From mirror xyz by Kain.eth

The Infinex Patron Sale wrapped up in September, and now the Patron Distribution is almost upon us, so I'm under pressure to write a retrospective on the sale. Also, I haven't been punched in the head this week, so my brain is working well enough for some long-form writing.

“Why do this weird NFT thing and not a seed round from VCs?”

I have been asked this question many times over the last few months. My quick, sarcastic response was usually, “Why do something easy when you can do something stupidly hard?” But the honest answer is that the easy option is rarely optimal, and the current “easy” option facing most founders leads directly to Goblin Town.

Tokens and crypto are about coordination, and decentralized systems are superior because of their capacity for coordination. The current meta breaks coordination because the incentives are so skewed. Incentive alignment works best when everyone has equal access. When access is gated or throttled, incentive alignment quickly breaks down.

What Infinex is trying to achieve is so audacious that we need the entire crypto community involved. We are ushering in the next phase of our industry, the”post-CEX era”. Where we no longer rely on centralized systems to intermediate our crypto transactions, if we are going to tear centralized exchanges down and make decentralised systems accessible, we must align as many people in the industry as possible.

So, this is the metric by which I judge the success of the Patron Sale: Did we achieve broad alignment across the community?

There are 1601 accounts that collectively hold 43,284, with a further 5,800 patrons allocated in various incentive campaigns like Speedrun and Craterun. This is a good start but falls short of our desired distribution. We must return to this later and identify a few solutions to increase distribution. This is one of the challenges of using NFTs for patron sales; because the total supply is only 100k and the minimum price is $1250, many people were priced out. That said, Governance Points allowed a wider group of community members to access Patrons.

Strategic alignment was a critical component of the sale; it was important that credible and high-profile funds and foundations join our mission to replace centralized exchanges. I believe we were very successful in this aspect of the sale. Not only did we secure participation from ecosystem partners like Solana and Near, but we also had many projects like Wormhole, Pyth and Synthetix participate. In addition, we secured numerous high-integrity VC firms as Patrons, including Variant, Founders Fund, Framework Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and many others. The complete list is here.