The End Of Centralized Exchanges | Kain Warwick's Infinex

Joining us today is Kain Warwick. Not to fight, but to talk about his exciting new project called Infinex. Infinex aims to replace crypto's centralized exchange experience and bring it all onchian. It's ambitious, but if it works, could change the way we think about DeFi and navigate across chains forever. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/78 ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:29 Infinex 00:12:44 The Infinex Tech Stack 00:20:45 Optimizing Across Protocols 00:27:00 The Centralization Tradeoff 00:29:04 Key Tech Unlocks 00:34:48 Managing Protocol Risk 00:42:33 Transaction Experience & Security 00:50:40 Patron Sale 00:56:55 Future Growth Plans 01:00:29 Fight Commentary ------ RESOURCES Kain Warwick - https://x.com/kaiynne Infinex - https://x.com/infinex_app ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think there's a large cohort of OG ETH people that have never done a Solana transaction.

• 0:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Their first Solana transaction will be on InfineX. I guarantee you, like, for the majority of OG ETH people, their first time that they use Solana will be on InfineX, without even realizing it.

• 0:21David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of DeFi platforms eating C-Fi banks. Today on the show, we have Kane Warwick, hot on the heels of the $65 million patron sale from his brand-new platform, InfineX. Kane thinks that DeFi is already better than centralized crypto platforms like Binance, except the only issue is that all the quality DeFi apps are fragmented across the crypto universe. Different apps on different chains, all creating and providing a ton of world-class products, but with dogshit UX for users. According to Kane, we are no longer in the era of educating users into self-custodial private keys, or learning DeFi interfaces one by one, or chain-swapping our assets to get there. According to Kane, in 2024, we have the technology to create one seamless interface,

• 1:05David Hoffman?

  abstracting all the chains and integrating together all of the DeFi apps. The thesis is simple: take all the best of what DeFi has to offer and package it up into a single interface, abstract everything in the background using intents, solvers, and chain abstraction tools like Gelato and Near. And with this, you can even use Litecoin or XRP, which to this day have large masses of users who keep their funds on Binance, because that's what they do, and integrate those assets into InfineX as well. If InfineX works, I expect it to unlock crypto for the next wave of users, because we already know that cudgelling users into self-custody and private keys is an exhausted opportunity. What we need is the next wave of technology to onboard the next billion users, and Kane thinks that he's cracked the code with a technology that we have in 2024.

• 1:50David Hoffman?

  As a disclaimer, both Bankless Ventures and myself are InfineX patrons. We're excited about what Kane is building and how aligned it is with the Bankless mission, so how could we not be? And for those eager to see me and Kane Warwick go head-to-head in karate combat on October 11th, we, of course, chat about that too at the very end of the podcast. So let's go ahead and get right into the episode with Kane Warwick from InfineX. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Kane Warwick, father of modern yield farming, benevolent ex-dictator of Synthetix, owner of Mansions, and now founder of InfineX. Kane, welcome back to Bankless.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

• 2:24David Hoffman?

  Uh, Infinix is the tip of the chain, the tip of the cane Warwick chain, the most recent thing that you have committed your life to. Talk about that a little bit, like what's the thesis behind it? What, what is it? Uh, why does the world need it?

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, the thesis is on-chain Binance, which I think is something that has been around for a while. This idea that, you know, we want to bring everyone on-chain. I don't think that we were quite ready to do it. I don't think we had, um, all of the tech in place to be able to do it, even though we thought we did. Um, you know, one of the interesting things about, uh, this new journey, stepping back from building protocols and building a, you know, something that's more like a user interface, um, has been realizing all of the weird coping strategies as a DeFi founder that, uh, that I think, um, you know, I needed to, to live by. So there's a, there's a bunch of stuff that I, that has, you know, kind of popped out for me that I'm like, oh, wow. We actually were a bit further away from this than I thought.

• 3:21David Hoffman?

  What is, what is on-chain Binance? How would you define that?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the interesting thing, right? Like if you talk to a lot of DeFi people, I think they would say, oh no, we've already got that. It's called DeFi. It's over here, right? Um, and, and, you know, okay, let's break that down, right?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  DeFi over here is the AVE interface and the DRIFT interface and the Uniswap interface. And all of these like interfaces that are individual features that Binance has, right? And for the average user, navigating a bunch of different interfaces, understanding how to connect to them, understanding that you bring your own wallet, there's no, you know, global account or anything like that, um, is very difficult.

• 4:07David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And that's why they stay on Binance. But even more importantly, even if you, you believed that this were true, that this, you know, fragmented ecosystem of individual feature-based interfaces was better, we actually don't even have all the features, right? If you talk to a Binance user, uh, and we've talked to a bunch of Binance users, we've talked to people, uh, in, in a bunch of exchanges, um, over the last 18 months, the average Binance user, if we walked down on the street and said, hey, Binance users, you know, what do you want to do? Uh, will say, I want to deposit XRP.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  That's the first thing they want to do.

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  You can't do that in DeFi.

• 4:48David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  There's no XRP. Not only is there no XRP, but we actually will then say, well, actually you're an idiot. So go somewhere else. Right? And, and this is the reality that like most of what centralized exchanges do, we talk a lot about trading volume and fees and all of, you know, those are the things that make money. But what they do, like one of their core value props is they store people's crypto. That's it. They store people's crypto in a way where they're not going to lose it. Right? So it's not self custodial. It's, you know, a ton of counterparty risk, but it's what people like. It's what people use. And so we can keep building, hoping that people will want the things that we're building. Or we can actually ask a genuine question. What do you want? And then build that.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  And that's what InfineX is.

• 5:35David Hoffman?

