Swidge has been in Closed Beta for a few weeks. We are now ready to transition to Open Beta this week. While we hadn’t anticipated a president dropping a memecoin during our beta period, it was perfect timing. The launch of $TRUMP highlighted several areas of opportunity. The rest of this post will cover the features and improvements we are making to ensure Infinex is the best place for you to trade onchain. However, I want to contextualize the market before covering specific features.

We didn’t expect Swidge to be an impressive feature. It honestly felt like a mandatory first step in our journey to replace centralized exchanges. We certainly didn’t expect it to be a 10x improvement over everything else in the market. We probably underestimated the improvement because we are already accustomed to the gasless cross-chain experience of Infinex. Many platforms already offer simple token swaps, Jumper, Cowswap, Jupiter, Phantom, and Moonshot to name just a few. So swaps felt like table stakes. Yet, as we built Swidge, we realized that while swaps appear to be a solved problem, this is a mirage.

What the current market is missing is convenience. $TRUMP highlighted this. If the market is moving quickly, you need your assets and trading platform in the same app with immediate support for the assets you want. Binance and Coinbase are great; you can store your assets there, and they support both mobile and desktop. But what happens when the asset you want hasn’t been listed yet? You are DOA. Now you are scrambling to withdraw to Phantom. Unfortunately, Coinbase has SOL withdrawals set to slow mode right now. Five minutes was 3x profit in the early moments of the $TRUMP trade.

The people who had assets in Phantom were fine, yet there are trade-offs to using a mobile wallet for custody. Securing seedphrases is not for everyone, and even if this was you, many people got caught out because they had their assets spread across multiple seedphrases or used Phantom with a ledger. Hardware wallets will not work for you if you leave them in your house on the weekend. Also, phantom swaps incur very high fees.

Infinex solves this. You don’t need to secure a seed phrase. You can safely store your assets in an Infinex Vault and quickly move them to your Infinex wallet to trade. Infinex does not need to “list” an asset; we pull the top 1500 assets continuously from Coingecko. We are improving this further by allowing you to trade by pasting a contract address, for those times when the asset you want to trade is not on Coingecko. We check multiple liquidity sources to ensure you get the best quote, and we take the cost of gas out of the trade with no additional fees.

We’ve already had thousands of people use Swidge over the last few weeks, and the feedback has been great. Still, we needed to improve execution to ensure the best possible fill and minimize transaction failures.

We had expected to launch Swidge and then move on to features like Earn and Perps. We realized there is a huge opportunity to continue focusing on Swidge and deliver an unrivalled experience, no matter your trading style. From the casual buyer of BTC to the trench warriors, we think we have a platform that can significantly improve your trading experience. Here is how we are going to do it…

Infinex supports over one thousand assets today, but in the next few releases, we will significantly improve this, rolling out support for 5-10k new tokens. We will also allow contract addresses to be added for trading for the more degen amongst you. The long tail of tokens is critical because when a new token begins trending, you want access to it immediately. The benefit of being onchain is getting direct access to every asset. Infinex needs to lean into this. However, in addition to the long tail of assets, many large-cap assets, including BTC, are not currently available. Filling in these gaps is critical. We will use NEAR intents to progressively roll out support for BTC, LTC, XRP, and other assets.

In addition to the older, more established chains, you may have heard that many fast and cool chains are about to launch. Q5 2024 is set to be lit. Berachain, Abstract, MegaEth, Fogo and Monad are coming, in no particular order 🤫. Not only are traders going to want to access the native assets on these chains, they are going to want access to all the DeFi, Memecoins and other tokens that will launch there. This means day one support for these chains.

