Infinex's Vampire Attack on CEXs with Kain Warwick and Jed Watson

Transcript

we could have done like a meme coin launch like seriously like we could have done that right bring onchain to users rather than forcing them to go the other way around all right Kane the DJ just want to know when they can trade man it's not just like oh I missed out good luck to them it's like they must die is infinex just like the ultimate onchain aggregator or is that just bad marketing welcome back to the rollup for today's episode we are going to do a deep dive into infinex with Kane and Jed uh a lot of you guys probably know Kane is the OG of synthetics if you were alongside Us in defi summer getting that c ratio as close to 500% as possible um like many

of us were uh Kane is from is calling in from Sydney as well as Jed um Jed is the CTO of infinex um previously with background in software design um and has worked in crypto for sometime as well so today's pot is going to be kind of a mix of the technicals and the strategies about infinex um and the broader Market of chain abstraction as well as defi so guys thank you for for coming on uh pleasure to have you guys here and yeah looking forward to this yeah thanks Andy appreciate it good to be here for sure um so Ken I I remember earlier this year we were at uh at that

rooftop party in Brussels uh talk talking about kind of the Journey of Defi and um I I think one of the main points that I had made was we're we're kind of on this on this period of time here where we had a lot of these zero to1 Innovations in defi in defi summer things like synthetics a amm um and then it really got you know pretty degenerate quickly and then we were kind of at this point for the last like 18 months or so where I think a lot of people are pretty excited about what's possible with these Solutions but also at the same time kind of like uh wondering when the next kind of big breakthrough is and so we we we were kind of having this conversation about infinex with this goal about okay

the goal is to go after the users on centralized exchanges not really focused on you know net new users to to crypto right if we can't kind of bring that user base from binance uh and those exchanges on on chain then you know we don't really have much business going after the the other uh you know non- crypto natives per se Bank of America and you know City Bank clients are probably pretty safe right if we can't take it take that yeah so like how did you guys come up with this like Market segment and mental model for for infinex to kind of like siphon off uh the the liquidity from binance per se and is this still kind of like your

Northstar I think it is although it's evolved right like the starting point was we have good you know and even back in July of of this year when we were chatting about this I was still kind of discovering in real time this this uh you know approach right and I think we've landed on something now that from like a it's it's in internally consistent and coherent um what's interesting though is the end state of the approach that we've got now is actually not 100% compatible with like the architecture that we've built today um so you know Jed and I have been spending a lot of time with you know other people in the um in the tech side of uh the project working through like

what should stay from our original thesis and what shouldn't right and the original thesis was like we have good execution engines no one's using them let's bring them to people by whatever means necessary right and if that means like building a centralized rapper around them cool right um but you know we've seen this is this is effective like hyper liquid kind of did this right it's just a centralized decentral you know it's cdy or something like that right um and so it does work and and it is better U but it's not sufficient um and so this this journey of discovery of like what will it actually take to replace binance with onchain applications or with an onchain application that uses onchain execution

uh you know has has been quite the journey and I think we're there now I think we know what it will take um and now we're ready to build it understanding what that looks like and and so we're we're really trying to think through this kind of you know these architectural challenges like what is important and what is uh maybe uh something that's just going to hold us back I guess yeah so so the vision was kind of a a reflection of the original idea and then essentially through the building that you guys saw um that Vision evolved with the technical challenges or just the idea of what infrastructure kind of needed to build uh this vision for for

taking down binance um and I think that's a it's like a it's like a a vampire attack on binance but for for the betterment of of everybody within the space and I'm curious if you think like there's actually like like what is the user profile of a binance user compared to like an onchain user in your opinion is is is there a stark Stark difference there there I think there is quite a difference right like there's a lot of uh people who are binance users that migrate off migrated off of like bitfinex or Kraken or you know uh like older exchanges and a lot of times they just have their Assets in binance you know they've just got like a bunch of

Bitcoin or Litecoin or xrp or whatever um I think the the onchain audience tends to be more active and More DJ um but one thing that has been really interesting to notice is that like over time people tend to get less active on chain which is kind of crazy right if you talk to like the defi summer ogs most of them don't transact on chain all the time anymore it's sad right and and you know so why is that like what's the reason um I think there are a bunch of reasons but one of the reasons is that you learn over time how risky it is every time you click a button and you know so you try to optimize for clicking less buttons um and and so I

think that uh you know there are a lot of people who uh who would do more stuff on chain if it were easier right but also we need to get better at doing things on chain you know we need to there's people who have assets to deploy on chain that are maybe not deployed or maybe they're are sitting idolish right like they're in a you know uh as an LP um but they could be in something newer or they could be in you know some split between a and you know some like Pendle thing or you know like but they're just not going around looking for the opportunities the way they were this is where infinex can also help right um by you know presenting those opportunities in a way that is uh safer you know

helping with Discovery helping you know distribution helping with access uh education so as new things evolve as new thing you know as new protocols emerge uh that we can make it easier for people to try them out um because it's a lot of effort as as we know right it was a full-time job to keep up with everything that's was happening in Deep by summer and there's an order of magnitude more stuff today than there was then I think just sort of adding on to that you've got this situation where the space of uh fraud and attacks and all this kind of stuff is like it's getting a lot more sophisticated and not just in crypto it's getting more sophisticated across the board um sort of in Char fing areas as well and so everyone's becoming a lot

