From mirro xyz by Kain.eth

This post will cover the projects I am most interested (invested) in at the start of 2025. My primary focus is Infinex, but most of these projects are somewhat related to Infinex, so I’m dumping everything into one post.

I will cover my thoughts on, and in some cases, plans for:

Infinex

Let's begin with Infinex. Startups are weird. You think you have a simple solution to a big problem, but when you try to take it to market, many things prevent you from even starting to solve it. I have founded so many fucking startups, yet I still get it wrong every time; even when I say this time is different, it isn't. The world is too complex, and I am too stupid; I always end up doing things the hard way.

Onchain Binance is a great idea and is pretty straightforward on paper. It is clear from a feature perspective, but like an idiot, I did not set out to build onchain Binance. I started by trying to develop a centralised wrapper for an onchain perps engine. Unfortunately, Hyperliquid beat me to it. Well played, Jeff. My only consolation is that HL can now experience the fun of progressive decentralisation while running an exchange. Yes, I’m farming engagement from the .hl crowd.

Late last year, Infinex decided the optimal path from a feature perspective would be to solve cross-chain bridges and swaps before pursuing other exchange features. We also built a ton of infra and incentive schemes. We got very close to delivering Swidge and realised it is not a simple UX issue; universal swapping and bridging are not solved problems, even at the basic functional level.

While implementing Swidge, we realised that there are many efficiencies to be had, not just with UX but also in meta-aggregation. We also realised this problem would only get more complicated with the launch of MegaEth, Monad, Berachain, Abstract, Fogo, and many more Gen4 fast blockchains. What is a Gen4 blockchain, you ask? I don't know. I made it up, but it sounds cool.

There are two primary jobs a user has in crypto:

In the immediate term, Infinex plans to be the best solution for both jobs. We do this by supporting the most networks and aggregators while having the best onboarding and UX experience. We nailed onboarding last year. We are now laser-focused on Swidge (Swap + Bridge). We also have a proof of concept implementation of BTC support that uses NEAR chain signatures, plus we support seven EVM chains and Solana. We recently streamlined our onboarding process further, making it even easier for new users to get an Infinex account. We will continue to iterate and improve our onboarding process, including adding the ability to send crypto via a link that onboards the recipient to a new Infinex account.

We will get more opinionated about which routes are optimal for the user. For example, assume you have ten assets in your Infinex account across four chains. But you want PENGU, a token missing from your portfolio. You click “Get PENGU”, and Infinex will work out the best route for you based on the assets you hold. In this case you have USDC on Solana, but what if those are your emergency Echo funds and you instead want to use ETH, but you don't have enough ETH on Base or Arbitrum, in that case Infinex will construct a route from both networks into SOL and then swap SOL to PENGU. This is non-trivial, but right now, almost every solution on the market forces the user to click through various routes to find the best one, and even then, it is unclear whether you got it right until after the trade settles onchain. The reason Infinex can do this is it is not a Dapp. It is a rich web application that knows every route and every asset, which assets you have, and which assets you typically use to swap on which networks. It can do the heavy lifting for you; you tell it what token you are missing in your life, and it will figure out the rest. I am sure that eventually, an LLM will replace all of this, but not this cycle, bucko.

Once we have landed this functionality, we will roll out referrals and a new incentive campaign based on Bulls, which, at the moment, you can only earn from playing Bullrun, our fantasy trading game.

We have all the core functionality to dominate bridging and swapping. We have wallet support for low-value accounts and vaults for those who want onchain recovery and have higher-value accounts. Even better, you can combine both to fit your security posture.

OK, let's talk Echo

Echo is one of my favourite projects this cycle, mainly because of their impeccably polite British customer service team. I spent a lot of time in 2023 ranting about how fucked capital formation had become. The market agreed and provided us with a bunch of solutions. I love Echo because they optimise for the user. But you have to build a product people love, when you get deals like Ethena, Megaeth and Monad, you create powerful alignment. But my favourite part of Echo is that the incentive structure is not retarded. While there are edges and the potential for bad actors to exploit the platform, these are significantly mitigated, and the optimal play as a group lead is to work fucking hard to curate the best deals possible. This is where I midcurved Echo hard when Cobie first explained it to me. I asked him, “Who would give up their allocation in the Solana seed round to a bunch of degens?” I did not realise then that running a good Echo group would be a powerful way to curate better deal flow. This is obvious in hindsight, but I don't think even Cobie realised how well this would work. I could only get an allocation into Megaeth because I have one of the best-curated groups on the platform. I have subsequently had several high-profile and highly sought-after projects reach out to do a round through my Echo group. The power of Echo is distribution, and I know this well because I had to grind for six months to get our Patron distribution. Now you can pitch me, do a deal with the Patrons group, and replicate our distribution in less than 48 hours...