  Okay. So there's a, a large cohort of crypto people, the, the deep crypto people who are very like values driven, even if you're trading meme coins, like you probably still understand and appreciate the value of self custody. And when this is something that we've been trying to espouse to the world, let's get the world on chain. Let's get everyone some private keys. And I think we've done a decent, good job of populating that corner of the internet with our kind of people.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  Uh, and then maybe what you're alluding to is like, well, that effort has actually kind of been exhausted. If you are a self custody crypto person, uh, there's not that many of those people, those types of people out there in the world that we haven't already found and put into our corner of the internet. And so I, I think what you're, maybe what you're alluding to is that InfineX is like the next step to getting the value of crypto ethos, like a bankless Binance, uh, that can like reach out to, uh, the next further out concentric circle of crypto people.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Exactly. Who are in crypto. These are crypto users, like they're daily active Binance users. They're in crypto. They're as in crypto as I am. We just say they're doing it wrong, right? And the funny thing is, right? We've been building for enthusiasts. And if this were any other industry, building for enthusiasts would have failed utterly years ago, right? But crypto being what it is and tokens being what they are, there's such a powerful coordination mechanism. There's such a powerful monetization mechanism and incentive structure that we got hooked on our own supply. We're like, we are just killing it here. Like, this is amazing, right? Everything that we're doing is working so well. But we were building for enthusiasts and we ran out of enthusiasts. Right. And then when we ran out of enthusiasts,

• 7:16Speaker 00

  we buried our head in the sand and said, no, no, it's okay. We can make more enthusiasts, right? And the answer is- We simply just have to teach them. Yes, yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I've said this a couple of times, but I, some of the things that I believed, right? I think maybe even in one of the conversations that we had, I was like, no, no, it's, it's good that private keys are so hard to manage because it makes people appreciate how good they are. And it's like, no, like, that's not how we make, that's not how we get adoption. Yes for some, no for most. Sure. It like for, and the some is tapped out. Right. We've tapped out those people, right? If you think about it like Linux, right?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  There was, there was a period of time where Linux users, and I was one of them, had this view that like the, the year of the Linux desktop was like perpetually next year. Like next year, everyone's going to work out Linux, right? The irony of ironies is that Linux dominates the world, but it dominates it by being the infrastructure that people build things on top of, right? And, you know, all of the data centers in the world run on Linux. That's just what they run on. But we use Macs and we still use Windows machines, right? Like, you know, and I mean, even there's an argument like, you know, obviously OSX, you know, has its Unix, you know, history, whatever.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  But like for a user, for a genuine end user, you need to control the experience. End to end, you know, this is like a very Jobsian thing, but like if you want to build good software, you got to build the hardware, right? Like you need to control the end to end experience, right? And we, we have a view at Infinex that if you want people to use crypto and be on chain, that you need to build an end to end experience, right? And optimizing for censorship resistance gives you a poor UX that only certain people are going to be willing to deal with, right? And so we are not censorship resistant, not today, right? But we are non custodial and that's the most important thing. We give people all of the

• 9:24Speaker 00

  things that are amazing about on-chain and we're non custodial. But yes, someone could censor us, right? Someone could shut down the system and we're not nation state resistant today, you know, but my view is if we build a thing that is valuable enough, like those are technical problems that can be solved. We can decentralize, you know, that infrastructure such that, you know, maybe you don't get the perfect end to end user experience, but you can get something approaching it and we can get better and better over time. But you need to start with demand. If you have no demand for it and you haven't, you know, built an audience and built distribution, then building something that is maximally

• 10:05Speaker 00

  censorship resistant, which again, we've been doing like in deep, you know, synthetics was maximally censorship resistant. You can't shut it down, right? You can't even shut down the interfaces. We've got pinned interfaces on IPFS that let you do the things that will be there for the rest of time, right? And so, you know, that is the fallback that we have, but we're trying to bring people on-chain and you got to meet them where they live.

• 10:28David Hoffman?

  I want to kind of pop open the hood and take a look at what Infinex actually looks like from like the tech stack. We're calling this on-chain Binance. Binance has like a front end, an interface. It's also got like engines and, you know, custodial systems. How is Infinex similar? What does it have that's similar and what does it have that's different?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  What what Infinex does that is different to Binance is it doesn't co-mingle funds. So each user has their own account, right? Which is a smart contract or a program. Or, you know, soon, right? We'll be using near-chain signatures. So that you will have a smart contract that will control a wallet address on the Litecoin network, for example, right? And so you'll be able to deposit native Litecoin into Infinex and control it through this non-custodial interface, right? You sign a message using a pass key and it will translate that message, send to the Litecoin network. And I mean, it won't do anything because no one does anything with Litecoin. But like, it'll let you put your Litecoin there and it's a safer place to put it, right?

• 11:31David Hoffman?

  Because if you're a Litecoin user, that is what you use it.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  That's what you use it for. It's yeah, like more so than even Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin kind of pivoted away from just like a pet rock to like, you know, it does stuff again now, right? There's runes and ordinals and L2s and all kinds of fun stuff that's emerged. Litecoin doesn't have that. Litecoin is like purely an asset that you hold, right? And same with XRP.

• 11:52David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  But there are huge segments of the market. And this is the really interesting thing, right? If you go down CoinGecko from top to bottom, go through the 30 assets. There's like 10 solidly that DeFi doesn't really touch, right? Or doesn't touch well. You know, maybe you've got wrapped versions, synthetic versions, but like you can't really get them into DeFi on Solana or Ethereum or, you know, Cosmos or like none of these ecosystems let you let you do that. And so Infinex gives you the ability to do that. It also gives you the ability to access the features that Binance offers as a

• 12:34Speaker 00

  full stack application running on a database on chain.

• 12:38David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  So an example of that is if you want to margin trade, right? So if you want to margin trade, you've got some ETH and you want to use that as margin to borrow some stables and trade. We take you to AVE.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Obviously, right?

• 12:57David Hoffman?

  In the backend, you don't take them in the frontend.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  In the frontend, they just click a button and say, I want, I want access to Maja. I want to, you know, I've got some ETH and I want to borrow, you know, a thousand USDC to trade Mudang. Cool. Okay, fine. We can do that, right? It doesn't matter that the ETH is on Arbitrum and is going to be borrowed via Aave on Arbitrum. And the USDC will then be bridged over to Solana or whatever. Like, none of that matters.

• 13:26David Hoffman?

  Is Mudang on Solana?

• 13:27Speaker 00

  I don't know, actually.

• 13:29David Hoffman?

  Let's act that it is. So like, I've got ETH on Arbitrum.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:32David Hoffman?

  I put my ETH into Infinex.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:34David Hoffman?

  I borrow stables on Arbitrum's version of Aave.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:38David Hoffman?

  And then Infinex will allow me to take those stables over to Solana and buy Mudang.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:43David Hoffman?

  And I don't, I don't know about any chain.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  You don't know about any chain. It's a completely abstracted away. I said this on Twitter the other day. I think that there are, there's a large cohort of OG ETH people that have never done a Solana transaction.

• 13:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Their first Solana transaction will be on Infinex. I guarantee you, like, for the majority of, like, OG ETH people, their first time that they use Solana will be on Infinex. Without even realizing it.

• 14:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  They'll be like, ah, whiff, okay.