more inhibited U one of the interesting things that we've observed is we've been working on this ux angle of of infinex is like crypto generally is kind of designed in a way to make like to make you think and to make you worry and that's quite deliberate like that that's part of the whole self- custody story if you go back but it's kind of not how we get net new users into the ecosystem and I don't think it's how binance and the other centralized exchanges have bring brought users in either they've really made themselves feel a lot more like my net Bank than like my treasure right so there's kind of this almost education or mindset Gap um which I think is forming part of how we're looking at giving people something that is more familiar

but actually has the transparency and the security of genuinely being on chain yeah and I think I mean to that point uh part of the part of the issue that that Kane Kane was referring to as well ties into that where where in defi summer we were all on ethereum L1 right and so it was very it was very easy to be interacting with you know every protocol with just a couple clicks there was no bridging there was no uh l2s and these types of things and I mean I think I had like multiple tens of thousands transaction count in 2020 21 and I you know it's I'd be lucky to get like a 100 transactions a month these days if not like 50 right um and and I'm you know I'm using the tech but it's mostly

stable coins right it's mostly payments it's mostly sending out salaries sending out uh payments to to vendors and and even still it's like you know do you send it on arbitrum or do you do it on this L2 or or ethereum or is it some people want salana usdc now and and so I think this combination of of the of the expansion of ethereum part of this rollup Centric road map has also contributed and I think this is like takes me to the interesting point um that I wanted to touch on with this kind of this chain abstraction thing Jed that you were hitting on right with security and just kind of ease of ux I think this this notion of chain abstraction will play a strong role in the upcoming

future of the ux and it's recently garnered a lot of attention um but I still think like what we're building in this chain abstraction world is like a lot of like Universal accounts for wallets or like one wallet to access all these chains or like uh things like agay and and and elastic chain which really help on the infra side so I'm seeing a lot of like this infra being proposed as this solution to fragmentation but when in reality it seems like the biggest breakthrough to make this idea of like chain abstraction tangible I is actually through like an an app um and so like from your perspective what is the the correct way to think about uh infinex is it an app or is it infrastructure and

kind of like what's the right mental model for for infinex I mean infinex is an app like hands down that is the space that we're playing in uh we're absolutely building what we're building on the shoulds of giants like a lot of people have spent a lot of energy over the last decade turning crypto generally like l1's l2s all of the side stuff um like MPC networks on the side of a chain to implement stuff like cross chain secr all of this stuff is really important at a technical infrastructure layer but to close the loop gr on making people safe when they use it we need to go to where users are and that is in apps so infinex from that perspective is

an app and because it's an app like if you look at binance that is the best Kan said this in other places that's the best cross-chain technology we've ever seen you don't know about the existence of different chains you want some Bitcoin you want to swap that into whiff it just happens right you got some usdc you don't know where that usdc is it doesn't matter now that's all running in a database which is not our goal um I think to take crypto seriously it can't become centralized and only run in a database in order to be in a way that people can actually use it intuitively and interact with it but that's basically the end State um you know binance have been there for a while our job is to get defi there and bring those users on chain what that means is at the end of the day

like all of the networks are kind of competing on different features or functionality like some are fast some are cheap some are both some are neither some are really safe like ethereum is very very decentralized in a way that I don't know that any other ex s of smart chain is really going to compete with that like these are all good things and depending on what kind of application you're building some are more important than others right and like it's I personal view it's really good that we've got all of these things happening we've got all these tools at our disposal but as a user I just in the last couple weeks I've interacted on like blast is fine I can use that with my current wallet but I've got to go find a bridge you know I've got to connect my treasure over here but then

I'm on salana and I can't use my treasure there if I'm going to interact with a DB I've got to have a ledger as well like there's all these weird corners and then you get the stuff like near and now I need to go create a near wallet like this isn't education I think that actually helps people use dii um so part of our goal is to be able to build an application that solves people needing to know that but behind the scenes is is able to operate across chains that's kind of the role like in our architecture that's the role of our infex platform is to understand that on behalf of the user and to be able to sort of cross um Implement cross-chain functionality on behalf of people got it in terms of how we get

there I think there it looks like there are sort of two main answers at the moment and one of those might be there's a bit of work that's being done uh actually using Wormhole ccq to synchronize State across chains um and that's kind of one almost philosophical approach to implementing cross-chain functionality and then the other one is this idea that we're going to end up with some chains that act more like control planes for functionality that is actually running on other chains um and that's where I I think there's also some really interesting stuff happening in that direction so at infinex we're kind of we're actually work I I I imagine that there will continue to be a valid use case for both of these different approaches to sort of solving the problems that living in a

multi-chain sort of world actually presents yeah yeah I think that's aligned with with my mental model I'm curious to to understand how you guys think think about this and where infinex fits in so my my general take here for the next six 12 18 months is basically we'll have um these uh intent-based interoperability Solutions in the immediate term facilitating cross chain uh transactions by basically market makers solver same thing uh you know sub one second sub two seconds even hopefully like uh sub like 200 milliseconds or somewhere around there uh we'll have users interacting with defi onchain in this experience

that's almost like when you interact with your web browser so right now I've got Riverside Google meet Twitter hype Fury streamyard I kind of just click around on these apps without needing to really change my my wallet change my uh chain change my assets I can use my assets on all of these chains in this kind of app Centric perspective um and I use blockchains in in the sense that I have my list of my favorite applications that I use where my assets are stored whether it's social whether it's um you know a community app Etc and I basically rely on these as like bookmarks in my in my in in my browser eventually we get to a place where there's better Orin at

