The death march to TGE has begun.

TGE is a critical time for any project, but our Patron sale has allowed us to time TGE for when the product is ready to break out. The launch of the Infinex token will drive significantly more attention and awareness to the platform and will also enable us to buy back tokens with revenue. Given the lack of liquidity in the Patron NFT, this is currently impossible. Our revenue is still small today, a quarter of a million dollars since we launched Perps this month; prior to that, we had no fees on the platform.

I'll be honest. We had anticipated and hoped to be further along in our product development by now. But with Patron unlocks starting today, we are at a critical point. We thought a year would be sufficient, but it was not quite enough time. So the team has agreed we should not have token liquidity before we have delivered product market fit.

So we will be voluntarily relocking all team tokens (20% of the supply) for another twelve months, with linear vesting post-unlock, to ensure unlocks are distributed over a reasonable timeframe. Everyone on the team feels good about this decision. It is the right call, and we are all aligned for the long term. Ushering in a new era is not a quick exercise, but we are here for it, as long as it takes.

We are breaking the pre-TGE period into three phases. The immediate phase involves finalising the core product offering and incentive campaign. We are almost ready to roll out access to the Infinex Extension and wallet import for all users. We have already enabled Infinex Perps for everyone, and the early feedback has been incredible. This combination of features allows existing Hyperliquiod traders to use our interface without losing their historical volume and discounts, and it allows them to easily switch back and forth between interfaces via the extension.

The core features we will support at launch:

• Non-custodial wallet with chain and gas abstraction

• Vault with onchain recovery

• Support for 20+ chains

• Browser Extension and in extension swaps

• Wallet/seed phrase import

• Perps (using HL, more DEXs coming soon)

• Swidge (cross-chain swap + bridge)

• Earn (yield aggregator)

We are confident this is the best platform for accessing the onchain ecosystem that has ever been built. But we also know "build it and they will come" is a laughable strategy. We must create powerful incentives to drive awareness and attention to the product. Tbh, this is maybe the easiest part. I have been part of teams that have built good products that have far exceeded expectations due to optimal incentive mechanisms. I have never been part of a team that could build something this incredible.

I will not leak the entire campaign, but will sketch it out to provide some early insight into how it will work. We will incentivise users to switch to Infinex by importing existing wallets and connecting socials. This will all them to get an account rank. This ranking will also take into account historical activity on the Infinex platform.

We will be doing some things differently from other projects here. This part of the campaign will not be a linear distribution because you are not contributing liquidity or staking; you are preparing to switch your existing activity to Infinex. The campaign will also reintroduce Crates, with rewards randomly distributed in Crates. We will release more details on how Crates will work next week.

We will rank each Infinex account. There will be modifications to the scoring throughout the campaign based on new criteria as we add additional factors, and there will be a balance snapshot at the end of the campaign. The intention is to ensure (like Monad) that everyone is losing their minds over how the system is scored, coming up with wild conspiracy theories and fomoing hard ahead of the big reveal.

At the end of the campaign, we will finalise the ranking and release everyone's crates over the course of a few weeks. We are not committing to anything up front other than that all things being equal, it will be better to rank higher than to sybil, as there will be scaling factors as you move up the rankings, so it will always be optimal to rank 500th versus trying to split wallets and get three accounts to 1,000th. Don't ask me how this works, but the math maths.

"Ok, but what the fuck do I want your dirty crates for, don't you realise Opensea is already doing chests? Coinbase probably just got like a trillion chests from buying that fucking UpOnly NFT. How are you going to beat that you idiot?"

First of all, these are pristine, top-of-the-line crates; you will definitely want them. In fact, some of these crates have entries into a $1m prize draw. Secondly, the prizes in these crates will only get bigger as the campaign progresses. But good luck with your chests.

I have talked recently about the airdrop meta and who the optimal cohort is to reward. Luckily, we have not incentivised any farming campaigns or schemes outside of Craterun, so we don't have any airdrop debt. This means we can optimise for distribution pre-TGE.

We have several plans. The campaign will have cash prizes, but it will also have discount token vouchers, allowing you to buy our upcoming token at a discount when it is released. Each voucher will have a fixed price. These vouchers last a year, so there will be plenty of time to use them.