• 14:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's fine, because they can get the deniability.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, not me, right? It's funny. It happened the other way around, where, you know, we had this yield farming thing. And one of the Solana guys was like, wait a second, I don't, I don't want to be farming on base. And I'm like, yeah, you don't really get a choice, right? Like, you put your, like, it just does the thing where the thing happens, right? Same thing with Bull Run. We've got this mini, you know, trading game. It happens on Blast. Doesn't matter if you like Blast or not. That's where it happens, right?

• 14:39David Hoffman?

  I've played that game. I had no idea.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, it's on Blast, right? So, you know, these things are happening on different chains, chains that you may never have interacted with, right? And, you know, it's only going to expand. We're going to have another, you know, 10 chains next year, right? Or 15 chains. And so, you know, Almost definitely balance the probabilities, your first IVC transaction will be via InfineX. Oh, interesting. Like, cause other than to like farm some airdrop, like Dimension or something like, who has installed one of those weird, well, like they just haven't, right? Like, you're like, I've got MetaMask, it's bad enough, right? I don't need anything else. So, so all of this stuff happens in the background. You get access to on-chain protocols on various networks. You get bridged across to wherever you need to be.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  And you get access to the features you want. And the features that people on Binance want, right? Because again, we're not targeting enthusiasts, we're targeting the existing Binance user. They want storage, they want to store their assets, right? Safely. And for them, safe is not non-custodial. Safe is a vibe. Right. Safe is a feeling, right? They like CZ. He does weird. Funds are safe. Yeah, literally, like he does weird stuff, he's super rich, he's probably not gonna rug them, like, who knows, right? But it's a vibe. They don't, they don't care about custody, non-custody, whatever, they just want a vibe that feels safe. So this is the reason why it's so important that we have a broad cohort of patrons, right?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  In, in the InfineX ecosystem. Because how does someone who's on Binance get that vibe of safety? They get it from someone on Twitter. Right. Someone on Twitter is like, hey, I did a deep dive into the tech and it looks great and whatever. And they're like, I trust this guy. Yeah. He's a smart guy, right? Passes his test, passes my test. Yeah, exactly. Like, Hasu's looked into it and, you know, if he likes it, then I'm cool, right? Like, he's smarter than me, I don't know, right? So like, sure, whatever. And so building up that vibe of safety that like, this is a safe place for me to store my assets is really critical, right? That's like table stakes in my mind. And there's never been a DeFi platform that has been able to accept all of the top 100 assets natively, non-custodial. Hasn't it? Wasn't even possible until like this year, really, right?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  So there's a whole bunch of stuff that's come together, pass keys, turnkey, near-chain signatures. All of this stuff has come together that's allowed us to do it. And then you go, okay, what else? As a user, I've got some assets on this platform now. What do I want to do? I want to do spot trading. I just want to swap, you know, I want to buy some Mu Dang or I want to buy some Whiff or I want to buy Pepe or, you know, I want to buy some new meme coin or whatever. Or I want to buy Sky.

• 17:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  I heard that it's rebranding. It's cool. There's this rebalancing thing like, you know, let's buy some DeFi tokens, right? Whatever it is, it doesn't matter, right? So you've got some Bitcoin and you want to buy Sky. That's easy on Binance, right? Binance abstracts the chains away in an incredible fashion, right? So you can do that very easily on Binance. You can't do that very easily on DeFi, right? We're going to make it easy for people to do that. Yeah, sell point, you know, zero one of a BTC and, you know, buy some, you know, buy some DeFi tokens. Cool. So we do all of that. We add margin. We add some lending. We add some staking. And the best thing is each of these marginal things that we add, each new feature that we add,

• 18:07Speaker 00

  not only are there like 10 amazing solutions that exist for it, right? You know, whether it's LRTs, LSTs, you know, all kinds of stuff. But it costs us nothing.

• 18:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  The integration.

• 18:19David Hoffman?

  You don't develop it.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  We're not building protocols. Protocol is already there, right?

• 18:23David Hoffman?

  DeFi already built the value.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  It's there.

• 18:24David Hoffman?

  You're just packaging it and selling it to the customer.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:29David Hoffman?

  So you mentioned like there's 10 different offerings, often of the same type in crypto. There's like five different ways, five different platforms to go margin long. How do you manage that harriness in the backend, right? Like whether you want to deposit into AVE or Compound or any other lending protocol might be determined by the yields. Maybe, maybe Morpho is giving the better yields today. How do you like package up and make sure you're actually offering the best in that one moment that DeFi is offering? How do you manage this complexity?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's a very good. Question, both from like a user perspective and I think also like a philosophical perspective as well. What are we optimizing for? Right. This is the other reason why it's so important. We have a broad range of patrons. Who are, you know, governing the system because we need as much input as possible into this process. We don't want to be necessarily, you know, kingmakers or picking winners. I think in the short term, Lindy is probably the biggest determinant for me, right? Like if I were the benevolent dictator of InfineX and I could just make decisions and do whatever I wanted. I would pick something like Ave for reasons, right?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Because, you know, and probably I'd pick something like Ave on, you know, uh, mainnet and Arbitrum. Like the place where it has the most depth, the most assets, the, you know, to make it easy, right? Because there's an argument that if Binance builds a feature and it breaks in. You don't lose money by doing the thing, right? Like you kind of can't, you can lose money in Binance, but not that way, right? You're probably not going to lose money by clicking a button and Binance, you know, nukes the, you know, ETH or whatever, right? Like they, they do some weird thing where they pay too high a gas fee or something like that. That's on them, right? Right. So this is different because it's non-custodial and so InfineX is not necessarily covering your losses.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  So we probably in the early phase need to optimize for safety over anything else, right? You know, building up a reputation for safety and also building up a reputation for letting the user opt in. You know, all of the things that you do as an InfineX user, you opt into, you upgrade your account. No one else can upgrade your account. You have an account that is a, you know, perfect blank slate when you first get it set up. It doesn't connect to anything. You, the only way that you can lose that money is if that account itself is hacked, right? But it's not connected to Ave, it's not connected to Uniswap, it's not connected anywhere, right? And then you go, okay, I want to do Uniswap. Opt in, I want to do Ave, opt in and you choose, right? So if you want to enable cream finance three. Right.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Like, I mean, you should know what you're doing, right? First of all, and there'll be some disclaimers around like, hey, just a heads up. You are gonna lose all of your money here. This thing gets hacked every single time, right? You know, and so, so those are the types of things we've got to balance.

