Infinex was founded in 2023 with a simple mission: to solve onchain user experience.

We figured it would take a few months before we declared victory, given no one had ever attempted to solve Crypto UX before.

How hard could it be? ...Well, it turned out to be harder than it looked. #startuplyfe.

Two years later, our mission remains unchanged. We continue to optimise onchain user experience. This post serves as a primer for those new to Infinex, explaining its features and the rationale behind them.

What is Infinex?

Infinex is a non-custodial wallet, powered by Turnkey. Turnkey is a key management solution built by the team that developed Coinbase Custody. Infinex uses passkeys for account access and control. The growing adoption of passkeys across the entire technology ecosystem ensures that a passkey-based self-custody platform optimises UX for most people.

Infinex is composed of several interfaces. Together, they meet the user where they live and optimise the onchain experience, whether for power users or noobs.

I will review each of them below.

The Infinex Web-app

The primary interaction point for most Infinex users is the Infinex Platform, a web-based application available on desktop and mobile. Passkeys allow users to log in across multiple devices simultaneously, handing off from mobile to desktop and back with zero friction. The Infinex platform supports 20+ chains and millions of assets. It offers a unified omnichain portfolio view and the best dex/bridge/intent aggregator in crypto, we call this Swidge. We provide a gas account that lets you pay for gas on any supported chain, in hundreds of tokens. A $5 top-up is sufficient to cover gas usage for months for the average user. The platform also allows you to import wallets and private keys from other wallets. You can import a Metamask seed phrase, a Phantom private key, or an "app wallet" for Fantasy.top or Time.fun (many of us now have dozens of these).

First-party apps

Alongside the platform, we offer first-party apps, including Infinex Perps, Infinex Predict, and Infinex NFT (Predict and NFT are in early access). These first-party apps extend the platform and enable you to share a single login session. Infinex Perps is the most developed of the three apps listed above, and is rapidly becoming a perps aggregator, supporting Hyperliquid, Lighter and Synthetix. It will also support spot assets in early 2026, and will evolve into Infinex Pro, supporting spot, margin and perps positions, with options coming later in the year.

Infinex Extension

For many users, the Infinex platform and first-party apps are sufficient. For those who prefer to interact with Dapps directly, the Infinex extension is our solution. The extension is a modern redesign of the browser extension. It completely reimagines how users connect to and interact with Dapps. Most user frustration in crypto stems from the endless chores and drudgery required for simple tasks such as testing a new chain or application. The Infinex Extension removes this friction by combining gas abstraction and Swidge. With the Infinex Extension, using a new chain or application is effortless and delightful again.

Although the extension was released only recently, it is already feature-parity with legacy extensions. We are rapidly rolling out features and are confident that it will be the market-leading extension in 2026.

Mobile app

The only interface missing from this list is a mobile app, and I am pleased to announce it is now in development. We are confident we understand the user requirements for our mobile app. We have achieved a prototype internally.

What can I do with Infinex?

Infinex is designed to make onchain life simple and delightful, removing the minor and major frustrations we have all come to hate about transacting in crypto. Whether it is tracking down the wallet to sell a random airdrop you forgot, or bridging to a new chain and figuring out how to get gas there first, we have made it fun to be onchain again. Infinex lets you do things rather than struggle with technology. But let's use a concrete example: The upcoming network launch of Megaeth.

Infinex will support Megaeth on day one. This means every token, every dapp, every yield source. You can bridge to Megaeth from any of our 20+ supported chains and test the network in under five minutes. But what if you don't have an Infinex account? This is where the combination of passkeys and the browser extension comes in.

Megaeth day one, the optimal path for many new users will be to download the extension from the Chrome store, import their MetaMask or Phantom seed, bridge to Megaeth and start interacting with Megadapps.

But why? What is the benefit of using Infinex over, say, Rabby? Rabby will also support Megaeth on day one, presumably. With Infinex, you can manage all your wallets in one place with a single passkey. You don't need to wait until you're back at your desktop. And this applies to Mobile as well. You can quickly swap SOL for MEGA as soon as you see the first tweet that the chain is live. This is crypto without friction, crypto on easy mode.

A note on Gas

When we say "Gasless" or "Gas Abstracted," we don't mean you never have to pay for gas on Infinex, because never paying for gas creates opportunities for griefing and other exploits. Gasless on Infinex means never having to think about gas. You can buy Mega without having Mega, and you can send a memecoin on Solana without needing SOL. With the recent introduction of wallet import, we have introduced a universal gas account. This allows users to cover network costs from a single source. This means when a new chain launches, you can interact with Dapps on that chain by bridging USDC and transacting, no need to think about gas ever. The gas account is universal. All transactions on every supported chain, and a few dollars should last months. This is unequivocally a huge UX upgrade over existing wallets.

The near and far future

One of Infinex's goals was to enable users to buy any asset in the top 100 on Coingecko and hold the asset in a non-custodial wallet. The addition of Near intents has made this goal much closer to reality. Today, you can buy 85% of the top 100 assets. We will continue rolling out new assets and expect to have full coverage in the first half of 2026.

But the biggest upcoming unlock is the Infinex mobile app. This will allow you not only to custody, swap, and bridge any crypto asset, but also to use any dapp from your phone. This will be the most universal and lowest friction onchain experience in crypto. This is our goal for 2026.

Campaigns

Building the best product is not enough in crypto. Tokens necessitate incentive campaigns. Users expect compensation for using a new product, regardless of its quality. However, these incentives must align with the project's long-term growth. Short-term incentives create artificial demand but are unsustainable. This is why we have designed Craterun to be an evergreen campaign that scales and adapts to each new feature we release. Users are rewarded for using the platform and for trying new features. There are cash and NFT prizes, but the primary incentive loop is designed around INX vouchers. These vouchers reward users with tokens at a discount to the market price and create long-term alignment.

Conclusion

Infinex is entering hypergrowth. We've built one of the most novel crypto products, and we can genuinely challenge centralised exchanges on both functionality and user experience. The launch of Craterun has begun to drive adoption and awareness. The feedback so far has been incredibly positive. Whether you are an OG Infinex user dusting off your account or a new user trying it out for the first time, we think you will be delighted.

The product continues to get better. Those who have been using Infinex consistently rave about the release cadence and the unwavering focus on improving usability and features.