Whether you are a degen in the trenches or a lazy whale just getting back into onchain trading, no one wants to overpay for a trade. There are many components to this, but fundamentally, it’s about the vibe—you want to have confidence and trust that your trading platform is doing everything possible to get you the best execution. No one wants to spot-check every trade across ten different venues. We believe Infinex can provide this confidence and trust. This means supporting the many bridges, swaps providers, intent networks, and liquidity protocols on each chain. However, fees are also critical; Infinex does not charge fees, and we only offset the cost of gas for each trade. Our gas estimation was initially overly conservative; we have significantly improved these calculations. In the first week of Swidge, we collected excess gas fees of around $15k on over $10m in trading volume, all of which will be returned to users. In addition to only charging for gas, we subsidize gas costs on all chains (except Ethereum) for Patron holders. Getting the best execution also requires the platform to know how to trade. Automatically detecting all available routes and, where necessary, breaking up trades across venues is critical for providing traders with the confidence that Infinex is the best place to execute trades. As is slippage estimation, which is more art than science, we are getting far better at estimating slippage. We will continue to improve these estimates and recommend different parameters when a trade fails due to slippage.

Being the best venue to trade requires offering the trader the best tools. Market orders are not enough, although lightning-fast market order execution is critical. There are times when limit orders, stop loss, and DCA order types are needed to express the trader's intent. Infinex is uniquely positioned to implement these more advanced and exotic order types. The Infinex platform leverages turnkey and can delegate trade execution to an execution client. This is similar to how photon and telegram bots work but 100x less anxiety-inducing from a custody perspective.

Many traders use advanced tools for charting and monitoring asset prices, but whether you are a novice or professional, having access to critical information at the right time is absolutely necessary. Over the subsequent few releases, we will roll out more asset information and pricing data, including liquidity information, charts, and a general token overview. In addition, portfolio and PNL tracking will be implemented in the wallet for each asset. We will continue exposing more information from novel sources over time to ensure that every user has the insights they require when executing each trade.

One of the nice things about trading inside a black box is that only Arthur or CZ can hunt your stops. Once you start trading onchain everything is out there for anyone to counter or copy trade. We can’t fix every aspect of this, but we provide every trader with a shielded wallet that allows them to open a position disconnected from the rest of their trading history. This will be a huge improvement of existing onchain trading where the effort of obfuscating your positions is extremely high and incurs significant costs. You will even be able to break up a trade into much smaller chunks and disconnect them from each other so you can build a much larger position without tipping your hand to the onchain sleuths.

Sorry you had to wade through all that to get to the good stuff…

Every day the winners of Bullrun, our fantasy trading game, win Bulls. In addition to a referral program, bulls will be rolled out for Swidges shortly. While all trading on Infinex is currently free, as more exotic trading options and trading agents are implemented, fees for these advanced features will likely be introduced. Referrers will initially capture a percentage of the Bulls earned by each trader they refer, but eventually, they may also capture part of the fees generated by traders they refer. We will also be rolling out more trading competitions like the one currently running for DRV.

In addition to these major features, many minor and not-so-minor UX improvements will be deployed over the subsequent few releases.

We will be working to minimize the appearance of chains across the platform; where possible, a user will not need to care what chain their asset is on. For features like earn, if there is a campaign on a specific chain, we will ensure that the user has assets on the correct chain, but if you want to sell a token to USDC, it should not matter to you which chain the USDC lands on. If you later want to send USDC to your Echo account, we will work out how best to bridge it to Base for you.

We will improve platform speed, particularly for quotes; several changes are being implemented to ensure quotes are almost instantaneous. This includes minor UX improvements like adding buy and sell buttons to the wallet to allow you to sell a token to stables or buy more of a token quickly.

Token discovery is another area of trading that is currently very painful. Even if someone posts a CA on X, you still need to copy it and then go to several different platforms to determine which ones support it and whether there is liquidity. We will soon enable someone to send you a link which will open your Infinex account to the swap page with that asset prefilled. You can also post a trade straight to X with a link to the asset and an embedded referral code.

Better error handling is another minor improvement that will significantly impact UX. Failed trades are inevitable, but recovering from these states gracefully is critical to providing confidence to traders.

We are very excited by the opportunity that Swidge presents. Infinex is now positioned to be one of the best trading venues. The combination of wide asset selection, trade execution, and availability on every device dramatically improves the existing trading experience for most platforms. We will do a final release for Patron feedback this week, after which Swidge will roll out in Open Beta to all users. LFG.