• 21:19David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure. Is there a world where like, um, maybe on like, there's like 18 different platforms in crypto? And maybe I'm coming in with size. Maybe I'm like actually going to like kind of nuke the order books if you put me into one order book. So maybe you, is there a world where you actually kind of like spread my order across three different service providers? Back end service providers?

• 21:37Speaker 00

  So here's, here's maybe a similar answer, but for a different use case, right? Which is, um, let's say you are, you have size, right? Let's say you have $10 million and you are, um, borrowing stables against ETH.

• 21:52David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Right? There's probably four or five different places where there's enough liquidity, um, that you can do that, you know, comfortably. But the APY fluctuates.

• 22:00David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Right? And it may be that there's an opportunity to offload a mill or two of that to Arbitrum because of reasons or optimism or base or blast or whatever. You probably can't take the whole 10 mil, but maybe you can offload 20% of it because there's enough of a delta in the interest rate that you're paying that it's worth it.

• 22:21David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  So that exists, right? You've got all those venues. You, as the user can opt into which ones you're okay with, right? And you might say, listen, cream finance, no, thanks. I don't want that. I don't want cream finance on blast, right? But I'm happy to do Maker. I'm happy to do Sky, right? I'm happy to do Ave. I'm happy to do Morpho. Any of those are fine. I'm happy to do Liquify, right? Sorry, Liquity, Liquity. And, uh, and so, um, I've got Liquify on the brain. Anyway, it's a long story. So, so I'm happy to do Liquity. I'm happy to do these things. These are all cool, right? And so you opt into that. And then the system, having got your opt-in, can actually optimize for you within those constraints, right?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  And you can set some kind of threshold where like if the APY delta increases by more Than 10%, then rebalance. And it can do it for you and you know, you just need to work out what the cost is in terms of moving the funds around. And you can kind of pre authorize all of that stuff because it's in your account that you are the only one that can sign a transaction for it. And then you basically say, within these constraints, these things can happen, right? It's like an intense based system and it can rebalance for you. So you could imagine you've got a perps position open to answer your, your question directly. And some new perps protocol pops up and you're like, well, if the funding rate is less than X, I'm willing to offload up to 10% of my

• 23:52Speaker 00

  thing, or maybe there's a farming opportunity or whatever it is, right? And so, you know, that system can monitor your positions and rebalance them for you in real time very easily. And the reason why we can do this and other platforms struggle to do it is because if you want to do all of that on chain. First of all, it's, it's almost an intractable problem. It's not quite, but it's close to it, right? We don't have to do it all on chain because we know we've got your pass key. We know signatures. We know you can pre authorize and opt into all these different things. And so we can rebalance things for you in real time, using our backend to construct a transaction with your pre authorization to then send the transaction on chain. It's just a better system. Right.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  But it requires you have a platform, like a full stack application that can be censored. Right, right. Yeah. That's the trade, right? And so, you know, what's the, what's the downside then, right? Okay, you opt into that, it's rebalancing, everything's going great. And then the moon decides that they hate crypto, right? And they're going to come in and they're nuking all the AWS, you know,

• 25:05Speaker 00

  data centers that are doing crypto stuff, right? And AWS goes, all right, we're shutting down any crypto things and your lights go out, all of crypto's off, right? If that sort of thing happens, what can you do? The answer is you can still get out. Right. Right? You can go, there's an escape hatch that you can go directly on chain and you can hit a button and it doesn't require. I could get hit by a bus. It doesn't require anyone at InfineX managing this. You can just go directly on chain, pull your money out. What's the downside? You don't get that your magical rebalancing APY machine anymore.

• 25:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Now, I'm of the view that, you know, similarly to Uber, right?

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Demand is the best thing that you can possibly do in an adversarial regulatory environment. Creating demand, demonstrating that there is retail demand for a thing and that there's utility for it, is the best defense that you can muster for adversarial regulators. And my view is that we haven't done a great job of that, right? That's actually a mistake. We tried the education thing and then we kind of had this epiphany, oh no, they're trying to kill us. Okay. And then we went from they're trying to kill us to what's next.

• 26:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Right? More education doesn't work if someone's trying to kill you.

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  The answer is build an army.

• 26:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Right?

• 26:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Become unkillable, right? And the only way we're going to become unkillable is if we have 10 million people that are doing on-chain transactions every day. And you go to try and censor that thing.

• 26:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  And those 10 million people are going to have a conversation with whoever's trying to censor it.

• 26:45David Hoffman?

  Right, 10 million people who feel like you're attacking their home.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Can we talk about some of the secret sauce? The technology that Infiniti has in 2024 that really has unlocked some of the opportunities that Infiniti is building? You mentioned Paskys. What's some of the cool things that when people use Infiniti that they'll be exposed to that really unlocks this experience?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  I mean, probably the biggest thing is it is a platform. Right? It is not a normal DeFi application where you just have this narrow strip of utility, right? It is a platform where you can do all the things. That in and of itself is quite different, right? From most of what we've seen in DeFi. We've seen aggregation platforms before where, you know, they try and aggregate a couple of different things. But this is like fully featured, we're giving you all the stuff, right?

• 27:32David Hoffman?

  So every, every single financial tool that DeFi has to offer will be there. Is in the platform.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  And, and will be in the platform either directly or in an aggregated fashion. You know, where you have, you're agnostic to what the best place to get yield on your ETH is, right? It will find it for you. Now, you may have a preference to not go somewhere. You're like, I don't want to do this thing, but everything else on the list, I'm fine with just no cream finance, right? Okay, cool. Opt out of that, enable the other ones and it will do the work for you, right? And so, you know, turning up to a platform and saying, oh, wow, I didn't realize I could do X, right? I've got this token, you know, whatever that token may be, I didn't know I could stake it. Who knew that GTO Sol existed, right?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  For a Binance user, they've got Sol on Binance and like, you know, maybe they got an email six months ago offering to stake it for them, but they didn't see it or like, you know, they don't know what that means, it was weird and like, so there's a discovery problem. Exactly, yeah. So, so there's a thing where it's like, we're going to give you all of the things that you want in a single platform, right? And the amazing thing for DeFi, if you, if you, you know, kind of take that to its logical conclusion, is that a new DeFi primitive doesn't need to build demand side, right? And build distribution for whatever it is doing, right? Especially things like a novel instrument.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  It's kind of insane that someone's like, oh, we've built this new VIX protocol. And then they're like, and we're standing up our own interface and hoping that people come and use it. Please come to take your money out of this other interface and deposit it into our interface. Madness. It's utter madness. Only enthusiasts would do that and even enthusiasts are over it. Right. Even enthusiasts like, honestly, this is dumb, right? And so if as an enthusiast, I turn up and there's a little banner that says, hey, there's a new Bitcoin VIX token. And I'm like, oh, cool. Okay. Like, and maybe it's only, you know, one in 50 people notice or care, right? But it's there. I don't need to stumble upon some new interface, right?

