Infinity is Going After OpenSea With 600M Free Tokens

Infinity, a new NFT marketplace is taking aim at OpenSea with 600M tokens ready to give away.

People who have made transactions on the biggest marketplace for digital collectibles will get free tokens, but only if they use the new competitor — and soon.

Infinity called itself the “FTX for NFTs” when it announced its launch on Medium, writing, “Infinity is a community driven, decentralized NFT marketplace built for the future of discovering, developing, and owning NFTs. As an alternative to OpenSea, it aims to better represent, as well as incorporate the needs and wants of the NFT community.”

According to a chart the team shared on Dune Analytics, people have been using Infinity, but volume has been dropping each day in its first few days. It saw $1.26M in volume on its first day, Oct. 8, but only $308,914 on October 12, for a total volume so far of $3.8M.

Meanwhile, OpenSea did $3B in volume in September and has nearly hit $1.5B in October already.

Web3 Version

Infinity has been set up by two collaborators, Garrett Allen and Adi Kancherla. Allen is an alum of ConsenSys, the Ethereum-focused incubator and software maker. He worked on its uPort identity product. Kancherla is a Google and Amazon alum who currently runs an NFT minting company called Mavrik.

They are doing this because, as Kancherla told The Defiant in an email, “A web3 version of OpenSea needs to exist. Not having this is like not having DEXes and the only way to trade tokens is via Coinbase.”

The recent discovery of an employee who had been using non-public information to trade NFTs has hurt OpenSea’s reputation.

Infinity’s first version is built from a fork of OpenSea’s code, though it has a lower transaction fee at 1.5%, versus OpenSea’s 2.5%. All of the transaction fees go to the community controlled DAO.

Vampire Attack

The distribution is similar to the vampire attack that made SushiSwap’s launch so attention getting, but Infinity’s approach isn’t quite vampiric. It’s not incentivizing anyone to take their NFTs off OpenSea, after all.

To keep with the metaphorical creature theme, it’s more like a wood nymph attack: it’s luring innocent Ethereum users to another field to play in with promises of sprinkling gifts over them once they do.

The main gift it’s offering now is its new governance token. Infinity’s new token will tentatively be called NFT, though that’s not finalized yet. People who hold the token will get governance rights over Infinity, its development and its treasury, discounts on trading, and other benefits (such as future limited edition NFTs, for example).

According to a new tokenomics blog post shared in advance with The Defiant, it’s minting a billion tokens at the start, and 60% of that will go to past OpenSea users if they try Infinity, 10% will be set aside to try to keep people using Infinity, 20% will go into the DAO in order to fund further work and 10% will go to providing liquidity in the market.

The team has identified just under 500,000 unique addresses that qualify for the airdrop.

Spend to Claim

Once the airdrop begins, users will have 60 days to make transactions on Infinity to claim the airdrop. Accounts with more tokens available to claim will need to spend more ETH. The smallest tier, users who have transacted $1,000 on OpenSea, will have to spend 0.02 ETH (around $71) to claim their full allotment of 70 tokens.

The largest airdrops will go to users who have spent more than $500,000 on OpenSea, but in order to claim they will need to spend 30 ETH, or roughly $114,000, to receive 100% of their allotment of 16,678 tokens.

“If we simply give out tokens to OpenSea users, they may never bother using Infinity. We want people to feel ownership of the platform and get them enough to be involved in governance,” Kancherla said.

Unclaimed airdrop NFT will revert to the user incentives pool.

DAO Treasury

Six months after the protocol launches, NFT will begin token inflation for 25 months, according to the tokenomics post, which says, “After 6 months, a 4% inflation amount per month over a total of 25 months (with the 6 months as vesting cliff) will be started. Tokens from this will be used for distributions to the team, investors, advisors, more user incentives and DAO treasury.”

The inflation period will double the supply to 2B tokens.

OpenSea did not reply to a request for comment from The Defiant.

UPDATE: Infinity updated their threshold for the highest tier of token distribution, lowering it from 100 to 30 ETH. The post has been adjusted accordingly.