‘Patron NFTs’ could be answer to ‘broken’ crypto fundraising model — Kain Warwick

Infinex’s “Patron NFT” sale could be a new model to bootstrap fledgling crypto projects while avoiding the unfair playing field of traditional venture capital funding, its founder, Kain Warwick, told Cointelegraph.

“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 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 said he would have liked to see that sum reach $100 million.

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Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Near Foundation, Synthetix, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum Foundation researcher Tim Beiko were among the 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 it 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 recovering to 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 of 2024, which is dwarfed by the $12 billion raked in during the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, a RootData chart shows.

Quarterly cryptocurrency venture funding amounts since January 2021. Source: RootData

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