• 29:45Speaker 00

  So that's the primary thing is that we will be a distribution channel for all of the things in DeFi, for all of the chains, all the protocols will be there. The other thing is that if you have a platform like that, that can communicate with you, and this is madness, honestly, but no one can communicate with DeFi people.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  The amount of time, like it happened to me literally two days ago, someone posted a message in a Telegram group being like, hey, is Kane in this Telegram group? Cause I think I found a thing on chain that he should look at, right? And like, it turned out to not be me, but it's like, the fact that it wasn't me was actually worse because now we don't know who it was, right? It's some person with an ENS that did something four years ago or whatever. And the money is still sitting there and someone's like, hey, I stumbled across this thing. Like you've got money sitting there. That's crazy. No one knows how to get in touch with this person.

• 30:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Right? Like if that were on InfineX, you'd be getting an email or a push notification or a banner when you logged in being like, hey, by the way, you left all your money in cream finance. You might want to take it out, right? Like, so there's, there's an element of discovery and you're having a platform that has the ability to communicate, that is monitoring and knows what you do. And, and you know, can tell you, hey, there's a new airdrop, right? Like the fact that, you know, I mean, Bankless does this, right? And I think it does a good job of notifying people of airdrops. But like, that should be a feature in a platform. It shouldn't be a standalone product, right? And it kind of is with Bankless, right? But you know, it should be in the place where your assets are, right? Right?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Like it should just go, oh, hey, by the way, there's a new thing. Click a button, done.

• 31:29David Hoffman?

  There's a, the word curation is coming to mind where DeFi, DeFi is the Wild West. And it's attracted the people who, you know, like that, they like the adventure. They like the risk, they like the rewards. And like, like we said at the beginning, we've kind of tapped out of those people.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:44David Hoffman?

  And even though the expert people in the Wild West have kind of like settled, like, you know, like honestly, with most of my on-chain activity, it has collapsed back down to like Morpho, Ave and Matcha.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:55David Hoffman?

  That's like 90% of my things. And I think the, the way that we scale this is some level of curation where like we, you InfineX is just going to curate the activities in DeFi that represent 90, 95% of the high value, useful, trusted activities collapsing.

• 32:14David Hoffman?

  Into one single platform and kind of softening the edges of DeFi by like allowing not necessarily like showing up the showing open the doors to like the deepest, most degenist corners of DeFi because most of those corners are bad UX like that's where you kind of lose lose the money and or the products don't work or something. The experimental corners of DeFi.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:34David Hoffman?

  InfineX is not InfineX is a self experimental in that no one's done this before, but I don't think you guys are incorporating the experimental edges of DeFi.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And we we probably won't until you know, something gets to a level of traction, right?

• 32:49David Hoffman?

  Some sort of Lindy.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but but you know, we we also might, right? You know, there's a bunch of platforms right now that are trying to solve the misaligned incentives in pump dot fun, right? Some are built by great teams, like they're good teams with good incentives. There's very little reason to not enable something like that in my mind, right? Now, there's a question of like token curation and you're solving that. But I think, you know, realistically, if something launch and this is the thing, right? If if something launches that has solved some of the misalignment in pump pump dot fun, right? We can roll that out in a week.

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Like if we're really under pressure, we're like, okay, we need to enable this. Our users are screaming for it. You can roll that out in a week. Binance can't build a meme coin launch path like they can't even build it anyway, but even if they really wanted to incorporating something on pump to fun, it's just not viable for them, right?

• 33:47David Hoffman?

  Because Binance has to bootstrap its own product, its own internal.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  They'd have to build some kind of centralized wrapper around it and you know, it would be janky and you know, like even I look at Kraken, you know, I was I'm a OG Kraken customer and I was following along with the trials and tribulations of the Kraken eat staking journey, right? They must have spent ungodly amounts of money rolling that out, right? I don't know if they'll ever get ROI on it, right? Like especially at 4%. So, you know, that's a that's a great like. InfineX can roll out 10 different versions of ETH staking for like 20 bucks.

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  Right, right.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  In 20 minutes. It's just so easy, right? They can be tokenized. They can, you know, you can wrap your ETH. You can, you know, do it on multiple chains. You can, you know, have an aggregator. You like, there's so many things that we can do. And, and one thing that DeFi does incredibly well is it makes the interfaces open and it makes, you know, the ability to compose it.

• 34:51David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Incredibly easy, right? And so this is, this is kind of one of the ironies, I guess, of InfineX, right? InfineX itself is not composable.

• 34:59David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  It leverages the composability of the protocols to allow for rapid integrations and rapid rollout of features.

• 35:06David Hoffman?

  Right. InfineX itself is a walled garden that leverages the open jungle of DeFi.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And, and again, if you don't like that, that's okay, right? But you've still got AVE.

• 35:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  You still go to the AVE interface or the Sky interface or whatever, right? Like that, that's the fallback in my mind. And, you know, for like, I think the funny thing is there's a lot of enthusiasts that are like, no, no, I prefer this, right? You prefer it because it's cope. It's a hundred percent cope, right? You don't prefer having 25 tabs open and going to whichever tab you need to go to and figuring out which network you're connected to. And then Phantom is blocking MetaMod. Like, no one prefers that. That's actually insane to say that someone prefers that.

• 35:50David Hoffman?

  It's just what you're used to.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  It's what you're used to and it's also how you made a lot of money.

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Right? And so, you know, we got rewarded with a lot of money for doing things that were kind of insane. And we were like, these must be good things. This is the right way to do it, right? And now I think there'll be a new way to do it. And so, you know, a lot of the people who, I mean, even to your point with yourself, right? Like you've collapsed your DeFi activities. I bet you would do more stuff if it wasn't such a nightmare to do it. It was just there and you were like, yeah, click one button. Okay, I'll check out this new thing. This looks cool. Like it looks cool. I can see what it does. Okay, like click a button, put some ETH in there. Let's see, you know, that discovery and curation side of things. I think it'll open up a longer tail of things that is just hard for, you know,

• 36:38Speaker 00

  a modern DeFi OG to maintain, you know?

