Opportunity
Half a billion creators, freelancers and independent workers are failing to get paid and deliver their craft efficiently because email, invoices, e-commerce and asset transfer are not reliable and don't protect them.
The average creative person or independent worker loses 20 days each year chasing late or missed payments - with almost half writing off at least one unpaid job per year. In 2023 this problem amounted to an $83bn cost to the global economy in lost productivity and put 22 million small or sole trader businesses at risk of folding.
From pop stars to boutique brands to code writers, people working and creating independently generate and average Worldwide of $1000 per month each, contributing $6.4tn to global GDP and growing as a sector at 20% year on year as more people leave the corporate workplace and explore alternative methods of income.
The commerce, invoicing, asset storage infrastructure used to manage their businesses online doesn't provide enough protection and doesn't scale to future demand.
Infinifty was designed to address this problem by locking transaction and immutable asset transfer together in a completely trustless solution to ensure the asset creator always got paid, and the customer could always access the assets they've purchased.
My Scope
Co-Founder & CEO
—Infinifty
Stakeholder
—Board & Advisor Relations
—Community Management
—Cost Recovery via HMRC R&D Tax Credits
Corporate
—Data Protection, GDPR, InfoSec Policy
—Financial Management & Forecasting
—Employee Policy
—Team Management
Digital Product Development
—Product Strategy
—Design System, UI/UX
—Roadmap
—Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
Brand & Marketing
—Brand Strategy, Mission & Vision
—Brand Identity
—Campaign Promotional Design
—Partnerships
Product Summary
We started with the core benefits of digital collectibles and upgraded them with unlimited lifetime storage. Infinifty is a future-focussed solution for selling and sharing merch, digital work and experiences.
On-chain collectibles
»
»
»
»
Proven authenticity and ownership
Instantly transferable
No personally-identifying data
Sell and re-sell with creator royalties
Limitless storage
»
»
»
»
»
Never lose or misplace sent assets
No late or missed payments for your work
Reward fans, event-goers and customers
Bundle any filetypes of any filesize
Unlockable only by owners
Creative by design
»
»
»
Made for brands, creators and studios
Create unique, limited edition experiences
Each tokenised item can be personalised
—Closed beta
Infinifty was launched into closed beta in 2023 with a waitlist application process that aimed to mint the first 1000 original NFTs by truly amazing creators and brands for free, giving creators complete freedom to list and sell their Infinifty NFTs wherever you like.
To kickstart this activity I built partnerships with leading web3 artist platforms to unlock an audience that already understood the concept of NFT ownership and minting, and would be able to benefit from the unique functionality Infinifty offered.
Colour Palette
Infinifty was designed to be developed and evolved over a series of 'eras' - with each era owning s primary dominant colour against a monochromatic information and application layer. As development moved from the first beta era, through to establishing product market fit, the dominant era colour would be swapped out along a predefined spectrum to provide an aesthetic marker for evolution across digital properties and promotional materials alike.
Infinifty's first era was a strong, full contrast fuscia - which was used to distance the brand against a sea of blue technical brands occupying the storage and cloud infrastructure space. It would evolve through red (era two), orange, yellow into green, to blue and purple if evolution required it. A range of era colours that retained a constant balance in core dominant weight would also allow for additional sub-product or sector opportunities where it may be necessary to specifically differentiate purpose or audience..
Design System
Built around Infinifty's era colour rules, the design system for digital properties used a monochrome background and foreground element system (switchable for light/dark modes) - and a single era colour primary for action, progress and focus items. For each activity only one era item would be present within the flow, and on-screen, only one activity would be in primary focus - with all secondary interaction falling back to the monochrome palette.
The typography system only used Inter, in two weights, and available in a primary and secondary strength for focussed and supporting text. Outside of button states no text was rendered in the era colour.
The design system colour palette was rounded out with standardised alert, success and warning colours within usual interface items like fields, banners, and did not interact with the era action or progress colour.
Infinifty Creator
Infinifty Creator handles the productivity component of Infinifty's unique offering: unlocking the full potential of digital media, collectibles and art by adding unlimited decentralised file storage to NFTs, which can be sent or sold instantly to anyone.
—Store
Source files, high-res versions, authenticity documents, instructions on how to display, remix or re-use your NFT. Whatever you decide to upload and store with your NFT is available to its owner to carry on where you've left off.