The second phase of our TGE process will be determining whether our product launch and incentive campaign have generated enough traction to justify committing to TGE. We expect this will take a few weeks, and we hope to make this decision by the end of November. As soon as we are confident in our trajectory and traction, we will announce the date of TGE and start the last phase.

The final phase will be launching a pre-market perp and maximising distribution. We have been looking at various ways to get more tokens into community hands. We did fairly well during the patron sale, but it was a different part of the cycle, and not everyone was risk-on. Even though everyone got the same price, we only had ~2,400 accounts buy Patrons, with the majority going to funds and whales. There is also a problem for liquidity because less than 10% of the supply will be liquid by the end of this year. We also did an Echo sale last year, so we think the timing is perfect to do a Sonar sale a few weeks before TGE. Final pricing tbd, but likely fully unlocked at the previous liquid tier price, or an auction, idk. Let's see how Mega goes first, I guess. The nice part about this is that Sonar will also be the Infinex launchpad, so most of the work on this integration will be reused.

As mentioned in my governance post earlier in the week, we must ensure we have sufficient momentum on product and revenue before we commit to TGE, so we will be waiting to see how traction is building during the campaign period before committing to a date. We want to see meaningful revenue across two revenue streams, in-extension swaps and perps.

Somewhat bizarrely, we have had several examples of NFT sets dropping tokens to holders this cycle, the best example is the Pengu drop to Pudgies holders. It also illustrates how liquidity impacts pricing. The marketcap of PENGU is almost 5x that of the Pudgy Penguins NFT set, and that is despite Solana memecoins struggling lately. I think Infinex can aspire to doing a token distribution that replicates or exceeds Pengu.

The plan is straightforward: 100% of the token supply of our new token (ticker tbd) will be airdropped to Patron holders. That has been the expectation since a token was first proposed by the community, and it remains the fairest distribution method.

We still have ~30% of the token supply in the treasury, so we have room to distribute more tokens prior to TGE.

Once the Infinex Token is live, we will need a plan for the Patron NFT. My dream is to turn it into a pure PFP-style NFT. PFPs are one of the best ways of driving attention to a project and allowing users to signal thier support for a project. And this is why I think we can outperform the exceptional PENGU distribution, because the Patron is currently a pretty shitty non-fungible token.

The other issue is that we have 100k NFTs, so we ideally need to reduce this to align with classic collections. While we aspire to 100k users wearing an Infinex PFP, this is probably a little too high. So I would like for the community to be able to mint a new Infinex PFP NFT by combining multiple NFTs. We will need explicit rarity tiers and a mechanism to combine NFTs to get guaranteed rare NFTs. This should reduce the supply to something more like 25-50k, which is more reasonable. Given that revenue from the Infinex platform will go to buying back the new token and not the NFT, I expect the NFTs to evolve into a cultural Infinex item. I suppose it depends on how good the art is.

We are planning to launch our incentive campaign and release all of the features listed above in mid-November. As soon as we have sufficient traction, we will press the button and commit to TGE. We will also look to launch a pre-market perp. Pre-market perps typically trade for a few weeks before the launch of the token. We are hoping to stretch this out to 4-6 weeks, because we have the patron NFT to anchor the perp somewhat, so it is not a completely floating price. So if you are doing the math, that puts our TGE squarely in the late December/early January range. Sorry, polymarket enjoyers, it still looks like a coin toss.

We have quite a bit of work to get ready for the launch of the token, as well as a bunch of new features to roll out, like our trading terminal. So it will be very interesting to see how quickly we can get the launchpad integrated and launch the Sonar sale, which will be the main limiting factor.

Provided our incentive campaign is working and the platform is scaling, we will continue with our feature rollout and begin token buybacks as per our new governance framework.

There are a lot of things coming, a trading terminal, more chains and assets, an NFT platform and several more perps markets all accessible from a single interface. And critically, we will continue to bring features into the main platform where we can hone the UX and simplicity to a far greater degree.

There are many elements to this plan, but we now have a clear and linear path forward. Which is why we are confident we can land it all in the next few months. We have laid the foundation for the best onchain platform ever built over the last few years and only accelerated over the last few months. We are ready to scale, and we want to compete for every onchain transaction. First from existing onchain users, and then from centralised exchanges, and eventually for the hearts and minds of normies. The crypto world is in the midst of a major transition. Infinex saw this coming years ago and has been building towards it. We are ready to deliver what we promised in 2023.