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  I probably would have bought Mu Dang a lot sooner had I not had to be concerned about like researching where the token is

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 36:49David Hoffman?

  and how to get my app.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Now I kind of need to know. It's funny, I was, I was so busy in Singapore. I looked it up. It, it came out on the 18th, um, which is I guess like 11 days and almost two weeks ago, right? It was right in Singapore. Singapore was so insane. I saw it and I saw, I saw the memes popping up and I was like, I'm going to regret this, but like, I just had no time. I was like so focused. And then today I was like, huh, okay, 250 mil market cap, yeah.

• 37:16David Hoffman?

  I was sharing Mu Dang memes with a friend, a crypto friend, uh, five or six days ago.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:23David Hoffman?

  And we just, neither of us thought like, hey, maybe.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Maybe I should monetize.

• 37:27David Hoffman?

  Somewhere, didn't think about it.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Look, I mean, who knows? There's probably 10 Mu Dang tokens, right? And like, same thing, I, you know, I bought, um, I remember when I was, when I was on my meme coin arc, um, I bought, uh, the DGEN on Solana. There was a DGEN token on Solana before the base DGEN token. And then when the base one came out, I faded it because I was like, I've already got that.

• 37:48David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  And then the DGEN on Solana rugged and they, and the base, and I was like, yeah, like this is a hard game. It's not as easy, it's not as easy as it looks, so.

• 37:59David Hoffman?

  Talk to me about the transaction experience, uh, because with Infinex, you're not logging in with your MetaMask. You're not signing in with Rabbi, you're not connecting your ledger, uh, but there are transactions happening. And talk to me about how that whole system works.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  So we use, uh, a system of relayers and things like Gelato, um, various RPC providers, uh, to land transactions, whether it's on Solana or, you know, one of the other, uh, EVM chains. And, uh, it, from a user perspective, you sign a message with your pass key, which goes to turn key, which unlocks your private key that only your pass. Key can unlock. What's a pass key? What's turn key? What are these? Sure, sure. So a pass key is Web 2's response to all of the cool stuff that we built in Web 3. Oh, yeah. In my opinion, right? Like, they've, they, you know, obviously, there's very smart people in Web 2.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  They've got huge problems in terms of authentication, right? Authentication has been a nightmare for decades now, right? And, you know, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake for these giant, you know, big tech companies to solve authentication. Like, how do I authenticate a user? The Fito Alliance has landed on pass keys as a solution, right? Like a technical standard. It's a, it's a, it's a technical standard, but it's a standard that they've all adopted. And like, people are, look, it's not, this is actually really funny, right? So I, it's not for everyone, right? And in fact, for some people, it's really not for them. So I, we had that conversation with Vitalik, right?

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And I was like, Vitalik, I'm building a new thing. I, please, will you try it, right? And, and, you know, true to his word, he did. And someone actually asked me on another podcast, like, do you think that Vitalik will, you know, change his approach to DeFi after all of you guys had that conversation with him? And, and you put some pressure to, to, you know, maybe be more supportive of DeFi founders, right? Like, both in private and publicly. And, you know, I said to a few people after that conversation, you know, I've, I've spoken to Vitalik a few times and my, my sense is that like, once he's processed something, right? And it took like, you know, a few minutes of like, thinking about it, right? But, you know, I could see the cogs turning, right?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  And, and once he's processed something and understood that like, it is, you know, internally consistent and like, makes logical sense for him to do that. The public piece fits. Yeah, like, then he's like, click, okay, I missed that, right? And I was like, better late than never, right? Like, and, and, you know, so I was, I was. Cautiously optimistic, right? But I was like, I really want to see some, you know, behavioral change, right? Like, it's easy to say, yeah, I'm going to do more stuff, but you know, will you actually deliver on it? And he's a busy guy, right? Like, you know, it's, it's not easy, right? He's out there advocating, you know, for Ethereum to nation state leaders and stuff, right? Like, so, you know, it's, it's not the easiest thing to do, but I think it's an important thing to do.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  And I really was hopeful that he would. And, and so he was like, hey, I'm gonna look, check out this Infinex thing. And the funny thing is that his setup is, as you can imagine, not super standard, right? He's not using an iPad. And Paskys just didn't work, right? And so there are edge cases in Paskys. And he was kind of like, ah, this Pasky thing is not like working for me, right?

• 41:27David Hoffman?

  Now, I would expect whatever, however, Paskys work to be, if they're going to be incompatible with something, it's going to be incompatible with like the Fort Knox of crypto.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It was, it's kind of interesting, right? It's like, if you're on that bleeding edge. And, and I was really skeptical of Paskys at first, right? Like, when, when our engineering team-

• 41:46David Hoffman?

  Are, are Paskys just like web two private keys?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:49David Hoffman?

  Their private keys, virtual private keys in password manager?

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Literally, that's it. Or like in a secure enclave on the, on the device, in the operating system as well. You know, so there's, whether it's Android phones or, or iOS phones, like there, it's been incorporated. Like, it's fully incorporated into the platforms. And so it's just a cryptographic key.

• 42:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  And so you have a cryptographic key that could sign a message. And we then take that signed message that you must physically have on your device, right? In order for that to work. And you go and sign the message and send it to an NPC network, right? That can then unlock your actual Ethereum private key or Solana private key. And then sign a message that can be broadcast to the chain, right?

• 42:33David Hoffman?

  And the NPC network, the NPC network is the thing that can unlock, that can access a private key without it being custodial.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Correct, yes. So this is turnkey. This is turnkey, which is made by the Coinbase- Ex Coinbase custody team.

• 42:47David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  So, you know, we're, we're very, uh, we're very happy with that. It's like the translation layer between pass keys and, and, um, and, you know, a lot of this stuff is going to converge over time. Pass keys will be able to sign messages and you'll be able to store a private key inside of a pass key. Like there's some cool stuff that's coming, um, you know, probably going to take like 18 to 24 months. But for now, we have this translation layer. Um, and so you have a pass key on your device that provided your device is secure and most likely it's, you know, secured via iCloud behind Face ID or whatever. You can unlock that device, sign a message, it sends it to the MVC network, it unlocks your private key,

• 43:27Speaker 00

  private key signs another message, broadcasts it to the chain, and now you own Mudang. Congratulations.

• 43:35David Hoffman?