—Customise
One-tap customisations make your Infinifty Base truly original in moments. Play with text, fonts, layouts and colours. It's online all the time, so show it off.
—Mint
Mint your Infinifty NFT to the Ethereum or Polygon blockchains. On Ethereum Infinifty supports ETH and WETH tokens, and on Polygon Infinifty supports MATIC and ETH on Polygon tokens.
User Journey
The Creator interface was designed primarily as an asset storage platform with a mint function at the end of the flow. After connecting their wallet to Creator, users could create a collection: collections allow you to start making NFTs without upfront gas costs, and speed up the minting process. Collections remain editable within Infinifty so onboarding was quick with basic required information, and on successful creation, a permanent secondary action to add more details later.
With an active collection, a user could begin the process of creating items to house their unique assets. To meet the fundamental basic requirements of a token on the supported blockchains, minimal information is handled in the initial creation step.
From a created item's detail page the user now has options to add assets, customise the item's own public website (Infinifty Base), and mint the item.
When following the asset area flow any amount of assets of any filetype could be added to the item's unique storage container, and optionally organised with a nested folder structure.
Following assets, the next step was to pick a preset customisation option for the item's Infinifty Base public site and to customise if required. With item details handled first, assets added and default customisations complete it's time to mint the item and have it publicly accessible ready for trade or transfer.
As the creator and minting processes were novel UX for most web users it was important to wrap new functionality with a collapsible progress banner throughout the flow - ensuring that users new to the process were aware of what they had done, and what was left to do before reaching the point where they could access or sell their item.
Infinifty Creator
—Walkthrough
Infinifty Base
Each NFT minted with Infinifty includes an online home where it's owner can reach all the assets minted with it to remix it, reproduce it, or take it further.
Customising the item's Base website allowed each item to have a unique, personal look and feel, and to bring the item's website inline with campaign or product bbranding. One-tap presets mean a quick start for the fonts, colours and layouts of the elements in each Base website, and can be easily edited at any time,.
All functionality was handled within a drawer on the right side of the screen revealed after a successful wallet handshake, with drawer panels to handle item settings, access to the stored assets and the Base customisation panel. Customisations are split into three areas: background, layout and styles.
Infinifty Base
—Test Scamp
To bring a brand new technology solution to life we had to find a user base who could help us amplify Infinifty's value proposition with output that other adjacent user groups could understand. It made sense to focus on people already using web3 tools in their own professional or personal lives.
Infinifty's go to market strategy was centred around identifying user sectors who would encounter the least friction in adopting a brand new use case for a technology that most of the marketplace had no previous first-hand experience with. From personal experience within the space I could reach a handful of creators who both understood the technology, and were already set up to utilise it - artists who had actively made NFTs a component of their workflow, and a method they used to monetise their own creative output.
Throughout 2022 and into 2023, dominant sub-genres within the digital visual arts sector were already turned on to NFTs and the possibilities that the technology offered, and had nucleated in vibrant communities around X (then Twitter), Discord and had begun forming web3 art communities via web showcase properties.
I adopted a common social theme at the time; art shares to collect and amplify web3 native artist communities on Twitter, using a format they understood and wanted to be part of. Low friction and easy to generate, weekly art shares became a staple opportunity within Infinifty's social calendar, further amplified by NFT-centric IRL gatherings like NFTUK.
As development of Infinifty's digital properties evolved and we reached a beta product we could use and share, it was time to get artists onto the platform and using the product. I built partnerships with emerging web3 creator communities like Joyn and Hug to set up artist open calls. These timed events used a competition mechanic within each community to pull entries from their own user base, rewarded with prize tiers for winning entries.
Cohort One, run in partnership with Joyn, dropped at a time when NFT sales via artists were at an all-time high, with marketplaces like Foundation, SuperRare, Makersplace, KnownOrigin and Objkt fighting to establish themselves to different sectors of the crypto and digital art ecosystem. Cohort Two, run in partnership with Hug, offered a fresh community of artists but hit when sentiment within the creative industries was turning against NFT and crypto - as a result of several high-profile marketplace and creator shock events casting deep shadows over the future of the space.
For both cohorts, winning artists were onboarded to Infinifty and each built out their unique winning artwork items - along with bonus assets and minted the first public Infinifty NFTs through the platform.
For the first cohort we created social carousel assets to help promote Infinifty and bring new creators into the closed beta, as well as recognising the cohort with a winners page on the Infinifty website. For cohort two we did the same, each time helping to evolve Infinifty's visual language and align the platform further with creators already working within the NFT space.