The Infinex team polishes and hones user experience better than any team in crypto, you are about to find out how amazing it feels when every time you open your crypto app you find it is easier to use.

The INX TGE is almost upon us. And therefore so is our Sonar sale.

Sale Pricing and Mechanics

The ICO meta is back. I believe ICOs are far better than airdrops, which leak value all over the place. This will test whether I am right. That said, Mafiosos gotta feed their families, or at least deliver them cigarettes, so we have made concessions to CT via Craterun.

The key to Sonar is pricing; if you price too high, no one will be interested.

There are a few ways to price a pre-launch token, and tbh we tried almost all of them during the first ICO era from 2014-18. But imo setting a low fixed price and curating buyers is the ideal solution. So we are setting a fixed price of $300m FDV with a 1-year lock. For context, the implied FDV of the INX token, based on the Patron NFT's price at the time of writing, is ~$400m. Now, no one loves unlocks, and creating a 1-year cliff with 5% of the supply unlocking on the same day in 2026 seems less than ideal. So we are also going to add an accelerated vesting option. If a buyer wants instant liquidity, they can exit vesting by paying $1b FDV. This optionality means that if the price is trading above $1b, some buyers may opt to vest early, thereby smoothing out the unlocks over the year. This price will decay from $1b back to the original $300m over the course of the locks.

We will sell 5% of the supply via Sonar. This means we will raise $15m. It is not a huge raise, but we already did a large sale for the Patron NFT last year, so this is more about distribution than raising further capital.

Inclusion and Curation

The main point of doing a Sonar sale is to provide wide access. The challenge is providing wide access to a constrained resource. So we have designed two paths to accessing the Sonar sale. Holding a liquid Patron NFT guarantees you an allocation in the Sonar Sale. The table looks like this.

1. One Patron = $2,000 allocation

2. Five Patrons = $15,000 allocation

3. Twenty-five Patrons = $100,000 allocation

4. One Hundred Patrons = $500,000 allocation

The second path will be a lottery system, with a minimum allocation of $200 and a maximum of $5,000. Which means if Patrons take up 50% of the total allocation, there will be room for 1,500 people to max bid, or 7,500 at a $1,000 average bid.

Registration for the sale will open in the next few weeks.

TGE

One final component of the Sonar sale is the token launch date. The TGE date will be the 15th of January. This is very much subject to change, but it will be within a few weeks of this date.

Conclusion

Simplicity and clarity are critical for a successful ICO. We want wide distribution ahead of TGE while ensuring as many people as possible have access. We must also brutally reject farmers, flippers, and sybillooors. If you are a genuine member of the crypto community, you've earned access to the best projects, and thank fuck Cobie decided to build Echo/Sonar, because it is pretty insane that one guy was able to yolo fix capital formation for us this cycle.

Bullrun was a game concept I created on my way to EthCC in 2024. This was pre-vibe coding, so I had to "enlist" a number of the Infinex team to build the game. The concept was that people play a hand of crypto poker by selecting five cards from the top 50 tokens on CoinGecko. I had planned for the cards to be minted as NFTs, but unfortunately, we never got around to it (yet). Each day, the hand that had the highest score, based on daily price movements of the underlying asset, wins. The game ran for a little over a year before we wound it down (temporarily) last month.

At the start, the game had a few dozen players, then a few hundred, and within the first few months, we had over 9,000 players. In the first 40 rounds, we gave out three Patrons a day. Yes, I am as shocked as you are at this profligacy. I asked three different people to confirm whether we actually gave out $15k a day for a weird game, and they all agreed I definitely told them to do this. RIP.

Bots emerge

We switched from Patrons to Bulls after 40 days and 40 nights, and unfortunately, this was somehow even more enticing for the bots than illiquid JPEGs. We got flooded. We had a minimum $50 deposit required to play, which was frankly too low. We saw the number of daily players rise to over 25k. Now, everyone knows there aren't twenty-five thousand people in all of crypto, so this was surprising. Then it grew to 69,420. Thankfully of our engineers had programmed a kill switch if we hit that number. The game halted, and it wasn't the first or last time this would happen. But the devs got it back online in time for everyone to finish the round.

Unfortunately, by this point, the few remaining human players were getting annoyed.

So we upped the minimum deposit to $250, this reduced the number of daily players from 69k to 10k the next day, but the numbers kept growing.

A slaughter is promised

At this point, I reassured the meatbag players we would deal with the bots eventually, but even though we were now awarding Bulls to the top 2500 players, it was becoming increasingly difficult for humans to win. While this struggle was an entertaining presage to the upcoming erosion of all human achievement over the next decade, it simply could not stand.

And yet it stood for another 400 days. I'm not sure if there were even any human players left by the final round. Round 403. Which led to the "404 Round Not Found" joke.

But I had promised that before any rewards were distributed, we would drag all the bots out of their houses and hang them from the highest tree, then redistribute their bulls to worthy human players. And that is exactly what we intend to do.

The hunt is on

Pandas and I, mainly Pandas, have spent the last two weeks tirelessly sifting through all of the data to rip the hearts out of every single one of those dastardly bots. And let me tell you, the numbers are grim.

Out of the top 50 Bulls holders, 40 were bots. Let that sink in.

Before we listen to the wails of agony and gnashing of teeth from the bot farm horde, let me explain one thing.

We tried really hard to prove someone was a human. And this is where it gets wild. There were so many bots that it was easier to validate human players than to isolate all the bots. That said, some of you were a little naughty. If you played on multiple accounts and limited your play to fewer than five accounts, we let you off with a slap on the wrist. Because tbh if we culled the people who played 2-3 accounts, we would have almost no one left. This graph by NoSeals gives some sense of the challenge.

Prize distribution

We announced last week that everyone in the top 100 would win a Patron; these bad boys trade at around $4k each, so it was critical they not fall into the hands of vicious, savage bots. But we also promised crates to the top 1,000 players.

We did our best with the crates component, but I am going to level with you. There weren't that many humans after we reached rank 100. Yes, the prevalence of bots gets worse as you go deeper down the ranks. The reason more humans were in the top 100 than in the next 100 was that most of those players started early and banked a decent haul of bulls before the bots arrived. So yes, if you squint, the humans outplayed the bots by being early. Small victories.