Swidge has been in Closed Beta for a few weeks. We are now ready to transition to Open Beta this week. While we hadn’t anticipated a president dropping a memecoin during our beta period, it was perfect timing. The launch of $TRUMP highlighted several areas of opportunity. The rest of this post will cover the features and improvements we are making to ensure Infinex is the best place for you to trade onchain. However, I want to contextualize the market before covering specific features.

We didn’t expect Swidge to be an impressive feature. It honestly felt like a mandatory first step in our journey to replace centralized exchanges. We certainly didn’t expect it to be a 10x improvement over everything else in the market. We probably underestimated the improvement because we are already accustomed to the gasless cross-chain experience of Infinex. Many platforms already offer simple token swaps, Jumper, Cowswap, Jupiter, Phantom, and Moonshot to name just a few. So swaps felt like table stakes. Yet, as we built Swidge, we realized that while swaps appear to be a solved problem, this is a mirage.

What the current market is missing is convenience. $TRUMP highlighted this. If the market is moving quickly, you need your assets and trading platform in the same app with immediate support for the assets you want. Binance and Coinbase are great; you can store your assets there, and they support both mobile and desktop. But what happens when the asset you want hasn’t been listed yet? You are DOA. Now you are scrambling to withdraw to Phantom. Unfortunately, Coinbase has SOL withdrawals set to slow mode right now. Five minutes was 3x profit in the early moments of the $TRUMP trade.

The people who had assets in Phantom were fine, yet there are trade-offs to using a mobile wallet for custody. Securing seedphrases is not for everyone, and even if this was you, many people got caught out because they had their assets spread across multiple seedphrases or used Phantom with a ledger. Hardware wallets will not work for you if you leave them in your house on the weekend. Also, phantom swaps incur very high fees.

Infinex solves this. You don’t need to secure a seed phrase. You can safely store your assets in an Infinex Vault and quickly move them to your Infinex wallet to trade. Infinex does not need to “list” an asset; we pull the top 1500 assets continuously from Coingecko. We are improving this further by allowing you to trade by pasting a contract address, for those times when the asset you want to trade is not on Coingecko. We check multiple liquidity sources to ensure you get the best quote, and we take the cost of gas out of the trade with no additional fees.

We’ve already had thousands of people use Swidge over the last few weeks, and the feedback has been great. Still, we needed to improve execution to ensure the best possible fill and minimize transaction failures.

We had expected to launch Swidge and then move on to features like Earn and Perps. We realized there is a huge opportunity to continue focusing on Swidge and deliver an unrivalled experience, no matter your trading style. From the casual buyer of BTC to the trench warriors, we think we have a platform that can significantly improve your trading experience. Here is how we are going to do it…

Infinex supports over one thousand assets today, but in the next few releases, we will significantly improve this, rolling out support for 5-10k new tokens. We will also allow contract addresses to be added for trading for the more degen amongst you. The long tail of tokens is critical because when a new token begins trending, you want access to it immediately. The benefit of being onchain is getting direct access to every asset. Infinex needs to lean into this. However, in addition to the long tail of assets, many large-cap assets, including BTC, are not currently available. Filling in these gaps is critical. We will use NEAR intents to progressively roll out support for BTC, LTC, XRP, and other assets.

In addition to the older, more established chains, you may have heard that many fast and cool chains are about to launch. Q5 2024 is set to be lit. Berachain, Abstract, MegaEth, Fogo and Monad are coming, in no particular order 🤫. Not only are traders going to want to access the native assets on these chains, they are going to want access to all the DeFi, Memecoins and other tokens that will launch there. This means day one support for these chains.