During the open call entry periods we collected entrant artwork and built social posts to encourage entries and bring more creators into Infinifty's social channels. By engaging with entrants and not just with winning entries, Infinifty felt supportive and proactive within the ecosystem - surfacing as many web3 native creators as we could during the time we had to reach them.
Partnerships & Support
Building Infinifty required sourcing and managing external contractors to meet the requirements of running the project in parallel with my commitments at Fabrik. For the production beta software scope I procured Lionwood Software (Lviv, Ukraine) to deliver the multi-tenant proof-of-concept platform on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. To advise and undertake the R&D tax credits claim process for an innovative project advancing science and technology, I procured tax specialists ForrestBrown; a leading UK R&D tax specialist and innovation incentives consultancy.
In forging a community pathway for the brand and product showcase I initiated partnerships with leading web3 communities Joyn and Hug to engage and introduce thousands of artists to the platform; establishing prize pools and a permanent collection of art.
My journey with Infinifty from ideation through to delivering the closed beta was facilitated and guided by my membership to SETSquared - whose community and mentorship programmes were fundamental to it's progress, and by community leaders at techSPARK.
Workflow, Productivity & Management
My leadership role on the Infinifty project covered governance and stakeholder oversight, offshore team management as well as hands-on creative product development, brand and marketing oversight. My productivity and management workflow for operating these scopes and facilitating activity within the team and with external suppliers and partners included tools from OpenAI, Notion, Dropbox, Slack, Microsoft and Google. Creative and ideation activities used tools from across Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Miro, Krea and Apple Creator Studio. Analytics via Google and Later helped inform and manage ecosystem sentiment.
Stack
Infinifty's live beta multi-tenant properties were hosted on Hetzner datacentres with full redundancy and load-balancing. On-chain asset storage was handled via Storj with IPFS, with Infinifty's smart contract built with Solidity and running on the Ethereum mainnet. Infinifty used Moralis APIs for cross-chain and multi-wallet support, allowing Infinifty to mint on Ethereum, Binance Chain and Polygon with support for Metamask and WalletConnect wallets.
Executive Summary
Infinifty was a digital asset marketplace built to solve a structural problem in how independent creators get paid for the work they do. Half a billion creators, freelancers and independent workers worldwide generate around $6.4tn of GDP each year in a sector growing at 20% year-on-year. Yet 75% of this group don't get paid on time, with the average creative or independent worker losing 20 days a year chasing late or missed payments - and almost half write off at least one job annually. In 2023 that gap cost the global economy $83bn in lost productivity and put 22 million small or sole-trader businesses at risk of folding. The existing stack of email, invoicing, e-commerce and asset transfer wasn't built to protect them, and doesn't scale to where the independent workforce is heading.
Infinifty's answer was to lock transaction and immutable asset transfer into a single trustless package, so the creator always gets paid and the buyer always retains access to what they've bought. We took the core benefits of on-chain collectibles: proven authenticity, ownership, instant transfer, creator royalties - and paired them with limitless lifetime storage - so a seller could bundle source files, high-res assets, authenticity documents and unlockable extras into one capsule attached to a single tokenised item.
As Co-Founder and CEO I covered the full operating surface of the company: product strategy, design system and UI/UX, roadmap and GTM, brand identity and campaigns, board and advisor relations, GDPR and InfoSec policy, financial forecasting, team management, and HMRC R&D Tax Credit recovery - through which I returned 33% of all product development costs to the business as a qualifying technological advancement.
Infinifty went into closed beta in 2023 behind a waitlist designed to mint the first 1,000 NFTs free for established creators and brands, and was built from day one for large-scale adoption rather than around a novel chain.
The beta supported Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain with frictionless onboarding through Metamask, Binance and WalletConnect. I embarked on discovery partnerships with web3 artist programmes on Joyn, Hug and through open compatibility with OpenSea to reach audiences already fluent in minting.
Through 2023 and into 2024 a series of negative shock events directly impacted the web3 ecosystem and how it was perceived by traditional creative industries. Adoption appetite across the whole space crumbled with the large majority of NFT-centric art platforms and marketplaces shuttering through this period. As such, in 2024 I made the decision to sunset the closed beta application process and leave the beta properties in place - but suspended compute and storage costs to drive infinifty's overheads down to zero.