block building shared sequencing ZK proof aggregation that makes this kind of like completely synchronous I think in the in the immediate term it's it's uh more on the intent side underneath so interoperability is powered by this like chain abstracted ux with one with one wallet or account that is able to access all of your assets across all blockchain networks um is this kind of like the right way to think about it and and if so or if not how does infinex either change that or or play a part in that yeah I think that is the right way to think about it I mean the browser is an interesting analogy right imagine if you went to Facebook and you had to somehow get yourself into the data center that that was running it right and then you went to Google and you had to like

figure out how to get into Google's data center in order to use Gmail like that's kind of where we've got users at the moment in crypto right um and so people would do it particularly the enthusiasts would do it the data centers have their own browsers right and so it's like you got to download the like gcp browser to be able to like run you know like it's crazy the fragmentation um I yeah like we need I I think we need an app that can just bring on chain to users rather than forcing them to go the other way around uh which is our goal with infinex but then what we've started talk more about is this idea where you also need to be able to

have the user sort of have the app follow the user right so like the other thing that you know you mentioned a bunch of social apps and they all they all actually interrupt with each other these days you can use your Facebook account to log into something you can use your Gmail account to log into something you can get your Gmail account connected to your operating system like everything kind of works everywhere so that's also folding into our vision of kind of like yes we can and will build on chain binance but what then like what about the the sort of weird corners of defi what about like people's Crea ity outside of just the past that we're building an infinex you know how do we kind of join all this together um get that really nice ux just everywhere as well as the safety that comes along with

that do you think that there is uh an an aspect of this interrupt game or this chain abstraction account abstraction game that is still anchored in the old way of doing things right like it's still anchored in the the old way of like all of the important things must be on chain and and this has been one of the interesting kind of interplays I think between Jed and I um you know I've got all these ideas of like how you know protocol should be built and and you know what is important from a security standpoint Etc um and some of it is important and some of it isn't and teasing out which are the parts that are

important and some of the parts that are not important are actually huge uh blockers to doing things well to giving users good ux right so what you know like one of the best examples of this is like sensorship resistance right you know um sensorship resistance in defi right now is like a grand lie none of the deps are sensorship resistant right they're laring a sensorship resistant like you know uh you might have like an ipfs instance of curv you know pin somewhere but like the vast vast majority of people are using the current curve interface and like good luck if that pinned version of uh curve actually works properly against the current

contracts with all the different vaults like my guess is it probably doesn't right um you know or it's relying on the graph or something like that right um it's a lot of slide of hand um and we sort of were forced into that saying like Okay we're doing our best now and we're going to get better over time but we haven't gotten better over time and it's actually optimizing for the wrong thing right like what we should be optim ing for is a system that is non-custodial but is not necessarily censorship resistant because if you optimize your sensorship resistance and trade off that for bad ux you will never get the demand and the demand side is how you actually prevent censorship get

enough people to care about your thing and it becomes much harder to censor right so build great ux and lean into that which all of a sudden if your Northstar is ux and it's not sens resistance there's a whole bunch of things you can drop off there's still things you can't like you can't just go YOLO we're going to be custodial because then you're binance right so you don't want to end up at the same place but there is a there's a thing somewhere between you know defi maximally sensorship resistance is over here binance custodial and censorable is here there's a hybrid in the middle which you know threads the needle and gets both aspects right where it's non-custodial you can't rug the user uh uh but you still get the the you know kind of world

class user experience that you expect from a modern application and not this like janky Thin Client riness which which again doesn't even solve for like the a instance you could take down it's just running in AWS like let's let's not pretend that there isn't like a credit card tied to a server and if you took that thing down it's gone right same thing with DNS like we still you know like DNS is still the gatekeeper of all of these things right so you know there there are all of these like trust me bro don't look over here problems that we've kind of handwaved away um and meanwhile like just like absolutely thrashed the user with like horrible ux for years because we were forced into doing this laring pretending to be censorship

censorship resist like why even why even play that game instead of just doing it the like flipping the script as you said and just focusing on the user first and then kind of Crossing that the Chasm of being you know immutable and Unstoppable after right the reality is that users have just gone onto bance yeah exactly because hard we made it better we've made it worse like that approach made it worse right yeah it's so much of ux ends up actually being about like this kind of combination of education and safety right like ux is don't make me think don't make me learn how to do a weird thing don't make me feel like at risk when I'm doing it like just make it obvious and easy and when I do the

obvious thing it turns out out to be the right thing like that's that's like that's what really good ux is um and then you get to like is it fast is it responsive those are all kind of built on top of that Foundation of like does what is happening match the users's intuitive mental model because most people aren't going to spend the time learning the the nuances of the weird thing like and I think if we can do that in a way like what Kane's alluding to as well is we don't want to block any of the potential to sort of implement something that is genuinely non like not just like outpath of being non-custodial means that you can have stuff that is genuinely censorship resistant as like the back stop behind it right like even if the front end for a disappears you

can if you know what you're doing still go on chain you can still do those things right um and like you couldn't do that if binance was your back end yeah exactly exactly you know like I've talked about this before but the reason why we kept going down this path is incentives it's incentives right the incentives were enthusiasts are the ones who are buying tokens do what the enthusiasts want which is like maximally censorship resistance laring right and you get the prize and so everyone did that right um you know and and like it's we've boxed ourselves into a corner right like we're in a part of the solution space where we can't get out of

