Injective is a finance focused blockchain, launched in June 2021. Built upon the Cosmos SDK and the Tendermint architecture, Injective is fully EVM compatible, enabling cross-chain communication and interaction between Ethereum, Moonbeam and the Cosmos ecosystem. Everything you need to know in our new article:
What is Injective?
Injective is the first Cosmos based L1 blockchain, supporting a completely decentralised stock glass infrastructure, consequently giving the developers an opportunity to launch spot and derivative exchanges, engaging liquidity.
In chronological order
Injective Labs were founded by Eric Chen and Albert Chong in 2018, while being supported by Binance Labs. The foundation has since raised $52.6 million in three separate fund search rounds. 🔎
- The first round was in July, 2020, with $2.6 million raised in a seed round led by Pantera Capital and participated by QCP Soteria as well as Axia8 Ventures.
- The second round was in April, 2021, with $10 million raised in a funding round that included Pantera Capital, Mark Cuban, Hashed, and many more participants.
- The third and round was in August, 2022. Injective with Jump Crypto and BH Digital have raised $40 million.
Architecture and safety
As mentioned above, Injective is built upon Cosmos SDK and uses the famous Tendermint as its consensus protocol. Thus, making Injective highly adaptable and allowing it to adjust the architecture for different use scenarios of their flagship product - DEX stock glass. 🥛
Thanks to Tendermint’s relatively high transaction completion speed and optimized network (lock time being approximately 2.3 seconds) Injective is able to maintain high-performance, while having centralised limit order book (CLOB) DEX infrastructure on the network. Injective uses an FBA model that fulfils orders, published over a certain period of time, according to priority. That period is called the auction interval and works remarkably well with low block times. 🤔
It is worth mentioning the fact that even thought Injective increased its maximum set of validators from 25 to 40 validators on 16th August 2022, there wasn’t any change to the block time. Currently, the block time has actually been reduced to around 1.9s, clearly showing that optimisations have probably been done. 🔧
Talking about security and certification
Injective audited its spot and derivatives codebases with Informal Systems in 2021. Five minor issues were identified and instantly fixed. However, after updating their new Helix DEX interaction, no additional inspections were made. 🫤
Tokenomics
The INJ native tokens has no outstanding use cases and is primarly utilised for commission payment, net security and governance. The overall offer is 100 million tokens, but the number can increase due to an inflationary block reward emission. The current target inflation level is 7% annual with 5% real inflation and plans to decrease the indicator all the way down to 2% annual. 🙌
In case of inflation increase there is a deflation stopper lever - a mechanism, that trades 60% of all the exchange fees for INJ, burning the native token afterwards. That way, if the amount of burned tokens overcomes inflation, INJ might face deflation. Pretty smart, init? 😉
INJ can also be used as collateral in the derivatives markets and in Injective insurance pools, which increase the demand for token even more.
Ecosystem
Invective is a public blockchain, that lets developers launch their own projects, if the latter are approved by the blockchain administration. There are 6 projects functioning currently, but we will only point out the two most interesting ones:
Frontrunner
Frontrunner is a testnet, that decentralises the sport prediction market. By purchasing shares in the respective team, users place bets on the outcome of an event - a match between two teams, for example.
The protocol currently supports betting on Major League of Baseball and will be adding more sports leagues and market types in the future. ⚾️
Helix
Helix is Injective’s flagship product and is a fully networked CLOB DEX with unique features like zero gas fees, spot and perpetual markets, and stop-limit orders. 🧾
You might ask about what is so unique about stop-loss orders, but do not forget about Helix being completely decentralised. That way Helix are the only DEX, offering stop-loss.
Considering Helix is built on Injective, it is fully comparable with Cosmos, Ethereum and Moonbeam assets. By the time this article is written, Helix supports 18 markets with spot and perpetual offerings. 👍
Other projects
Unfortunately, the other four projects are simple variations of a DEX with no features, that are completely new to the market, so we don’t think mentioning them is worth it. 🤦♂️
Conclusion
Even though the project offers a range of unique features and services, the overall ecosystem is still not developed enough to be considered attractive for users. That will certainly change in the near future, but it is a pass for now.
Stay tuned 📻