But here is the problem. As we culled bots from the top thousand, their ranks were simply replaced by different bots. At that rate, we would need to search down to rank 5,000 to find 1,000 genuine human players.

So that is exactly what we did. But once we had achieved this, we were fatigued. Covered in blood and gore, surrounded by the severed limbs and heads of the bots, we had to wade through a sludge of dismembered bot corpses to even get a glass of water.

We did our best, but we simply had to apply a looser filter as we got deeper down the ranks. Which means, unfortunately, some bots slipped through our nets. We are sorry about this, but we hope you will be satisfied with the slaughter rained down on the bots we did catch.

Our methods

If you came here for lurid tales of bot destruction, this is the section of the post you have been waiting for. We used so many methods to track these sneaky little bastards down. We used IP clustering, deposit and withdrawal clustering, x-handle heuristics, Telegram accounts, hand clustering, login times, and session data. Honestly, Pandas outdid himself. I actually begged him to stop killing bots and send me the sheet so there would be at least a few bots left for me to skull fuck, but he kept delaying the handover of the sheet through sheer bloodlust. In the end, I'm happy with the result. It is not perfect, but it is a far, far better result for humans than could reasonably have been hoped for before we started.

Winners

We were going to do a fancy page with all the winners, but everyone is busily handcrafting crates, so it seemed like a misuse of resources. Without further ado, I present the leaderboard.

Conclusion

There will be no discussion, and no debate. If you or a family member were mistakenly slaughtered in the bot purge, we humbly apologise and will be happy to send you a $20 discount voucher for your next swidge. We did our best to avoid the slaughter of innocent humans, but it would be wild if we didn't kill a few. Again, we humbly apologise, but it was for the greater good.

It is almost time for the Infinex TGE. Now, some of you may be scratching your heads in confusement. Thinking to yourself, "Wait, didn't you guys already do a TGE with those tequila bottle NFTS?"

Well, yes, great memory you have there. But we fucked up. It turns out NFTs are terrible assets. We should probably ban them. So we need to replace or displace or disappear the NFT in favour of a liquid token. Contrary to popular belief, NFTs cannot be listed on Binance. I have deep regrets about using ChatGPT for my token research now.

We need a token that can be listed anywhere, CEX or DEX. A token that can support perps. If you want to know how bad NFTs are, a year after launching the Patron NFT, you still can't buy one on Infinex.

Infinex is ready

One of the curses of iterative development is that, in early iterations, most people don't see value in your product. Or worse, they sign up, but there is nothing for them.

If you hear about something ten times and ignore it, why the fuck would you pay attention on the eleventh time? Getting people in the door is hard, but getting them to try a platform a second time is almost impossible. So we need to throw everything at this.

Really, it's dire. Our top KOL is crashing out over this.

Infinex is ready to take over your crypto life. The combination of the best multichain wallet, a dex/bridge aggregator, and a browser extension is unmatched. Add in a native perps aggregator and a trading terminal, and it's over for legacy wallets.

So no matter how many times this cycle you have heard "try Infinex" and faded it, this time is different. Do not fade this time.

Superapp (real)

We are about to launch the best browser extension in crypto, but you could be forgiven for saying, "bro, a browser extension in 2025, I thought you were fixing crypto UX."

Look, I don't love the idea of a browser extension either. But I capitulated when I realised getting everyone to adopt a new form factor just to try Infinex was going to take a long time. So now we have a browser extension. Will it be here forever? I hope not. For now, we need to meet people where they live, in the browser, using dapps.

The browser extension is our solution for universal support of crypto applications, but it is not our differentiator. That is our platform. We have invested two years building the best cross-chain, gas-abstracted platform in crypto. We also rolled out perps powered by Hyperliquid, and soon Lighter and Synthetix. I'm confident that our perps interface is the best trading experience for HL, and it is getting better every day.

But what really sets Infinex apart is our multi-device setup. Passkeys let you easily switch between mobile and desktop devices and run multiple sessions simultaneously.

Three new chains

We have been lucky to work with three of the most exciting new chains for over a year. These chains will be a huge part of our continued expansion into new ecosystems. Somewhat strangely, they have all decided to launch in the same month, right when Infinex is ready to support them. Monad, MegaEth, and Fogo are among the most anticipated chain launches in recent memory, and Infinex will be the best wallet for all three on day one. I really cannot emphasise enough what an incredible opportunity this is for us. We will support every token and every dapp on all three chains. This will be one of the most compelling reasons to try Infinex, as we make it incredibly simple to onboard to these new ecosystems.

INX Season

I could write another two thousand words about how amazing the Infinex platform is, but frankly, you just need to try it. We are ready to make Infinex inevitable.

When we launched the Patron sale last year, our goal was to ensure that anyone could access the sale and that everyone paid the same price. We were very happy with the outcome of the sale, you can find all of the details here if you are curious.

But we now have a token to distribute. So firstly, let me reiterate that 100% of the INX supply goes to Patrons. There are 100,000 Patron NFTs and there will be 10b INX, so 100,000 INX per Patron. This included uPatron holders as well, who will get 1:10 INX to uPatrons. The Infinex treasury still has ~33% of the token supply; some of these tokens were earmarked for the Patron Sale, some for future Incentives and some for Treasury holdings.

The primary way to access the INX token will be by holding Patron NFTs. This will be a 1:100,000 drop, and you will get to keep the Patron NFT, which will then convert into a classic PFP so you can rep your love of Infinex on the timeline.

We will also do a Sonar sale. Because, while we were happy with the outcome of the Patron Sale, we did not get as wide a distribution as we wanted. Even though we had 500+ Angels buy Patrons, many people were unaware of the sale and Infinex and missed out. As mentioned above, I will have more details about the Sonar sale soon.

The final and possibly best way to get access to INX will be via Craterun. Many more details below, but this is a campaign to drive usage and adoption of the platform. So we need powerful incentives.

Before jumping into the mechanics of Craterun, I want to explain why we decided to distribute INX this way. We have worked incredibly hard to build the best crypto platform, but we are not naive enough to try the "build it and they will come" approach. We need a compelling campaign to capture the community's attention. We want everyone to have multiple ways to access INX before TGE and to ensure wide adoption before the token launch. Our tokenomics are simple and laid out in this governance post. We generate platform revenue across multiple products, then use that revenue to buy back tokens. OK, enough preamble, let's get to the crates!