  Billions of dollars of security research. So I can securely and non-gossodial buy Mudang across chains.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. A tiny hippo. Um, so, so, but the cool thing about it is that, uh, you click one button, right? You like, you see a thing, there's a banner that says, hey, Mudang. And you're like, this.

• 43:52David Hoffman?

  Fuck yes.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yes, bang. You're like, all right. And it's like, and it's like, I don't even care what assets of mine you're using, right? You're just like, YOLO, I want some of that, right? And so, you know, it will go and figure out the cheapest route for you and say, okay, let's, you know, pull, you've got some stables, right? We'll pull some, you got a hundred dollars with a USDT on Tron. Right? And we pull it off and we send it over to wherever Mudang lives and now you're sorted.

• 44:20David Hoffman?

  Okay. So does the, in that example, does the hundred dollars of USDT on Tron, is that the actual funds that ultimately gets transported over to the right chain to actually buy the Mudang? Or is there an abstraction happening somewhere?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  The answer is maybe.

• 44:33David Hoffman?

  One pocket in, one pocket out.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it's probably going to be an intense-based system, right? So that hundred, uh, dollars with the USDT will probably get sent to, uh, some kind of solver.

• 44:44David Hoffman?

  Okay. In that case, I would say, yes, it is the hundred dollars.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, and it gets sent there and then they go and do some stuff off-chain or buy it on Binance or whatever. And then, you know, your address on, let's, you know, say it's on Solana, right? I really should check out where, where it's funny. It's weird because I was literally, I like, I, I looked up the market cap, I looked up all this stuff on, uh, on CoinGecko this morning. Um, but I don't think it. I don't remember looking at the which network it was on, but anyway, so yeah, it will, it will do that for you, basically. And so you have a thing that you want to do, right? And in web two land,

• 45:22David Hoffman?

  It's on Solana.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  It's on Solana. Yeah, I figured.

• 45:24David Hoffman?

  Of course.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  So, so, but I think it was launched from not pumped up fun. I think that's the, the, it was launched from dumb B dot.

• 45:36David Hoffman?

  I think, I think I see, I'm seeing it on pumped on fun.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Oh, it, okay. All right. Yeah. I mean, well, is that the real Mudang?

• 45:43David Hoffman?

  It's got, it's got the 250 million.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Okay, all right.

• 45:46David Hoffman?

  I checked that.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Okay. Nice. That's nice.

• 45:48David Hoffman?

  I know how to not get rugged.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  So, um, so, yeah. So, so there's a, there's a, uh, there's a thing that you want to do. There's a job that you want, which is owning Mudang and the system should be able to solve it for you. Right. And because we are a rich, full stack application, we can solve that for you in a multitude of different ways.

• 46:09David Hoffman?

  Okay. Describe the, the patron sale. So this is something that just got finished. What was it? What does it do? What's the mechanism? Describe that part of this journey.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, I think our view was that we wanted, um, to have as many people, be bought into this journey as possible, right? We wanted, we wanted, um, as wide a distribution, you know, this is an attention game, right? And in my experience, people pay more attention to things that they have some kind of token ownership of, whatever it is, right? If you own the token, you're going to pay attention to it. And so we created this, uh, you know, I guess, like NFT, right? Um, that you could own and show your patronage of this platform,

• 46:57Speaker 00

  right? Um, and we, you know, it was, it was fairly successful, I would say. You know, we tried to balance a bunch of different factors, um, but we got, I want to say maybe 300 to 500 of the, you know, prominent people in the crypto community, um, as patrons, which was what we were hoping for. Um, because those are the people, you know, as I said at the beginning, those are the people that are going to be. Using Infinex and talking about the fact that they use it, it works. They've looked at the tech, you know, whether they're a security researcher or a DeFi integrator or a protocol builder or whatever it is, they're going to have some angle where they're like,

• 47:42Speaker 00

  I actually looked into this and I like how they integrate AVE and Morpho, right? Or I actually looked into POSKES and I like how POSKES work. I was a POSKES skeptic and now I'm bullish on POSKES, right? So there's, there's a bunch of different people, different perspectives, different audiences that I think it's, it's critical that we have their attention to make sure as we're rolling stuff out and we're building the platform, that people are paying attention, talking about it, advocating for it. And so that was the purpose of the patron sale and it went really well from that perspective.

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  So. And in this patron sale, Infinex sold $65 million of these patron NFTs. What is Infinex going to do with that money? What is that going to?

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so to date, I'd been bootstrapping the project.

• 48:27David Hoffman?

  Payne Warwick has been bootstrapping.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Literally for the last 18 months. And we have 60 people. So it's like not a small bootstrapping act. It's not like two guys in a garage, right? But it, it got to the point where, and this is, I think, part of, let's call it the, the structural issue that we have in the market right now, where, you know, people are excited about a project and they want to be involved and they can't, for whatever reason, get involved until much later in the cycle, right? And so I was like, look, I can keep bootstrapping this for a long time, right? You know, probably not forever, but like I could do it for another two years if I really wanted to, right? Comfortably. And so this was, this was not even really about raising the money.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Like I could have kept paying people salaries and we could have kept doing stuff. It was about the alignment because my, my very strong view is that in crypto, it's so adversarial that.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  If people don't have alignment, if people don't feel, you know, and in this case, you, you are a patron of Infiniti. Like you're like, I believe in this thing and I bought the token to show that I care about this direction. I think this is the right direction, right? If you didn't have that, if there was no opportunity in a normal industry that wasn't full of lunatics, people would just go about their days and they would be like, I have no way to have alignment with this thing, but it's fine and I'll let it live, right? In crypto, unfortunately, we have this environment where if a thing is doing well and I feel like I've missed out on it, my response is to fut it. I hate that. I hate that thing. Yeah. I hate that thing. I want to kill it. And if you're, let's say, multi-coin,

• 50:08Speaker 00

  your response is, I'm going to finance a competitor to it, right? Um, and so, you know, we were, we really wanted to try and uh, avoid that, right? We wanted people to feel like they had a chance to, to, you know, um, to kind of get involved in the project as early as possible. Um, and you know, again, from that perspective, it went really well. Um, so originally we were not even going to include VCs. Right. We were like, we actually don't want VC money. It's not about the money. Um, I talked to a bunch of my friends who are VCs and they were like, this feels weird, right? Like, you know, why would you exclude VCs? If the patron sale is designed to be like egalitarian and the same, this, you know, everyone pays the same price, all of that stuff, like all things being equal,

