centralized exchanges down and make decentralised systems accessible, we must align as many people in the industry as possible.
So, this is the metric by which I judge the success of the Patron Sale: Did we achieve broad alignment across the community?
There are 1601 accounts that collectively hold 43,284, with a further 5,800 patrons allocated in various incentive campaigns like Speedrun and Craterun. This is a good start but falls short of our desired distribution. We must return to this later and identify a few solutions to increase distribution. This is one of the challenges of using NFTs for patron sales; because the total supply is only 100k and the minimum price is $1250, many people were priced out. That said, Governance Points allowed a wider group of community members to access Patrons.
Strategic alignment was a critical component of the sale; it was important that credible and high-profile funds and foundations join our mission to replace centralized exchanges. I believe we were very successful in this aspect of the sale. Not only did we secure participation from ecosystem partners like Solana and Near, but we also had many projects like Wormhole, Pyth and Synthetix participate. In addition, we secured numerous high-integrity VC firms as Patrons, including Variant, Founders Fund, Framework Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and many others. The complete list is here.
The next aspect of the sale was more difficult than I expected: getting the attention of key community members. Many of the people we spoke to were my friends and acquaintances, but the unique nature of the Patron Sale made it challenging. The current meta is highly favourable for angels. They get to buy projects privately at valuations that are often discounted by 90%+ from what everyone else will pay months or sometimes weeks later. So when I slid into their dm’s, asking, “Do you want to buy a commemorative NFT at the same price as normies to show your alignment with our vision of displacing centralized exchanges?” Many people failed to see this as the compelling pitch it was!
Many of these people I pitched were founders of DeFi projects who stood to benefit the most from a platform like Infinex. Yet, it was borderline impossible to get them to pay attention. The current meta is so sticky because the incentives are skewed toward people who have already made it. Thankfully, after some explanation of incentive misalignment, most people realised the Patron model aligns everyone much more effectively for the long term. But at the start of token2049, it was unclear whether any of the current high-profile community members understood what was happening. Thankfully, once a few people realised, momentum picked up. As more people paid attention, more people got it. Within a few days, Patron meta, a significant improvement over the current meta, had become the consensus reality, at least in Singapore.
On top of some fantastic foundations and VCs, we attracted many high-profile community members as Infinex Patrons. Probably the most exciting among these were the Founders and leaders of L1 and L2 networks, including Vitalik and Toly, as well as a bunch of L2 Patrons, including Jesse from Base, AJ from Arbitrum, Luca from Abstract (aka Penguchain), Smokey from Berachain - or possibly an imposter we are still not entirely sure, Sam from Fraxtal, Rushi from Movement, Namik from MegaEth. Sadly, no one from Optimism or Polygon 🪦. One of the most validating aspects of the Patron sale was how quickly the founders of many different chains understood the value prop of a beautiful interface like Infinex.
We are getting very close to distributing Patrons, our final act in Season Two - Launch Season. But we have not been waiting for Patron Distribution to get started on integrations. We are already well into several key integrations. Significant progress has been made across various features required to compete with centralized exchanges. I will wrap up this post with an overview of what the near future of Infinex looks like, plus a small alpha leak.
Infinex is a monolithic platform that will unite every onchain application. However, the roadmap is designed to ensure we focus on the features required to compete with Centralized platforms. The users on these platforms are our immediate addressable market. While we must deliver feature parity to unlock this market fully, we can begin with some critical features like asset storage. This is where NEAR chain signatures come in. Chain signatures allow us to connect legacy chains like Litecoin and XRP to DeFi. When a user creates an account on Infinex, we must be able to support all their assets. We can then enable the swapping of assets and spot trading. These two features cover 90% of the users of centralized exchanges. From there, we will roll out many more features, some familiar to a CEX user but many that will be brand new and exciting.
OK, here comes the alpha. The Infinex journey has been one of discovery for the last 18 months; we have discovered so much new technology that will allow us to deliver our vision of replacing CEXs. We have also learned that many ways we currently build DeFi are simply not viable at scale. However, expecting to replace all of this infrastructure in one fell swoop is unrealistic. We must find ways to leverage and improve our current systems while we work to replace them, and this is where the concept of Infinex SSO emerged. It is a bridge that allows us to improve our existing systems, i.e., Dapp interfaces, without needing to replace them immediately. Sign-in with Infinex is our solution to this. By creating a mechanism to allow users to sign in to a dapp with a passkey and their Infinex account, we can significantly improve the safety of Dapps for Infinex users. Implementing all the core functionality users require will take time, and it might take years for the long tail of applications. However, Infinex SSO will allow anyone with an Infinex account to access any Dapp using assets in their Infinex account without requiring a new wallet or a browser extension. Most importantly, it can do this safely, as all of these integrations are pre-vetted, so phishing and other common attack vectors are significantly mitigated.
Most Infinex users will never use Infinex SSO because the core features they need will be integrated into the Infinex platform. However, for enthusiasts, the ability to connect to any supported Dapp will make their Infinex account infinitely more useful. We are so excited about all of the new launches coming up before the end of the year, but 2025 is going to be even more wild.
If you are hearing about Infinex for the first from this post, fear not. There will be many upcoming ways to join as a Patron over the coming months, including a chain signatures deposit campaign targetting all of your favourite boomer assets like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold.
Step one is to experience the best onboarding process in crypto at infinex.xyz.
Patron NFTs will be available on Blur and OpenSea in the next few days. Follow us on X for more information.