Crates

OG Craterun was the best campaign of the cycle, so if you were sidelined, you can stop coping and get ready. We are dusting off the remaining crates and running it back.

Just like the first time around, there will be many types of prizes in crates.

The best prize, imho, will be INX Vouchers. These vouchers will allow you to purchase the INX from the date of TGE, and they expire after one year. They will have various FDV ranges from $1m to $500m. Yes, you read that correctly $1m FDV. These days, your average seed round is $10-50m. So being able to buy INX tokens at checks notes 0.01 of a cent is quite the opportunity. For reference, the current implied price of INX, based on the Patron NFT price, is 5c. These low FDV vouchers will be the ones first distributed, so there is some level of urgency in participating.

We will also have tickets to major prize draws, including a $1m major prize and over $2.5 million in total prizes. Including instant cash prizes of up to $10k, as well as NFTs like Pudgy Penguins, Punks, and Hypurrrrrrs. Speaking of NFTs, we are also giving away 10 Patrons per week until TGE.

How to get crates

There will be six ways to get crates.

1. Bulls acquired legally through organic BullRun player (top 1000)

2. Historical organic Infinex activity and Patronage

3. XGP holders

4. Historical Perp volume, including on Infinex

5. Perp volume on Infinex, but forward-looking

6. CT Mafia Bonus Crates

Bullrun

For the Infinex OGs we are distributing crates. But tbh some smelly old crates for a year's worth of grinding against an army of bots would be somewhat brutal. So first, we will give everyone a public bot execution. Let's pray our future AI overlords have a sense of humour about this. Bulls from bots will be redistributed to humans. Then we will distribute Patrons to the top 100 Bullrunners, with the top prize of 3 Patrons. The top thousand Bullrunners will also get Crates.

We will also give guaranteed allocations in our upcoming Sonar Sale to those who have played more than 20 rounds. So hopefully it was all worth it. And if that is not enough, OG Bullrunners will definitely get some cool perks when Bullrun returns.

Historical Infinex Activity

Holding a Patron and using the platform will also get you Crates. We will filter out any botting and inorganic activity. Usage will be scored, and crates will be distributed based on consistency of platform usage. This was not about farming but simply rewarding the people who consistently tried out new features and used the app. This will not be a huge crate haul but there will be a Patron bonus multiplier for Patron holders, historical Patron holdings and participation in the Patron sale.

XGP conversion

We recently froze XGP in preparation for TGE, and anyone with 200k XGP will be airdropped a Patron. For those under, we will airdrop crates. Conversion ratio tbd, but likely around 1 Crate per 1000 XGP.

Retroactive Perp Crates

This first campaign is focused on Perps volume, so we are also providing crates based on your historical activity across Perp dexes based on volume/fees paid. We need data from each of these services. Please reach out to me with the canonical data for any of these services if you have it.

1. HL - (Data secured)

2. Lighter - (Investigating)

3. Synthetix - (Data secured)

4. GMX - (Investigating)

5. dYdX - (Antonio is ghosting me)

6. Aster - (Investigating)

7. Account balance throughout the campaign

You will need to import a current or historical seed phrase to switch from your current wallet provider to Infinex. We will scan your transaction history, calculate your crates, and distribute them. You can add as many seed phrases as you like, and each seed phrase with qualifying activity will accumulate more crates. The more activity an account has, the more crates you earn. This is cumulative and scales with more activity. We do not want sybils!

non-retroactive crates?

OK, great. You created an account, got your retroactive bonus crates, and didn't win anything. What do you do now? Honestly, you should have hedged those crates with a big OTC desk before opening them.

But if you want more Crates, just use Infinex.

Try swidge, download the extension, try Perps and just get used to the platform. It is, after all, going to be your new home for quite a while.

Of course, we don't expect you to use a crypto service without getting something in return. So, you will also earn crates for all Perp trades you do on the platform from the start of the campaign. We currently have perps powered by Hyperliquid and will soon add Lighter and Synthetix. So, no matter your preferred venue, unless your preferred venue is some weird DEX on PulseChain, you can import your trading wallet and retain the fee rebates and discounts you have earned in the past. We want to lower the switching cost of migrating your onchain life to Infinex.

What if you don't do Perps

Well, first of all, good for you. Very impressive self-restraint, sitting comfy in spot. More importantly, though, this is just our first onboarding campaign, and while it is our biggest and will distribute the most tokens, we will have future campaigns focused on our trading terminal and swidge, NFT platform, and yield aggregator. So fear not, there will inevitably be a campaign for you in the near future.

CT Mafia Bonus

There has been a lot of discussion and FUD on the TL about whether and how to reward KOLs. My view is that it is in the community's best interest to reward people who can and will FUD you if they do not get paid. The key is ensuring whatever is given is clear and that not too many steps are required.

We have a simple plan here. A list of the top ~5k accounts on CT will be eligible for a crate bonus, ranging from 1-100 crates based on two factors. CT influence and Historical onchain activity. We are going to keep this fairly simple. The higher you rank on CT, the more crates you get, provided you import a wallet that has historical onchain activity. There will be several criteria we use to ensure that you are not just a bot-farm LARP account that has never used the chain. Each of these is binary, and you only need one to qualify for your Crates. If you have none of them, no crates, sorry.

1. Fees paid in SOL and ETH for chain usage, minimum 1e and 1 SOL

2. OG wallet, with pre 2020 transactions

3. Transaction count, minimum of 100 tx across SOL and/or ETH

4. TVL of more than $10,000

Conclusion

The Infinex TGE is approaching, and the INX token is almost here. We want to maximise our user base and distribution before the token launch. INX is designed to capture platform revenue via buybacks, so the more revenue we generate before TGE, the more we will have for buybacks when INX starts trading.

We have been grinding hard to deliver the best crypto superapp you have ever used. We hope you enjoy it. Crates are designed as a nice bonus for using the platform. But if there is anything missing or problematic or annoying, we want your feedback so we can continue to iterate and improve the platform.

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.

What comes next?

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.

Incentives

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.

Phase two

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.

More Distribution

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.

TGE criteria

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.

What about the Patron NFT?

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.

Timing

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.

Post TGE

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.

Conclusion

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.

I think it is fair to say that most people in crypto assumed that Synthetix was dead. From mid-2023 to the end of 2024, two very long years, the project languished. It was run by a committee and was optimising for all of the wrong things.