My biggest fear is Justin Sun buys Echo for $300m and ruins it by switching the funding flow to USDT on Tron.

Solana and Fogo

I have been waiting for this moment for a while. An SVM chain that has a compelling value prop. For context, Fogo is a new SVM chain based on the Firedancer client announced last month.

I’m bullish on this for several reasons, primarily because fast blockchains are good. More SVM chains also make a compelling case for better SVM dev tooling. Ethereum has invested a ton (maybe too much at times) of effort and money in dev tooling. A highly robust and competitive industry supports the Ethereum developer experience. Solana is still lagging on this front, though it is rapidly improving. More SVM chains will be a strong driver for increased dev tooling investment as the TAM increases significantly, even though most programs running on Fogo will initially be copypasta. We saw this with BSC and other chains during the last cycle with Eth. New chains allow for more experimentation and force more effort towards cross-chain communication in the SVM ecosystem. Also, more new and exciting chains are incredibly bullish for Infinex as we are positioned to be one of the primary ways for new users to access these chains.

Derive

Man, what a four-year journey for these lads. I’ve been a degen options trader off and on for two decades; I started trading equity options in 2007 and did it as a side hustle with a fair amount of success for a few years before getting rekt in the GFC. I traded crypto options when I got into the space, but I far preferred perps. But I’ve come full circle, and given trade sizing, it is often lower risk for me to construct an options chain than to yolo perps. This is why I was bullish on Derive from the start. Unfortunately, they had to endure much pain and suffering to get to the platform they have today. They still need more liquidity, but for most traders, it is enough. They are at a point where you can quickly put on eight-figure trades across various durations. I opened a trade on US election day, buying BTC calls for December 27th. I luckily rotated all these to longer-duration options when BTC hit 107k, selling the pico top. I’m currently sitting on a bunch of Feb 150k calls, which I am very bullish about, and I even added some more 130k calls yesterday. I like to buy calls when I think Vol is trading cheap, and we are in such a position right now. The other reason I like options is that rather than idiotically buying $25m worth of ETH at 4k as I did in Nov 2021, getting my face ripped off, I could have spent a million on premiums for 8k calls. My thesis is ETH to 10k, and this remains my thesis. I just got the timing a little wrong... Buying options would have been a far better way to express that trade. Derive is also about to relaunch its token, and the platform is ready for adoption; it is one of my highest conviction plays of 2025.

What is the Infinex tie-in here? Well, DRV will be listed on Infinex for Swidging on Day One, and there will be a trading competition with 1m DRV up for grabs based on notional trading volume. This is a double alpha leak.

Ethena

While many people are midcurving Ethena, they have quietly taken over the world. I say quietly because while you probably see a ton of news about them all over the timeline, people are behind on the fundamentals. But first, Ethena is not suppressing the price of ETH, for several reasons. Traders no longer supply stETH to mint USDe. They provide stables. So that whole theory is retarded, sorry. But even more importantly, 60% of the collateral is now BTC, which blew my mind when I learned about it yesterday. I mainly mention Ethena here because of my contractual obligation as a large bagholder and because I am working on a new proposal to have Synthetix provide collateral to Ethena to generate yield via protocol-owned Snax.

What about Synthetix?

Things are finally happening in Synthetix land. While there has been a lot of dysfunction over the years, most of which was caused by me. The Synthetix contributors continued to deliver. The issue was that no one was driving prioritisation, and even more importantly, there was no one to align Synthetix with the current meta, in addition to a feeble marketing effort.

Now, there is a new council, and I’m on it in an advisory capacity, helping direct the narrative and prioritisation. The SIP I just published proposes redesigning the staking mechanism to make the protocol far more efficient for scaling open interest and collateral for perps markets and generating yield for stakers.

And let's not forget about the upcoming integration of Perps V4 into Infinex.

And now for something completely different.

This is one of the weirder stories of this cycle for me. I was part of a group that CTO'd the oldest memecoin on Solana.

Luckily, it is still the oldest memecoin on Solana, or I would be worried about the recent price action. AI agents are sucking the air out of the room rn, but I'm confident we will rotate back to pure memecoins later in the cycle. There have been some headwinds, including many people selling life-changing bags that went from a few cents to six figures overnight. But my conviction remains high because there is no second first.