we need to back away slowly from that corner and like go to a different part of the solution space like this is this is not the thing we were looking for right like there's there's no there's no end game here right like we're not taking down binance in this corner of the solution space we need to go back our way back out of the maze we're at a dead end and and try a different part of the maze yeah two steps forward um or two steps back one step forward and I think that what we saw Ken we were talking about this in Brussels is we saw a lot of like technical innovation like Unis swap V2 then V3 then we saw different types of lending markets and all of

these things were like prioritized on marginal improvements across the onchain usage of D5 from like the pure numbers perspective of like optimizing for Capital efficiency right we heard that term so much in 2020 and 2021 and still do um but like the idea of actually optimizing for making this simple was just yeah completely pushed to the side because well frankly the financial incentive and the economic incentive to operate in the system that was so poor was still so high so it was like well you know I don't really care but things have changed significantly due to Market uh sophistication more teams more tokens Etc um it's more competitive like the landscape's more competitive and it's also saturated we've sucked the air out of

the room right like there's no more enthusiasts really right and in fact like it's actually worse than that I've been saying for a while like we ran out of enthusiasts not only do we run out of Enthusiast we actually drove the enthusiasts away the enthusiasts got tired of this they're like this is [ __ ] nonsense I don't want to deal with this [ __ ] anymore they're not transacting on chain anymore they're just like sitting on a a pile of tokens and you know waiting for the next bull market yeah in a or something right like they stopped experimenting they stopped you know it just became too dangerous too painful too annoying um you know uh people got tired right so I think there's it's not just that we ran out of Enthusiast I think the old enthus is

need to be reactivated like we can reactivate the OG onchain people like we can back on chain again and be like God like they're going to be the easy there's actually another audience like before we even get to binance of like OG yield farming people that were like hey guys like you can actually come and just click a button and play the same games right like you know we're we're stuck in Atari land meanwhile like you know everyone's playing Call of Duty on there like you know um crazy bance thing literally yeah literally right like it's like okay or prediction Market or whatever okay so I want to get into some of the of the of the infinite X kind of tech as well as

the patron stuff but I just want to put a put close the loop as to kind of what this what how exactly our our community should be thinking about in INF finex and so I put out a tweet several months back I believe and it was like when will we have one single ux that Aggregates all of dii across all chain that gives me the best liquidity across all venues it sources it for me through some sort of like solvers or some sort of Technology where I can just come to one place and I can get the best rates the best yields and kind of in this ultimate aggregator and so I'm starting to kind of think of like infinex as this like ultimate aggregator of defi not aggregator in the same sense as like Paras swap or one inch but aggregation of everything that we that we have um in

the space today across multiple chains um into one place where I can get the best liquidity yields opportunities and an easy to use ux um is that the right way to kind of think about it uh do you guys have access to like all the chains some of the chains all the daps is there a focus um and kind of is is infinex just like the ultimate onchain aggregator effectively or is that just bad marketing it's a good question we've talked about this a bit internally from time to time like are we an aggregator right and and there's multiple answers to that sometimes the answer is like no we're not because you're thinking about it like one inch um I do think that we end

up being almost an aggregator of aggregators right like I think our job at the top of the stack is to be the interface for users and so we want to expose as much as possible of what di is to users and some of that will become that we just surface all these options right and whether that's users kind of whether that's helping educate users on like you know is it should I go into Athena is that the best place for me to get some stable coin yield this month or should I do something else even if I'm in Athena right like am I doing some weird Pendle thing or am I just holding USD like and I'm I'm getting kind of different yield and different incentives for those so like we want to surface some of that we don't want to kind of

take responsibility for defi we want to make it accessible um so we start sort of talking about this like maybe 8020 rule where like 80% of people looking for yield are only going to use 20% of what Athena are doing and we want that in infinex we want that to be like in our app um eventually we also want to have a really good answer for like the other 20% of people who want the other 80% of the complexity that you can get in all the different kinds of pools and setups and different strategies that Athena can sort of expose you to um and we want people to be able to kind of seamlessly move between the stuff that we're really surfacing and all of the other stuff that you can do um and kind of eventually try and wrap all of this together um you know in and

outside of infinex in a a better user experience and a safer way of interacting on chain and so it may not be like when we talk about aggregation it may not just be like automatic automated aggregation it's definitely not like within one chain like you know the sort of aggregation that was started in the space um so so I'm really depends on like how you want to interpret that concept but I think our goal is to sit at that at that top layer um where we're making this stuff accessible to people without like kind of creating this like concrete flaw that people can't then break through to get into the rest of it safe is moving the world's GDP onchain with the introduction of

safe net safe is taking this to the next step very soon check out net. safe. Global to learn more about how safe is moving the world's GDP on chain welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame roadmap for frax and fractal the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fraxel is a modular L2 blockchain built by frax with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal IM and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes

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you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity redstone modular oracles are available on 50 plus chains trusted by over 100 clients and over 6 billion in total value secured visit redstone. Finance to find out more cool appreciate that really good understanding and I think that that that's going to be helpful for the community to get right and and also ironically I think the the line between apps and infrastructure is completely going to be blurred over the next you know it's already happening with like app chains and kind of um you know people just deciding that they don't want to be a CH an app on a on a general

purpose chain and then kind of moving even into this direction right where where infinex becomes like this uh this app that people use that's powered by all this you know crypto infrastructure that is already there and so that you know that is already kind of a blurred line um all right guys so $65 million raised 40,000 patrons I see Kane at the Mega E infinex party and Singapore we're having some drinks and I'm like dude I've got to ape he's like man it's too late I'm like no I think I've got like seven more hours um my my business partner Rob and co-host who unfortunately is asleep he sends me sends me some usdc to the infinix app I'm at a I'm at like some table at a

club that night had like a lot of drinks I'm aping the patrons you guys are tweeting about it all of crypto Twitter's tweeting about it um and you guys did something right and I think that was the biggest breakthrough so before we get deep into like kind of how that all worked and I know that that the launch is just in a couple of days so we'll we'll try to time this right and get that out right around the launch but like what is the what was your inspiration for doing things this way um are you a believer in this kind of like Murad thesis of VC coins FTV float like like like how deep are you in this idea that you know the public should have equal access and that

we should do things in a completely new way than the than the previous token launches I mean I'm I'm deep down that rabbit hole and I have I've always been there right like and this is this is kind of the sad thing um over the last like maybe you know three or four years is like it's benefited me that you have these very tightly held seed rounds and people are looking for Angels I just got a message right as I was about to jump on this podcast where someone's like hey we just closed our round but we really want you as an angel you know and it's like hang on a second there's like this this round is closed right you've wrapped it up you've got the right VCS whatever and now you're like going and Gathering up some

angels for Signal or whatever like that like I got it wrong if this if this deal is so good I should have known about it right if this were an Ico and the person sent me a de being like it should be like hey our seo's over you're a [ __ ] idiot we're missing it instead it's like hey would you like to come in the back door and you like it's just bad it's bad it's not good for anyone it's misalignment and like again everyone's responding to the incentives right so the project goes out and gets VCS and then they go and gather up some angels and they're like hey we're doing sometimes it's like hey we're even going to give the Angels a discount against the VCS right it's like playing them off

against each other but like what about everyone else it's just it's just bad it's bad and you know we're in this inadequate equilibrium right now that no one can break out of because the incentives have just boxed us into this place where we got to play these dumb games right um and and the bigger problem is when you play it out it ends up in this lowf float you know High fdv meta right which is bad for everyone bad for the project bad for you know uh normal people bad for your average D gen right and so I was like look you know one of the one of the things that I think crypto does a bad job of sometimes

is like we do good things and we and we find we discover good things and then we get bored of them and like nft mints were a thing that I think you know even over iOS right like did a really good job of kind of ging access giving you know being like fair you know equal access to people Etc they they did a really good job of that and so I was like what is the thing in terms of token distribution uh that you know over the last five years has done a really good job of of satisfying these conditions of like wide distribution and alignment and fairness and you know equal access and it's probably nft Ms you know like crypto punks were just sitting there you can mint them for free for like months

right um you know I never bothered I was like H it seems dumb like whatever you know meanwhile like Eric Connor is like YOLO minting like 50 crypto Tonks right so like he wins he wins that game but like I was there I had the chance I didn't do it for reasons you know I didn't get whatever right U and so I think that I looked at that and I was like an nft mint is the best thing that we have at the moment of like aligning a community right um you know and also it it creates this Dynamic where like you have to get it right it's not easy you have to get it it's a bit weird right um it's not something that like everyone's going to just immediately get in fromo into right

um we could have done like a meme coin launch that like SE like seriously like we could have done that right we could have been like we're gonna launch an infinex meme coin we're gonna put it on pump fun and it would have been bad like it would have been bad it would have got sniped it would have been PVP it would have been you know it would have like just the whole thing like so the current meta like there's different you know Solutions right like the the BC Seed rounds mcoin launches like most of them are kind of dumb and bad in various ways right um nft mints at least you know the classical style nft mint it works it's it's a good distribution mechanism um and it had this advantage of being like a little bit obscure a little bit weird

U you know which which gives people a chance to like figure it out but Ken they were minted if you look at the token Supply versus is the uh the pricing on the on the mints they're also between 125 million FTV and like 500 million FTV so like is are you not are like you know are you gonna have to launch this thing are are you worried that like people are going to be down are you are you thinking about like token launch like like you still raised quite high right like it was still not a a cheap round by any means it wasn't a cheap round but look I guess you know if we're if we're pricing things right like if we're like okay you know infinex uh was somewhere between a you know again

an nft doesn't have an FTV exactly but you know collection value whatever you want to call it right it's worth between 100 Mil and 500 mil or something right okay um you know when I did the Haven Ico the FTV was like 70 million and you know that kind of worked out fine for everyone right like the actual you know it was like so so I think um my my view is that like if you want to do something that's open and fair and and genu like genuinely available to everyone right um You have it has to be priced in a way that like everyone can get in otherwise you just have a tiny door right and it's like a lottery which doesn't really help like

and it's actually worse this is other thing right if you look if you look at the nft mints that went really poorly and I like crypto is so adversarial that if you miss out on something like if you if you had you know passed out under the table at that club instead of uh instead of was close I was close they were close right like if you if you had if you had just you know fallen asleep an hour early right and you missed out your incentive is not just to be like oh oops I missed out your incentive is to try and like burn infinex to the ground right now you're like in the fud Army of infinex you're like infinex Sops is the scam like shut this thing down seriously like that like

you know it's true right like everyone this is the behavior of everyone right and you'll be like looking for the infinite killer you know like every person who Miss salana right it's like okay s is gonna be the next you know salana for reasons right move whatever like and it's like you know this is like it's such an adversarial environment it's not just like oh I missed out good luck to them it's like they must die I'm GNA kill them right and so if you create an environment where like you have this tiny little door and it's a lottery ticket where like one in 50 people get in that's bad too right um you know so I guess the the question is like you know what do we think a thing that is going to take down binance is worth I don't know dude but it's like not a100 million