But in late 2024, we began to reassemble a team to finish the job that we started. A job that began in 2020 with the publishing of SIP-80. This specification would later be iterated on by multiple DeFi teams, either via forks or through modifications to the spec. I won't go through all of them, but the DeFi OG's remember.

Maximalism

One of the issues that prevented Synthetix from delivering a viable perp DEX in its first three iterations was unrelenting decentralisation maximalism. When I came back to the space in 2023, I finally realised that aiming for maximal decentralisation up front was a huge impediment to iteration and efficiency. Far better to build a product people wanted and then progressively decentralise. Ironically, this was the approach that early Synthetix had taken, and it was what allowed us to frontrun DeFi summer. We were one of the first projects to implement upgradable proxy contracts, and this allowed us to iterate much faster than many projects which opted for immutable contracts. Today, this is not controversial, but back then, boy howdy.

Thankfully, Hyperliquid killed this debate; it was now obvious that the only path forward was optimising for the best product and iterating. We knew we had one final chance to get this right, so we began to design a new modern Perp DEX, a hybrid off-chain orderbook with optimistic settlement direct to Ethereum Mainnet. We built quietly, and last month, we felt it was finally ready to launch.

Relaunch

We knew we needed to do something bold to drive awareness and visibility to the new exchange. Of course, when an OG DeFi project does something crazy and unexpected, people will take note, but competition was fierce, and the attention game is critical.

So we cooked up a campaign based around a $1m invitation-only trading competition. Thankfully, I am not completely washed, so we were able to wrangle some of the best and most entertaining traders on the timeline. And the first few days have been as entertaining as expected. Six people have crashed out completely, and multiple six-figure round-trips were executed.

Go to market

So far, the exchange has been holding up well during the comp. We had some teething issues on the second day, but the feedback has been broadly positive from traders. Our goal is to scale up markets through the trading comp and be ready to launch to a closed group of beta testers as soon after we wrap up the competition as possible.

That means we need a strategy to attract liquidity and traders. We have a plan on the liquidity side, we are working wth several large market makers to ensure we have deep liquidity from day one. We are also working on an incentive campaign for our SLP vault. This will be one of the primary early liquidity sources on the exchange.

Incentives

We also need an incentive scheme. The treasury has around 15% of the token supply, and it is critical that we rapidly bootstrap liquidity on the exchange, so we must allocate a reasonable portion of the token supply to liquidity and trading incentives. But we are going to tweak this mechanism slightly. Rather than paying out liquid tokens as trading rebates, directly incentivising mercenary farmers, we are going to provide Snax. Snax can be used to bid in a weekly auction for SNX options. Finer details tbc, but a block of options will be auctioned each week, and traders can bid for them using Snax. Snax will be distributed based on trading volume generated on the exchange.

Revenue

The other lesson we learned the hard way is that while staking is important, only stakers getting network value is suboptimal. It creates a two-tier system and discourages more passive holders. In fairness, this is exactly what we wanted in the early days, but the world has changed.
This is why, based on strong empirical evidence, I have changed my position and believe that buyback and burn is the optimal model. We tested this out with Perps V2 and burned a small amount of SNX. We aspire to burn a lot more this time around. And this is why early momentum is so important. If we can begin to generate meaningful revenue by rapidly scaling the new Ethereum exchange, we can buy back and burn significantly more tokens while the FDV is at historical lows.

Infinex

Infinex has already integrated HL and is in the process of integrating Lighter and Synthetix. It is safe to say that the Infinex trading experience is one of the best in the market today. You can seamlessly switch between mobile and desktop and access the trading interface on multiple devices simultaneously. You also get access to the extension, which means you can, if needed, trade directly on HL. But the killer feature is the ability to easily move funds in and out of your margin account without needing to think about gas or cross-chain swaps or deal with any friction at all.

Infinex perps will soon support three trading venues, making it one of the first perp aggregators in the market. This will be extremely convenient for traders who like to access multiple venues, whether to tap into different markets, for arbitrage or for maximising fee rebates and points farming.

Differentiators

We are very confident in the architectural choices we have made in building this latest version of Synthetix, whether it is all transactions and orders being private in the order book, or the ability to launch novel perp contracts for pre-market assets, RWAs or even memes, we think this exchange design is the optimal tradeoff between capital efficiency performance and security. The goal is not to compete with other DEXs; the goal is to accelerate the extinction of centralised exchanges. The world is changing rapidly, and we are about to enter the post-CEX era, and Synthetix is positioned to be a huge beneficiary of this shift. We bet on the world migrating onchain almost a decade ago, and it has been a longer and more gruelling journey than we ever expected, but we are still here, and you cannot yet dance on our grave.

Conclusion

If you want to follow along with the competition or check out the leaderboard, and the exchange. We have assembled an almost completely new team, combined with a few of the hardcore OGs who stuck around. The gloves are off, and we know how to deliver an amazing trading experience. Follow along and get ready for the beta launch by depositing sUSD or USDe into the exchange to get on the waitlist.

When we designed Infinex governance in 2023, we started from first principles and tried to avoid the mistakes of early DeFi governance. Unfortunately, we started from the false premise that Infinex was a protocol. It turns out it's not a protocol. Infinex is an Application. We have learned a lot in the last two years, so it is worth once again assessing the governance problem from first principles. In this post, I will propose what an optimal Infinex governance structure could look like.

What is the purpose of governance?

Governance is about establishing the meta-rules of the game. We must assume in a changing world, rules must also change. This assumption necessitates a legitimate mechanism for modifying the rules. Establishing these meta-rules is critical. Without clarity over the rules, no one will play. In crypto, the game is often capital formation and allocation. Crypto platforms are typically money games. This means using a platform typically requires an assessment of risk and/or allocation of capital. This is not too dissimilar to early banking (and arguably modern banking), where the bank you chose required a careful assessment for solvency risk. FDIC insurance and other global insurance schemes reduced the necessity of this over time, but have not completely removed it, especially for large depositors. See the recent (and upcoming) regional banking crisis for a modern precedent.

So, whether you are a user or an investor, the rules of the game are critically important. I will add another point that I think was lost on the early DeFi governance enjoyoooors: the simplicity of the rules is a critical advantage. Unfortunately, early users of DeFi found inscrutable and complex rules to be exciting and challenging for reasons of weaponised autism and PvP money games. This led to perverse incentives and an escalation of governance complexity.

