Infinex's Patron NFT Sale Introduces New Crypto Funding Model

According to Cointelegraph, Infinex’s “Patron NFT” sale could represent a new model for bootstrapping crypto projects while avoiding the traditional venture capital funding pitfalls, says founder Kain Warwick. Warwick introduced the concept of “Patronage” with Infinex, aiming to allow all participants to own a portion of a crypto project under the same terms. He criticized the current venture capital model for its “skewed incentives,” where wealthy investors receive significantly better deals than others. Warwick emphasized the need for a different approach, noting that the current incentive structure is flawed and lacks fairness unless everyone gets the same deal or as close to it as possible. Patronage involves providing support to an individual, business, or cause without expecting anything in return. To distribute ownership of Infinex, Warwick issued “Patron” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the public, including venture capitalists and retail investors, to generate community interest in its vision of offering a non-custodial, unified user experience across all blockchains and decentralized finance applications. Infinex aims to replace crypto exchanges as the primary point of contact for new and existing crypto users. Warwick prioritized obtaining a wide distribution of Patron NFT investors over focusing on a few venture capital firms, which he initially considered excluding. Ultimately, Infinex raised $65.3 million through the sale of Patron NFTs to several VC firms, industry leaders, and hundreds of community members, although Warwick had hoped to reach $100 million. Notable participants included Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Near Foundation, Synthetix, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum Foundation researcher Tim Beiko. Warwick noted that Infinex conducted a pre-access sale for key community members under the same terms. He mentioned receiving a “healthy” push from participants eager to know when integrations with projects like Jupiter, Uniswap, and 1inch would occur. Despite market prices nearing late 2021 highs, crypto projects have seen significantly less funding recently. Crypto funding has remained slightly below $3 billion each quarter this year, a stark contrast to the $12 billion raised during Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, according to RootData.