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Venture capitalists and angels get a “100x better deal than everyone else” under the current crypto fundraiser model, which is what Kain Warwick’s “Patronage” model intends to fix.
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Infinex’s “Patron NFT” sale could be a new model to bootstrap new crypto projects while avoiding the unfair playing field of traditional venture capital funding, says founder Kain Warwick.
“Patronage” is the new strategy coined by Warwick with Infinex — which, in theory, allows all participants to own a slice of a crypto project on the same terms.
Warwick said the current venture capital model is plagued by “skewed incentives,” where those with deep pockets are handed a “100x better deal than everyone else.”
“This is not a company, this is this is an open source project, so we needed something different. I think that people have realized that the current incentive structure is broken.”
It’s not “egalitarian” unless “everyone’s getting the same deal” — or as close to it as possible, Warwick added.
Patronage refers to the act of providing support — financial or non-financial — to an individual, business, or cause without expecting anything in return.
To own a slice of Infinex, Warwick issued “Patron” non-fungible tokens to the public, including VCs and retail, to spark community interest in its vision to offer a non-custodial, unified UX layer across all blockchains and decentralized finance apps.
In short, Infinex aims to dethrone crypto exchanges as the first and main point of contact for new and existing crypto users.
Obtaining a “wide distribution” of Patron NFT investors in this way was far more important than focusing on winning over a few VC firms — which Warwick said he even initially contemplated excluding.
Source: Kain Warwick
In the end, Infinex raised $65.3 million selling Patron NFTs to several VC firms, industry leaders, and hundreds of community members — though Warwick would have liked to see that sum reach $100 million.
Related: Ethereum is a ‘dictatorship’ claims Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson
Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Near Foundation, Synthetix, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum Foundation researcher Tim Beiko were among the most prominent participants of Infinex’s Patron NFT sale.
Key figures from Infinex’s Patron NFT sale. Source: Infinex
Warwick noted that Infinex conducted a pre-access sale for these key community members, but that was facilitated on the same terms.
Warwick said he’s received a “healthy” push from participants who are keen to know when the integrations will happen:
“It’s not one token anymore. It’s like when Jupiter, when Uniswap, when 1inch, when [are] all of these projects that they want to see [being] integrated.”
Crypto fundraising amounts are falling
Despite market prices back up near late 2021 highs, crypto projects have seen far less funding this time around.
Crypto funding has hovered slightly below $3 billion in each quarter this year, which dwarfs the $12 billion raked in during Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, a RootData chart shows.
Quarterly cryptocurrency venture funding amounts since January 2021. Source: RootData
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This article first appeared at Cointelegraph.com News