Simplified governance

If simplicity is one of our goals, then an elegant solution is a set of rules where those delegated authority to build the project have broad discretion with clearly defined guardrails. This is a major benefit of a non-custodial platform, because if every participant can exit freely at any point, we do not need to have undue complexity and layers of intervention and mediation.

We then need to delegate authority to someone(s) to operate within this framework. Currently, that person is me, although with significantly more complex governance processes. If we opt for simplicity, we can delegate authority, within a predefined framework, to run the project with broad discretion, circumscribed by one explicit rule: no action taken, either directly or indirectly, can threaten the platform's non-custodial posture.

Hol’ up

But wait, is this a good idea? Do we want a single person or group to have broad power over a project? My response, with the benefit of hindsight, is overwhelmingly yes. We have clear evidence that DAO governance and other forms of governance by committee, in general, are absolutely diabolical. Many of the best founders in the space handed control to committees of apparatchiks for both ideological and regulatory reasons. Saying this grand experiment has gone poorly is being generous.

Now, I am on record saying the best ideas from early Synthetix came from the community, and I stand by this. Without debates and discussions between Degenspartan, Arthur0x, Andrew Kang (he is evil, not stupid), Nocturnalsheet, DeltaTiger, Alex Svanevik and many, many others, the project would have died in 2019. But we must understand diffusion of responsibility. In the early days of Havven/Synthetix, as the director of the foundation, I was almost solely responsible for deciding what to prioritise, but the input into this process was the community.

Governance was designed to signal that the input from these community members would be listened to, which created a virtuous cycle where many more people with good ideas stepped up to provide feedback and critique. Feedback, ideas and critique are necessary but woefully insufficient for a project to succeed. You also need people with a mandate and the ability to decisively execute on these ideas. This was the superpower of early Synthetix. We had a small team of ten people, we were brutally efficient at prioritising, and we constantly engaged the community in the process of both deciding what to do and how to prioritise.

This is very different from seeking community feedback. That is helpful, but it is a completely different process and far inferior to genuinely engaging a deeply aligned and valuable community. For Synthetix, this was all done in Discord. I lived there day in and day out, and read and responded to almost every message. Today in Infinex, we have a filtered channel in Telegram for Patron holders, which reduces the noise significantly, although arguably it reduces participation. I'm aware that one of the elements that drove participation in the early SNX Discord was the fact that everyone knew they had direct access to me and the rest of the team. And the degen trading channel.

Many of the issues with DAOs over the last five years have arisen from incentive misalignment; the principal-agent problem is pernicious in crypto governance frameworks. When we (the proto-DeFi community) began designing DAO governance in 2017/18, it was not about regulatory arbitrage; it was about removing central authority and trusted parties. It was only later that governance was co-opted and corrupted as a regulatory arbitrage optimisation vector as a necessary defence mechanism from overzealous and unscrupulous regulatory regimes.

An aside on governance philosophy: Ethereum needs credible neutrality because it evolves; Uniswap doesn’t because it is immutable code. Aave needs more credible neutrality than Uniswap because it is upgradeable, so it is critical that systems are in place to ensure users do not lose funds. This requires some kind of onchain token-based governance. Infinex is a platform; the onchain contracts are upgradeable, but they are not monolithic. This means every user must opt into upgrades. This is a huge advantage over a defi protocol that has a single set of contracts controlled by governance. This enables an ecosystem of many non-custodial “superapps”, all optimising for user experience and functionality. Because they will each be able to move far faster than if they were governed by DeFi-style governance.

So, we want wide input but narrow execution. At least within Infinex, we have a good framework to enshrine decision-making with a delegation of authority from token holders to a team that is paid to be 100% focused on the project and whose compensation is dependent on its success. We have done this very well at Infinex; we have a team of 50 people who are all very aligned through Patron allocations.

Earnings

Let’s now discuss revenue distribution. Over the years, we have seen many examples of revenues bypassing tokenholders and going to an equity company or being completely co-opted by insiders. Friendtech is one of the worst examples of this kind of grift. So to continue optimising our governance system for simplicity, we must agree on how revenue will be distributed up front and enshrine this into governance.

Historically, very few crypto projects have generated meaningful revenues, especially compared with sales of tokens. This has created an incentive for many projects to focus on selling tokens rather than pursuing revenue. This takes many forms, and again, examples are useful here. DYDX held what amounted to a multi-year ICO where they sold tokens in exchange for generating fees on the platform. This looked like a simple volume incentive plan, but the issue was that the fees generated through these incentives did not get returned to token holders; they went to a foundation. This misalignment of incentives is diabolical. Imagine a world where a company had a clause where all revenue generated went to the founding team, and shareholders received nothing. It would be hard to imagine such a structure getting funding. But in crypto, historically, because investors have been able to sell tokens, they have chosen not to call out these structures.

This is where enshrining revenue and fees that flow back to token holders is crucial. Today, the most acceptable structure for this is token buybacks. This is what I propose for Infinex. One of the reasons used to justify teams diverting funds to themselves is funding operations. For Infinex, a solution for this is to do what Binance used to do: periodically buy back directly from the treasury to ensure sufficient operational funds. If these tokens are then locked, they are effectively taken out of the market.

So now we have key rules enshrined, preserving a non-custodial platform. To be explicit, this means that any user can exit the platform without requiring anything from any other party. The second is that all fees and revenues, after any incentives, rebates or other direct costs, must be used for token buybacks.

This is very simple, and I think it would be sufficient in a perfect world. It is almost sufficient for traditional startups, where both users and investors accept that the founder is in charge and has significant discretion to pursue a product strategy of their choosing. However, we have not yet contemplated when things go wrong and a change of management is necessary.

Change control

Let's now discuss changes in management. What happens if the founder no longer has the mandate of token holders? In traditional startups, there are two options: the first is that the founders control the company, in which case minority owners can do nothing and are along for the ride. The second is where there have been sufficient sales of equity that the founders no longer have control; in that case, if the owners lose faith in their management, they can replace them. This is rare in startups, but it definitely happens. WeWork is a great example, and so is Apple, but for the opposite reason. But in crypto, it is rare for a founder to control the majority of a project token.