and the thing is also if you also give the initial you know however many days post token launch weeks if it's not launched at an egregious valuation the people people can also just buy on the on the secondary and have the similar community upside as somebody who's locked right yeah for sure and this is the other thing right it's like I think there's something like 5% of the supply was given out uh through like yield farming and uh some air drops and stuff um so those people have zero cost bases right so they don't really care like they could sell at a thousand bucks 500 100 whatever you know so um there's a very decent chance that like that supply that people farmed which helped to create awareness of infinex right like that's worth it it's it's marketing spin

if you will right definitely those people if those people you know all turn up and like dump it to like you know 1,500 bucks or 2K or something like that like that's bullish in my in my mind right like it means that people are getting a you know better entry like I'm kind of okay with that um you know like not to not you know not to encourage dumping not to encourage dumping but like it's sort of like sell me all the patrons that you've got at 2K and [ __ ] off [ __ ] off so you know like I'm okay with but I'm okay with that okay so in in by the time this is out again I hopefully in the day ever day after this Patron launch will have

happened which means the patrons have been distributed investing has started like what does that mean does that mean that like the infinex token is out or that like the platform is is going to be evolved in some way such that there's more usage like what does this launch signify yeah we've got some ideas for what patrons can do right like we sort of wanted to have them and then we can figure out you know what what to do with them um obviously we have decentralized governance and there's already a proposal to switch governance once the Patron's live to uh Patron enties that kind of makes sense like it's the thing that you know everyone bought to show their alignment with infinet so you know probably should govern the platform so I think that's one thing that will happen

um another thing is uh is you know probably some like infinex perks you know uh and and I think exchanges do a really good job of this like B&B has like differential discounts if you're taking B&B and you get like Finance launch pad stuff and you know so if you hold your patrons in your infinex account um and one kind of hint towards this direction is there's a plan I think to launch like a competition uh for uh three people who uh are holding their patrons in their next account uh to go to devcom to get like an all expenses pay trip to to go to devcom so it's like hey there's going to be some like weird little perks like go to devcom you know go to breakpoint

maybe or something so for the people that mint it it's not just a financial thing there's there could be other community incentives alongside this or other kind of out of the out of the traditional like I invest X I get y kind of vested over over amount of time um you know that's like obviously like the primary bootstrapping use use case for for the community but you guys are also game planning kind of other ways yeah I commun incentives I can also Imagine like Ina features right so like one of the things we've got at the moment is um like infinex is paying all the gas for anything that you can do on chain through infinex work gas and you know one of the things that means is that on ethereum will give you I think it's

three swaps a day is like current cap um and that's just because it's expensive on the L1 um and it's not even really about not wanting to pay the gas of people who are using the platform genuinely it's also about not wanting to just open the door to all the people who are going to you know come in and like well those infex photos that Kane was just talking about I don't want them coming up and just like mashing the swap button all day and like that's not going to work out well for anyone um so you know maybe there's something like if you're holding a patron in your account you get upper limits on stuff um we ran another campaign as an earlier part of launch season which was uh speedrun the wait list so that as we start rolling

out Integrations integration season we have a way to like order accounts by who was in early and who you know kind of should get access to maybe features uh when we're in like small group testing stages of roll out stuff like that um and I think eventually over the long term like it'd be really nice for the patient to have utility in the platform in terms of like all right you've shown alignment with us you've shown that you're supporting helping us build what we're building and it's good for you to get access to the things that we've built you know or higher limits like you kind of you you yeah almost like the centralized exchanges do with VIP this like K said that that works out quite well I think and so there's a lot of

stuff like that where just you know if you're holding a patron you're a very real user to us you know you're not just like someone who's shown up sibling and stuff like that yeah makes sense and I think you you guys could even look into using like um a a ZK co-processor integration to facilitate much more personalization of infinex so you can get you know you can use users data from other applications other other uh onchain metrics uh Trends Etc and you know really kind of like maybe do like some like personalization of that platform kind of like a a centralized exchange does I think that I think that that would be a really cool ux feature as well um from the patron perspective I

have two main questions um and then just kind of want to on on the tech side and then just kind of look looking ahead as we wrap up my first one is this was the first time I've ever done anything on chain that has my face ID and that I've used this kind of Pass key for so that I thought that was pretty cool and also very easy to set up but like the like the onchain my my name a Andy with a penguin I was also like um what information is Kane getting from me with this face ID so like how does this Pass Key work with TurnKey how are you guys ensuring that this dat is safe and why do you guys why was this the selection that you guys made um you know and kind

of you know pushing this forward I've got a 3D model of your face now uh on my Des it's just like right above where you sleep right yeah literally ex I wasn't planning on revealing it this early but this was actually this whole thing is just a back door to basically build a giant worldwide database of people's faces that's awesome now that's out we're done Kane we can go um no like that we're not infinex didn't scan your face your operating system did right your operating system then unlocked a private like a a private key that's stored inside your device's secure enclave and use that to sign something that we sent you and then you sent that back like

that's just your operating system acting like a treasure you know um and so we basically say we need to know that it's you we need to know that your device has told us that that's that's you and so um you know like the implementation varies depending on what Pass Key ecosystem you're in apple do it one way Google do it one way one password does it another way um you know like we've learned a lot over the last six months about the different ways in which this uh sort of plays out in some of these different ecosystems like Pro tip don't use Windows hello to store your infinex pass key but um or Linux Linux doesn't do it at all Linux is like yeah