Pengu/Pudgies/Vibes

My kids bought Pudgies in 2021. As they grew older, their understanding of property rights grew increasingly sophisticated. It became clear I would not be able to claim these as a shared family asset, so I finally aped a bunch of floor Pengus for myself last year. The PENGU airdrop was masterful and validated the thesis that NFTs are typically stuck in the uncanny valley of too little liquidity for whales but too expensive for the average degen. Pengu solves this for the Pudgy ecosystem, and the price reflects that. I stayed up until 2 am to LP the launch, but it did not go well. It turns out that when the dev puts a trillion dollars of liquidity in a .00005% pool, no other LPs can make money. Luckily, I was saved by my continued inability to understand Raydium and accidentally sold half my tokens, setting the range too tight when it pumped from 3 to 5c. I pulled the LP too late and ate a ton of slippage. Thankfully, my one remaining analyst and I figured out what was happening and bought back at 2.5c. There is no accounting for pure luck. In any case, I am now out of the LP game and am diamond-handing this bag until the launch of Cream Finance 3.0. I will be max borrowing against my PENGU until the end of the cycle.Also, I have been playing the Pudgy Vibes Game with my kids. We each have three full sets of cards and are now working on a full set of foils. What is interesting to me is that there is almost an arb right now in that buying 13 boxes is around $1950, which gives you an 85% chance of getting a sketch worth around $2k. The rest of the cards in those 13 boxes will likely cover the slightly -EV trade. Please don’t do this, though, as I want the sketches. What is maybe craziest is a complete set of sketches is like $500k rn…

Pudgy Dungeon Crawler

I used to be addicted to this roguelike game. I still am, but I used to be, too. During Christmas lunch, my father casually reminded me of it. I then lost four days of non-stop grinding to try to speedrun the game again. I voluntarily killed my character and deleted the game when I got to level 29 and realised XP per-level scales insanely. But my character's loss is your gain because I have always wanted to see someone build a crypto version of this game. I funded a small team to kick it off. I want them to make it an ice tower theme based on my Pudgy PFP (still borrowed from my Son Ethy) which is within the licensing rules for Pengus. They will be working on a PoC over the next few months, and I hope we can also use it to test Infinex SSO for easy onboarding.

Ethereum, wen moon?

Ethereum is the greatest blockchain that has ever existed, but this cycle has been full of growing pains. It feels similar to what BTC went through last cycle; there were moments when many people were ready to write it off as dead tech, even inside crypto, which is a pure reflection of price action. Narrative follows price, and when price stalls, narrative stalls. Many factors are at play: increased competition, an ineffectual EF, community members being too rich, L2 token-induced choice paralysis and many more issues. But I genuinely believe the pivot to UX focus many people in the ETH ecosystem are going through will be a massive driver of adoption and activity later in the cycle. We are not quite there, but we are close. There are numerous solutions to UX issues, including EIPs, in progress. One thing that people continually underestimate about Ethereum is that it tends to be a white swan machine, and the number of times a minor update or shift in developer focus delivers unanticipated parabolic improvements is staggering. I’m as bullish on Ethereum the network and ETH the asset as I have ever been because we are approaching a tipping point for a new wave of adoption, and the implications are hard to predict. These changes will, however, drive more awareness for the Ethereum ecosystem. Infinex is leading the charge on cross-chain UX, if we pull off our roadmap, we will significantly reduce the barriers preventing the next wave of crypto users from being onchain natives. Also, Base is pretty good, and that Jesse guy is pretty bald now, so don’t fade.

My final thought is on the role of Vitalik. Since token 2049 last year, it has been clear he is in the trenches and understands his role in motivating and supporting the key founders building on Ethereum. He has been aping into new projects, testing new infra and doing much of it in public. This is hugely beneficial for the entire ecosystem, and knowing that it is in principle possible once again to get a V seal of approval for your work impacts builders in the space.

General Crypto Predictions

I think we go much higher from the start of the year despite the FUD from Mr Hayes. I do expect we top out in early 2026, but I’m open to the bull lasting another 18 months. I think BTC will eclipse 250k, and ETH will break 10k. Lots of other crazier shit will happen. The top signals will be glorious. But my primary bet is this will be the cycle where we hit the tipping point of more people onchain than on centralised exchanges. It will be the year when the CEX era finally ends. It will take a while to play out, but many credible platforms are already vying for the onchain Binance crown. Several will dominate this cycle. Enjoy the bull market, and if you haven’t made it yet, get in the trenches and grind. If you have made it, get back in there. Not all of us are cut out for retirement…