But in crypto, for the last few years, it has been "best practice" for the founder to larp as having given up control of the project, although sometimes it is not a larp (see my abandonment and subsequent return to Synthetix). In these structures, the Founder takes control of a totally separate entity, a "Labs" entity. This is where the majority of meaningful decisions are made. Unfortunately, it is rare for most holders of the token to exercise any control over the Labs entity at all if they bought the token on secondary markets.

Let's assume, though, that there is a single entity. If the founder or manager of that entity has been given discretion over normal decision-making (in the case of Infinex, everything except custody and revenue) and they lose the mandate of the token holders, how do we resolve this? In DAO governance, historically, this process has been extremely convoluted or nonexistent. But I would argue we want to simplify this significantly, such that the bar for exercising this change of control is high. The simplest solution is to allow a group of token holders to propose a new candidate, and if ratified by a vote, that candidate takes over the project. Again, this is similar in process and outcome to how it is done in traditional startups. You don't dissolve the entire company and restart it. You just replace the leader. There are, of course, examples where the leader decides they don't want to be replaced, and they have sufficient social capital both internally and externally that it is impossible to replace them, see OpenAI. Again, feature, not bug.

So let’s practically review how this ought to be done in the case of Infinex. If a group of Patron holders (or the future infinex token) votes to replace me and they reach a pre-agreed threshold of token votes, then the vote passes and I am replaced. This would necessitate a token bond being offered of sufficient size that token holders were willing to vote in this new candidate. This is pretty simple. But what if I refuse to go? In traditional startups, we have the law to rely on, although it is still a somewhat murky question as to who ultimately controls a company, as Matt Levine loves to point out frequently. In Infinex, I propose a simpler solution: if I refuse to give up control, my tokens can be slashed. Now there is a risk here for me, which is that my tokens might be arbitrarily slashed, but tbh it is a risk I am willing to take. If token holders decide to slash my tokens, I will obviously and immediately stop working and start fudding, which would be bad for everyone. If this is no longer a credible threat, then I should definitely be replaced. So we have pretty good incentive alignment in both the failure case and the optimal case.

The Patron NFT

We have a Patron NFT, which is the governance token today, but it is a pretty retarded form of ownership for a bunch of reasons. Suffice it to say, I think we need to replace it. This change clearly falls outside the bounds of the rules defined earlier. But it is also a pretty critical process in the project evolution. So we need a mechanism to make this decision, and it seems fairly clear this should be a supermajority decision, imo, something like 50% of net voting power in the affirmative. I am proposing adaptive quorum voting, where if there are no votes against, a minimum of 50% is required, but if there are votes against, they are netted off the affirmative votes. This handles low governance participation, but if we have 100% participation, we can handle up to 25% against and still pass the proposal if the other 75% vote for it. My proposal is that a referendum-style vote must be held for any change outside the defined rules of day-to-day governance.

Proposed Governance structure.

Operationally, these bylaws will be enshrined in the existing Foundation and form part of the constitutional documents that bind its independent director. The Foundation will delegate decision-making to an Association, and both of these entities will ensure oversight and adherence to the governance structure below on behalf of all token holders:

1. A 50% net majority requirement of Patrons voting to enact the new governance system

2. Delegate project decision-making to a project lead

3. All revenue after any direct costs, such as incentives or rebates, must be used for token buybacks

4. The platform must remain non-custodial

5. Modifying governance requires adaptive quorum voting

6. Replacing the project lead with a majority vote by Patron holders

7. Quarterly reports on token buybacks and sales as described below

Treasury

Another consideration is how to manage the treasury. The simplest version is to operate under the assumption that with these rules in place, particularly the buyback structure, the treasury will be used effectively to drive revenue growth and not raided by the project lead or the rest of the team. I think it is fair to say that this would be a somewhat naive take, given what we have seen in the space historically. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a simple solution for this other than clear disclosures. My proposal is to add a requirement to release audited reports on buybacks and treasury sales on a quarterly basis. If this is not done in a timely fashion for any reason, I should be replaced. This gives token owners oversight of the buyback rate and use of funds without introducing complex mechanisms to manage the treasury.

Meatspace requirements

The final consideration is the legal structure. While this proposal optimises for simplicity and clarity with respect to the onchain project governance, it does not account for legal liability for token holders or the people managing the protocol. While I am personally comfortable taking this risk, it will be almost impossible to find someone who is willing to take this on, therefore making it impossible to replace me should it be necessary. We therefore need a simple structure that enshrines all of the above in a legal wrapper, protecting token holders, managers and counterparties. I believe a Swiss association is the optimal solution for this, and all of the above processes can be incorporated into the association charter, providing meatspace clarity without introducing overhead.

Another consideration is that Infinex needs to be able to sign contracts in the real world. We now have two entities with a clear mandate to enforce governance and act on behalf of the project as a counterparty to agreements and other legal requirements. This ensures we have a mechanism for entering into contracts for services and infrastructure.

Conclusion

If we were launching Infinex today, it is possible I would opt for a traditional company structure. This would have been tempting because of the reduced complexity, and it would have enabled me to have maximal control of the project direction. I'm glad we don't have that option today because I still strongly believe tokenisation is the optimal path for cryptocurrency projects. We are all Patrons now.

Once this proposal has been reviewed by various stakeholders and any feedback incorporated, I will look to formally propose it through our current governance structure.

After many years of futile meming, the revenue meta has broken out. We can thank Hyperliquid for this. In 2021, a few DeFi enjoyoooors tried to meme the “real revenue” meta into existence, but outside a handful of projects, onchain activity and revenue were insufficient for this new meta to be sustainable. Then, the bear hit in 2022. The other reason the revenue meta never caught on was that projects that did have meaningful revenue either didn't have a token or their token was treated as an afterthought. Even when a project did have revenue and a token, revenues were rarely meaningful when compared to the FDV of their tokens.

Despite these headwinds, it was obvious revenue would eventually be the dominant narrative. We need only look at Binance, which has been burning BNB (where this BNB came from may be up for debate) for years. BNB is, without a doubt, one of the best-performing assets in history.

The Playbook

1. Have revenue

2. Have a token

3. Buy back the token with revenue

4. Make sure the revenue is meaningful relative to the token market cap

5. Profit

Easy, if you can get past step one 😂.