that's definitely don't put it on a a UB key right like I'm here to tell you that you can find ways to do that and you should absolutely not but it's just it's a thing that you you hold that is really hard for you to lose it's really hard for you to lose and it's almost impossible for anyone to take it from you um because so if I lose my phone that I have here as long as I can sign into my Apple ID or even just like so do I just need to sign into my Apple ID to be able to access infinex again or like do I just need to have my face you need to like so this is again there's some Nuance here right if you've got um your iCloud security set up to a certain level then they will let you use

um like Apple's what's it called um keychain sync with iCloud right so keychain sync is the technology that Apple built that is actually facilitating the synchronization of that um and if you turn on the right features even Apple can't decrypt that for you right like if you lose your iCloud password then and you lose the way they've implemented TFA across devices like all that stuff like you're you're you're done there don't do that but it's also Apple are very good at this game you know they've been at it for years they're very good at both security and user Centric safety um in fact I'd say like they're probably the best company in the world that understands this connection between ux and safety that we've been talking about

um so we've got these ecosystems that doing a really good job of of helping people kind of be safe and it's not just in crypto like that's your net banking right it's it's all this other stuff like web 2 honestly got really good at some of this stuff um and then if you look at it it's it's actually almost like a bit of crypto in web too right because like it's just a pkp at the end of the day the whole whole web orn um standard like you can do attestations with it right you've got a private key that's never leaving your device we can give you a challenge you sign that you send it back what we're doing with um in the middle which we're using tone key

for is just the abstraction layer where we can take a signature from a pass key using web orn and we can turn that into a signature that can be sort of natively validated on chain and you on any chain well yeah I mean there are different encryption curves that different change support so we can we can sign a salano transaction we can sign an ethereum transaction uh if we wanted to a Bitcoin transaction um and we'll go there and like that's kind of the key to self- custody for us um that plus the smart contract infrastructure right because like you've got this smart contract which is guaranteeing that you can recover if you do lose your pass key you

have set a recovery address and you can eject funds to that address and so this is kind of an important part of it as well basically we looked at it and we said okay your pass key is yourself custodial thing that you hold and that Gates your access to most onchain transactions if you lose that though we want to have things that are lower severity to like not lower severity like they're kind of easier for someone to get like I'd say maybe access to your Gmail login is easier to get than like your face ID on your phone right it's just like it's just not quite gated the same way and and again this depending on how you set up and there's stuff that's even easier like the number of Facebook IDs

that get stolen annually is a ridiculous number so we don't support Facebook at all as a social or to unlock your recovery we tried to pick like the right things that kind of everyone has versus are really secure um or if you're on chain and you've been on chain for a while you you can opt out of social recovery um you can do nothing that's going to dox yourself and you just use a ea to sign a transaction um so we got options right but all they can do is eject your funds to an address that's been pre agreed before your account had any value so like you show up with infinex it's got no value in it you're going to tell us what your Escape hatches right you then deposit $100 million and without your pass key you

can't do anything with that right so there's kind of like other ways that people can kind of lose access to stuff like we've got lower severity stuff but the only thing you can do with that is send it to the pre-agreed escape hatch so we can kind of make that more accessible and so it's really been a blended sort of model the way we've approached this um this security piece but yeah it's I guess back to your original question um TurnKey is that translation layer for us where we can sort of get you to sign with your pass key and then translate that into a signature with the transaction that you intended to sign um and we can't get in the middle of that we we don't have like a back end that can just sign on your behalf it requires sort of that

multi-party process for you to for us to then be able to have a transaction that you signed that we can land on chain for you yep and you actually hit on my kind of next question as well which was around kind of the recovery process again like for patrons like if I somehow lose my pass key I have my I have like this this other treasure connected as like this backup um so I you know in the event that a patron loses or or somebody who has funds on on the platform loses their Pass Key they can go and initiate a funds recovery process that would just send their funds back to that wallet address basically yeah that's right and then but how would I initiate that process if I don't have my pass key we've got three options at the moment um

like if you've connected your Apple account you can just sign in with apple if you connected your Google account sign in with Google all right and again the way Apple challenges you you're going to get kind of probably a stronger challenge to unlock your keychain sync than you are to just sign in with Google like and this is this is very much a thing that everyone can kind of set up in accordance with their own personal preferences and you know everyone's kind of got a different posture with these major providers um but those are our two sort of social recovery options and then like it sounds like you yourself you would have added your eoa um for your treasure as a signer as well and so you know if if we weren't around you could just go to the contract and you can sign

a transaction with your treasure and you can get that like that's another method that we've got available for you for you to eject your funds from your infinex account if you've lost your pass key got it cool I feel like this is uh better by far than the traditional seed phrase with Hardware wallet so I think that was that was the goal right I mean just felt way easier to like sign up you know yeah we do too we do too and you know there's trade-offs of course right um but like yeah like you have my face picture exactly my yeah the 3D model of your face that sits on my desk you know there's there's

trade-offs with everything always technolog is about tradeoffs but I think I think that you know like Tech gets better Tech gets better like this idea of like you need a seed phrase like you know we like we tried to do this a while ago like Argent like people knew that this was not going well years ago and tried to fix it tried to do things Dharma there are a bunch of wallets that try to do it and it's just like the wallet Al and Jed has a lot to say about this but like the wallet alone conf fixs this yeah like something else that I'll say is you know one of my favorite uh attacks that I've seen this year in um in crypto is turned out a bunch of