• 50:52Speaker 00

  like we are good as well, like we can help you, right? Um, and I think that, you know, there's, there's a range of different VCs out there, right? There's some that are like absolutely mercenary and, you know, they are just extracting max value. Um, and you know, the incentives are set up so that they can, right? So fine. Um, and then there are ones where, um, you know, they're neutral, right? And then there are ones where they're like genuinely value add. And the genuinely value add ones, I, if I can see why they'd be like, eh, this feels dumb. Like why, like, don't exclude us. We want to help. We like this as well. Um, and we want to add value, but we need to be aligned.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, we need alignment, right? Um, and so, so again, I, I think that we were like, okay, you know what? Fine. Everyone, everyone gets to play. We're not going to pick. You know, you don't get to play, you do whatever. We'll let everyone play. You know, we'll let everyone become a patron. And again, I think we, from a, you know, one of the measurements of success for me was like, just distribution, like how wide was the distribution? You know, how many different facets of crypto, you know, and like the Solana ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, individual L2 ecosystems, like we nailed all of that stuff. And I think we've got a really good base of support. And, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna be hugely valuable next year.

• 52:17David Hoffman?

  Right. Three to 500 to 500 patrons is a pretty, is a pretty good base of support. But I think Infinex wants, you know, millions of users. In the future, is there other plans to like grow that base of support even wider? Like their current, current interested perhaps users of Infinex or people that might want to show their patronage, is that opportunity available for them in the future?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, again, it's an NFT, right? So the token will launch like sometime in October. I think there's like an agreement that has to launch via governance within 30 days or whatever. So there'll be this NFT that's floating around, right? You know, it's not a token, it's not gonna get listed on Binance. You know, it's not gonna be on exchanges. But, you know, presumably there'll be people, you know, who have liquid patrons that will want to sell them or whatever. And like any NFT, it will just trade, it'll have a floor price and, you know, people will be able to do whatever they want. So, you know, I think, I think there'll be an opportunity, you know, on secondary, you know, marketplaces or whatever, whether it's OpenSea or near Blur or whatever,

• 53:24Speaker 00

  for people to turn up and, you know, buy a patron if they want, right? But again, I, I think the important thing was that people felt like they had the ability to kind of access it first, right? Like if I, if I've been paying attention to Infinex for the last nine months, right? It feels weird if a bunch of VCs are able to like get access to the project and I'm excluded. And then, you know, I turn up nine months later and it's like, oh, now, you know, the, these guys are just gonna, you know, dump this token. Like the current meta of like, you know, Three or four rounds, a pre TGE.

• 53:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  The token list on Binance and then all the VCs are dumping on you. It's just not great.

• 54:02David Hoffman?

  Right, right. So what's next for the Infinex roadmap? What is on there?

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Integration.

• 54:08David Hoffman?

  What's on there?

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Okay. Just rolling out integrations as fast as we can.

• 54:11David Hoffman?

  Integrations with DeFi apps across the.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  DeFi apps, you know, chain signatures with Near, you know, rolling out support for Litecoin, Bitcoin, all of that stuff. Like, that's, that's the key.

• 54:20David Hoffman?

  And then, like, what's, what's kind of like the longer term time horizon? The idea, the trajectory is trying to become like feature complete with Binance. When do you think you could get that done?

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Probably next year. I think like, yeah, next year, you know, Binance has a lot of weird and wonderful little features. I think that like the key five features we should be able to nail early next year. Once we've got that, then it's sort of picking and choosing which things make sense to kind of, you know, pull in, basically.

• 54:47David Hoffman?

  And then the competition here, you're swinging for the fences.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 54:51David Hoffman?

  You're going for Binance.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  We.

• 54:52David Hoffman?

  You're not even going for Coinbase. You keep on using Binance.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Like, we have to take down centralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges have to be a footnote in history. In 50 years' time, we'll look back and go, of course, there were centralized exchanges, right? In the same way that there were like steam-powered railroads, right? Like, there was, it was a technology that had to exist as a stepping stone to some new thing. And now we have, live in a world that's in a better state, right? But we couldn't have gotten there without going through centralized exchanges. So they served a purpose. They had an ecological niche that was very important for a period of time, and now we need to kill them.

• 55:31David Hoffman?

  Okay, if people are piqued by Infinex, they haven't opened it up yet. Where should they go? What should they do? How should they learn about Infinex?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so infinix.xyz. If you deposit $50, there's a $50 minimum deposit on any one of the supported chains. You can play Bull Run, which is this little trading card game. It's quite fun. It's in preseason at the moment. It's gonna launch on Blast, I think in about a week.

• 55:55David Hoffman?

  Cool. Cool. Kane, how much are you clocking in at? What are you weighing these days?

• 55:59Speaker 00

  I was 178 this morning.

• 56:03David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  So, yeah, are we getting close?

• 56:06David Hoffman?

  We're getting pretty close.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  We're getting pretty close.

• 56:08David Hoffman?

  I got up to 174 and then I came back down to 172. But we still got another week.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we'll get there. I can get down to 175.

• 56:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'll get there for sure.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:17David Hoffman?

  If I need to, I'll just chug like two pounds of water.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  I just won't drink for a day. So, yeah, I think we'll get there. It's gonna be fun. I've been training hard.

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  Have you had any combat experience? I didn't ask you when we first.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  I mean, I did Taekwondo and karate growing up. But, you know, like I was, until I was like 12 or something like that. And then I boxed a little bit in high school for like, you know,

• 56:42Speaker 00

  not even, it was like an elective sport you could do. So, you know, and again, never like been in a match, right? I've never been in a televised fight, I would say.

• 56:52David Hoffman?

  I almost was there. And then it broke a rib, of course. Polymarket has a heavily favored towards Kane.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it must be like some kind of liberal. Is it a liberal bias? Is it a?

• 57:03David Hoffman?

  I thought it was a conservative bias. Says it's a liberal bias. That's a hot take. I've always thought it was a conservative bias.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it must be conservative bias. Yeah, I don't know. It's not super liquid, though. There's only 10K on there. So, you know, you can.

• 57:16David Hoffman?

  Yeah, anyone could move the market.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Anyone could move the market.

• 57:19David Hoffman?

  Here's the, here's the shape up right here.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 57:23David Hoffman?

  Kane, this has been great. Thanks for coming over to the Bankless Studio. And also, I think on behalf of the industry, thank you for trying to take down centralized exchanges. It's a very noble goal. I hope you succeed.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, appreciate it. I'll see you in Utah.

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  See you in Utah.