Tradfi has a metric for this (though like everything, it can be and is gamed): P/E, price to earnings. The theory is that if the price is high relative to earnings, it is bad, and if the price is low relative to earnings, it is good. But fuck tradfi, we can just reinvent the wheel.

In 2023, the Solana ecosystem birthed some of the first hyper-revenue projects. Though, as a recovering eth maxi, I must point out that Uniswap, Aave, and Opensea (all Ethereum projects) were the first to generate meaningful revenue during the previous cycle.

In the bear market, most of Solana's revenues were from memecoins, either launchpads or terminals. The issue was that, in almost every case, these projects didn't yet have a token. Then Hyperliquid combined revenue and a token with a little L1 spice and exploded. Suddenly, what had been obvious to everyone holding BNB for almost a decade was once again obvious to everyone in crypto, especially those early to HYPE (not me, sadly, due to contractual obligations 😅).

If you have enough revenue to buy back enough tokens, you can meaningfully return value to token holders.

A little aside: Back in 2018, Synthetix needed to decide how to distribute value to token holders. We chose distributions vs. buybacks. The reasoning kind of makes sense if you squint, but in hindsight, we optimised for the wrong thing. We wanted everyone staking, so we did not want to reward non-stakers. This worked for a while, especially with high inflation, but unfortunately, the revenue never became sufficient to offset inflation.

Revenue Wars

So, the revenue wars are in full swing, and the leaders are HYPE, PUMP, ENA, and Axiom. We should also recognise Phantom and Metamask, but let’s leave them for now. While each of these projects has done extremely well this cycle, there are meaningful differences.

Hyperliquid generates the majority of its revenue from exchange fees on its native DEX. While it aspires to be an ecosystem and has made meaningful progress this year with HyperEVM and Builder codes, it is still, from a revenue perspective, a full-stack exchange.

Pump is a protocol/app on Solana, and while they are expanding vertically down the stack by adding their own AMM to Solana, they have not yet decided to launch an L1. Given how the market prices layer ones, it seems almost inevitable.

Ethena is a protocol more than an app, and its strategy has been to focus on distribution via other platforms. This strategy appears to be working fairly well for it so far 😅. Ethena has even satisfied the conditions required to enable their fee switch, something which seemed way off only a year ago.

Finally, Axiom is a pure app that provides access protocols and chains, mainly on Solana, though it has also integrated Hyperliquid. Ninety-nine per cent of its revenue comes from the memecoin trenches.

The fat protocol thesis

This is where it gets interesting because all of those projects above occupy different places in the product stack. So we must now return to the fat protocol thesis. Where does the value capture happen in the stack? Historically, the fat protocol thesis was supported by protocols like Aave and Uniswap. But it has been increasingly clear that these protocols are feeling compelled to move vertically up the stack. While every DeFi protocol initially had a dApp, over time, many have launched their own mobile apps and wallets. Where is this pressure coming from? Distribution.

Outside of crypto, most value is captured by the layer that owns distribution. And we are already seeing this play out as crypto evolves. In DeFi summer Curve.fi LPs and token holders captured almost 100% of the value the protocol created, with some minor value capture happening at the aggregation layer, with 1inch and others adding fees or capturing “positive slippage”. But that has shifted massively with Metamask and Phantom enabling in-app swaps. Today, Metamask charges 1% vs the 1-5bps on a curve swap. So Metamask is capturing 20-100x more value than liquidity providers and orders of magnitude more than the protocol itself. Over the long term, distribution wins.

The OG superapps.

Centralised exchanges are the original superapps. They have custody, spot, perps, staking, launchpads, and many more services all in a single platform. They are also fully vertically integrated and arguably manage to capture far more value through trading fees and launchpads than most of the tokens they list ever generate at the protocol level. But the world is changing, and CEXs are being forced to change. In the next five years, we will move beyond this prehistoric era where the majority of value transfer in crypto happens off-chain.

Infinex

Infinex was built to replicate all of the functionality of a CEX by leveraging onchain protocols. Last month, we went live with perps powered by Hyperliquid for all users, and eventually, spot will be added, two critical features that must be present to challenge CEX dominance. We already have one of the best token swapping platforms in crypto. We will extend this further with the launch of a trading terminal in the next few months. We are also launching our own extension, which will have built-in swaps and other features that leverage the Infinex platform to make it the best experience for interacting with dapps on any chain.

From there, we will continue to roll out new features on new chains, including NFTs, new games, an upgraded yield interface, and prediction markets.

Crates

It has been a while since Infinex launched an incentive campaign. We had Yaprun, but that was an attention campaign. We are now ready to unleash powerful incentives for new and existing users to try the platform. So we are bringing back Crates. Craterun was one of the best and most beloved incentive campaigns of this cycle, iykyk. Crates will be 100x more fun and exciting than the OG version. Crates will become the unified incentive delivery mechanism to support all new apps and features on Infinex.

Each new feature will have a chance to design a crates-based campaign that aligns with the app's user base and usage patterns. So, the Crates campaign for the new Infienx extension will look very different from the one for Infinex Terminal, but they will all leverage Infinex Crates as the single memetic reward scheme.

Diversification

The final component of the superapp thesis is that it is not enough to have one undiversified revenue stream. If we are going to supplant CEXs, we must have multiple independent revenue streams that can all be directed towards token buybacks. But, Infinex doesn't have a token! Well, yes and no, Infinex has the patron NFT, but as everyone has realised, an NFT is not the optimal structure for a token to support a platform like Infinex. We need a real token. But only once we have earned it. And here is the final point: we will transition to a new token once we have truly validated the superapp thesis by demonstrating sustained and diversified revenue from multiple platform features.

We also need to enshrine this in a governance framework. The specifics of what metrics will be required to launch the token will be included in the new governance proposal, a complete refresh of Infinex governance. This will ensure clarity over key decision-making processes and codify token buybacks within governance. I will publish a post on governance in the next few weeks.

Conclusion aka TGE

Infinex will rapidly deliver new features over the next few months. This, combined with well-designed incentive schemes that amplify the network effects of our superapp, will allow us to rapidly expand distribution. Increased distribution will grow revenue, which will be directed towards buybacks once we have satisfied the requirements for launching an Infinex token. It’s a simple plan, really. Look out for more details in upcoming posts on the relaunch of governance, crates and our upcoming TGE.