Android apps in the Google Play Store were just recording screens right like screenshot every 30 seconds of whatever's on the screen and so if you had installed one of these apps literally and like somehow just pointed your Android phone at your like with the camera and at your C phrase which you've only ever written on paper by the way I just just taking pictures and constantly uploading them to an S3 bucket somewhere it's then ocing all this stuff and looking for anything that looks like a SE phraser and they're draining people's wallets it's the stuff we think is safe is so deeply not safe once you really get into all of the implications of the different ways in which people get wrecked and that's before we get into

how much of a lie blind signing makes everything we do in Def which I I could probably do a whole podcast around that but um it's hard to stay safe in crypto really like what my treasure is doing and don't get me wrong I love my treasure and I kind of like the idea of maybe one day being able to also plug that in as a second factor to my infinex account right but really like what this is doing is something very similar there's you know I've got a secret private key in here and I've got a way to unlock and sign a transaction with it that can then sign a transaction in my infinex account right this is a really

good Hardware wallet it's a really good Hardware wallet and I just I don't even know that it's happening as a user I'm like oh it's just there's the face ID and I'm in you know and I can't L it because if I just throw this at a brick wall like it's in my iCloud but that's secured by other private keys that I am self- custodial of right you know it's like this is actually stuff got pretty good here um so it's it's nice to start actually being able to use that yeah I mean the two biggest problem spaces that I see infinex basically tackling is this wallet infrastructure side I think this while it may seem like the focus for for trading and for a better ux of actually using the app I think the entire just

the entire signup process and the way that we've explained how it works is is light years ahead of the seed phrase era so I think that hopefully this sets a a trend in that direction and then I think obviously the actual the actual ux of kind of um an aggregator of aggregators of sorts or a a a place to get people to get the enthusiasts excited again about defi is in in my books it's the it's this it's it's the important part of the app but like the the wallet side breakthrough here I think is what a lot of people have probably commented on already who have signed up as as patrons and I think who will continue as you guys grow I think the key is like it's both nicer to use and it's also better

you know two of the other great attacks that we've seen a lot of this year one is domains get stolen all the time um like there was that square space huge domain surface area attack um and you know if you got our domain you could use that to unlock pass keys but then you couldn't do anything with them right because the past key is not actually signing the onchain transaction right you need our our private backend keys to actually get into turn key to start unlocking things like you kind of need to attack so many different things at once here um there's no kind of single point of failure and then another if you registered infin great.com and managed to get a bunch of infinex is used to it like they couldn't

unlock their pass keys there it's it's fishing resilient like you it really just it kind of gets like entire categories of threats and just like notes them out of the picture um which is and it's and it's nicer to use it's just like well that's cool all right guys well I mean last thing here I'm on the infinex app on my phone right now there's uh home wallet earn play and obviously like your my Patron stuff speedrun crate run um so I can play bull run today and it says trade is coming soon we haven't really talked that much specifically about the development of the product itself so I'd like to just kind of end on that note

what is the product road map looking like uh you know going into 2025 and what are the key features that you guys want to ship priorities um and kind of like rough timeline there I I think that this is one of the challenges right that like um you know again Jed and I have been speaking about this a lot is we built the original architecture you know when I when when Jed uh joined the project last year in whatever it was like October or November or something like that you know we had this architectural idea in mind and it was very aligned to like the the Dogma let's call it like defi Dogma right um you know the the religion of defi um and you

know Jed turned up and was like yeah some of this is nonsense but like you know I'll play along for a while right um and I think that we've now built enough and we've seen enough of like where this architecture gets us and we've actually been through like a whole iteration cycle of this architecture in and this is a novel architecture right like no one's ever tried to do it this way before and we've gone through like v0 maybe like v.5 of that and we've kind of we're sitting here today going we can keep grinding on this or we can really like learn the lessons of the last year and re architect it to speed up our ability to integrate um and unlock some of these other things and and that's

currently the tension right now is like how much re architecting versus just you know pushing along do we do um because you know there's there's this this fairly harsh tradeoff of like do we spend a couple months like rebuilding some of this stuff the right way to then allow us like really accelerate or do we know keep running in parallel upgrade the back end while we're you know kind of going along in the front end there's there's there's an open question at the moment I guess all right can the DJ just want to know when they can trade man you know what's funny is for if this gives anyone confidence right we have a bunch of Deens in the team and they say

they're like shut the [ __ ] up with your architect ual nonsense like when can I trade like literally I was talking to one of the engineers yesterday and he's like you just keep rugging us let us trade let us build a trading interface like and uh and so yeah there there are internal Advocates let's just say for for the external DJ out there you've got you've got plants inside the orb who are pushing hard for trading uh so I look I I like the the honest like the honest answer is like probably uh like early next year I think uh trading will go live it's just question of like is it trading plus like 20 other things or is it just trading yeah I think it would be cool as you guys roll that out to also write some of this into like a blog post

right as to the thinking right I I think that kind of the the the Crux of the conversation I think Kane you said between this like binance edge of of full custody best experience versus like what we have onchain full censorship resistance kind of like scoping out that gradient and then you know explaining you your thoughts as you guys come to that choice I think could influence a lot of Builders to think in the better way of basically ux first right um and so would love to see something like that from your end and you know obviously excited for the trading stuff too so guys thanks for coming on it's been a great conversation I think we covered A to Z here um it's been a pleasure thank you thank you