Whether you are a degen in the trenches or a lazy whale just getting back into onchain trading, no one wants to overpay for a trade. There are many components to this, but fundamentally, it’s about the vibe—you want to have confidence and trust that your trading platform is doing everything possible to get you the best execution. No one wants to spot-check every trade across ten different venues. We believe Infinex can provide this confidence and trust. This means supporting the many bridges, swaps providers, intent networks, and liquidity protocols on each chain. However, fees are also critical; Infinex does not charge fees, and we only offset the cost of gas for each trade. Our gas estimation was initially overly conservative; we have significantly improved these calculations. In the first week of Swidge, we collected excess gas fees of around $15k on over $10m in trading volume, all of which will be returned to users. In addition to only charging for gas, we subsidize gas costs on all chains (except Ethereum) for Patron holders. Getting the best execution also requires the platform to know how to trade. Automatically detecting all available routes and, where necessary, breaking up trades across venues is critical for providing traders with the confidence that Infinex is the best place to execute trades. As is slippage estimation, which is more art than science, we are getting far better at estimating slippage. We will continue to improve these estimates and recommend different parameters when a trade fails due to slippage.

Being the best venue to trade requires offering the trader the best tools. Market orders are not enough, although lightning-fast market order execution is critical. There are times when limit orders, stop loss, and DCA order types are needed to express the trader's intent. Infinex is uniquely positioned to implement these more advanced and exotic order types. The Infinex platform leverages turnkey and can delegate trade execution to an execution client. This is similar to how photon and telegram bots work but 100x less anxiety-inducing from a custody perspective.

Many traders use advanced tools for charting and monitoring asset prices, but whether you are a novice or professional, having access to critical information at the right time is absolutely necessary. Over the subsequent few releases, we will roll out more asset information and pricing data, including liquidity information, charts, and a general token overview. In addition, portfolio and PNL tracking will be implemented in the wallet for each asset. We will continue exposing more information from novel sources over time to ensure that every user has the insights they require when executing each trade.

One of the nice things about trading inside a black box is that only Arthur or CZ can hunt your stops. Once you start trading onchain everything is out there for anyone to counter or copy trade. We can’t fix every aspect of this, but we provide every trader with a shielded wallet that allows them to open a position disconnected from the rest of their trading history. This will be a huge improvement of existing onchain trading where the effort of obfuscating your positions is extremely high and incurs significant costs. You will even be able to break up a trade into much smaller chunks and disconnect them from each other so you can build a much larger position without tipping your hand to the onchain sleuths.

Sorry you had to wade through all that to get to the good stuff…

Every day the winners of Bullrun, our fantasy trading game, win Bulls. In addition to a referral program, bulls will be rolled out for Swidges shortly. While all trading on Infinex is currently free, as more exotic trading options and trading agents are implemented, fees for these advanced features will likely be introduced. Referrers will initially capture a percentage of the Bulls earned by each trader they refer, but eventually, they may also capture part of the fees generated by traders they refer. We will also be rolling out more trading competitions like the one currently running for DRV.

In addition to these major features, many minor and not-so-minor UX improvements will be deployed over the subsequent few releases.

We will be working to minimize the appearance of chains across the platform; where possible, a user will not need to care what chain their asset is on. For features like earn, if there is a campaign on a specific chain, we will ensure that the user has assets on the correct chain, but if you want to sell a token to USDC, it should not matter to you which chain the USDC lands on. If you later want to send USDC to your Echo account, we will work out how best to bridge it to Base for you.

We will improve platform speed, particularly for quotes; several changes are being implemented to ensure quotes are almost instantaneous. This includes minor UX improvements like adding buy and sell buttons to the wallet to allow you to sell a token to stables or buy more of a token quickly.

Token discovery is another area of trading that is currently very painful. Even if someone posts a CA on X, you still need to copy it and then go to several different platforms to determine which ones support it and whether there is liquidity. We will soon enable someone to send you a link which will open your Infinex account to the swap page with that asset prefilled. You can also post a trade straight to X with a link to the asset and an embedded referral code.

Better error handling is another minor improvement that will significantly impact UX. Failed trades are inevitable, but recovering from these states gracefully is critical to providing confidence to traders.

We are very excited by the opportunity that Swidge presents. Infinex is now positioned to be one of the best trading venues. The combination of wide asset selection, trade execution, and availability on every device dramatically improves the existing trading experience for most platforms. We will do a final release for Patron feedback this week, after which Swidge will roll out in Open Beta to all users. LFG.