Looking Back: A Year in Review for Injective
2021 proved to be a significant year for Injective, characterized by major milestones, rapid adoption, high-profile investments, and significant media coverage. Let’s take a glance at some of the year’s highlights. However, before we get into it, let’s just do a refresher on what Injective is.
Injective’s Mission
Injective mission is to take a shot at legacy institutions that create artificial market delays and thwart market innovation. Injective has created a protocol on which anyone can build powerful decentralized exchanges for sophisticated and main street traders. The main goal of the Injective DEX is to deliver low-cost, fast access to a limitless number of Web3 markets.
Injective prides itself on being cross-chain compatible, so it aims to have compatibility across major blockchain systems instead of trying to replace Bitcoin or Ethereum as many other chains have set out to do. Furthermore, Injective was built on the premise that multiple chains would thrive in the future, and therefore the protocol was deliberately set up to smoothly interact with other crypto ecosystems.
Injective looks to be well-positioned to enjoy continued success in the future with major collaborations and players supporting the protocol.
Injective Architecture
Injective has built an interoperable layer 1 protocol optimized for building cross-chain DeFi applications. Specifically, Injective enables anyone to create exchanges, prediction markets, lending solutions, sports betting and much more. Users are free to trade any market of their choosing on Injective such as:
- Derivatives
- Futures
- NFT’s
- commodities
Injective Labs co-founder and CEO Eric Chen describes the protocol as having the “innovations necessary to usher in truly free and decentralized DeFi ecosystem for all.”
Regarding its architecture, Injective’s unique layer-2 structure removes network congestion and operates with zero gas fees. This seems unheard of in a world where Ethereum gas fees thwart adoption and serve as an obstacle for activities like trading NFTs. Injective’s sidechain infrastructure allows for more speed, meaning higher throughput for more transactions without costing the network’s users time, money, or security.
INJ is the native, deflationary asset that powers the Injective Protocol. Currently, 60% of all trading fees go towards a burn auction process that allows INJ to become more deflationary over time.
Highlights of 2021
Now that the recap is over, let’s talk about the massive year Injective had. The growth of the platform cannot be understated.
VCs and Mark Cuban Join the Party: In the fall of 2021, Injective’s mainnet officially launched and amassed over $100 million of volume in just the first few days. It wasn’t long before the protocol was recognized as one of the fastest-growing decentralized exchanges to date with a valuation of over $1B. During the $10M “party” funding round, Injective’s success skyrocketed even further by major backers like VC firm Pantera and Mark Cuban. Other investors that joined the $10M round include Pantera Capital, Blocktower, and CMS.
Read more about this part of the Injective journey during our summer 2021 recap.
Binance and Banksy: Back in July of 2021, the world’s top exchange by trading volume, Binance, joined Injective as a genesis validator and utilized the protocol as the first Binance Labs incubated project. Later, in one of its more unique developments, Injective also minted the very first Banksy NFT alongside Burnt Banksy, gaining coverage from major news outlets like CNBC and Forbes.
Products:
- Mainnet: After the first phase of the mainnet launched in March 2021, went live in Q3 and quickly blew past $100M in volume in the first few days.
- Rebrand: There was a major rebrand in August 2021 that reshaped the look of Injective. From the beginning of August to the beginning of September, Injective’s price more than doubled from $6.48 to $13.51.
- INJ Burn: In December 2021, the INJ Burn function came online. In just a few weeks, over $2,000,000 USD worth of INJ was burned, lowering the overall supply of Injective.
Injective has also generated coverage from top media outlets including:
- Forbes
- Tech Crunch
- Bloomberg
- CBS
Roadmap for the future
From day one, Injective set out to create a new financial paradigm that is fully decentralized. With its permissionless, censorship-resistant nature and major breakthroughs in the last year, Injective remains true to its core intentions and looks forward to a future of ongoing innovation.
What’s next for Injective in 2022? Short answer — plenty. Overall, its main focus will be fully building out the protocol with novel cross-chain integrations and creating the world’s most powerful derivatives exchange protocol. More Web3 decentralized apps are in the works to create a versatile and integrated ecosystem that will work synchronously to create a positive feedback loop.
As the Injective community is focused on making DeFi accessible to everyone, Injective also plans to deploy more intuitive Web3 products.
Due to its truly decentralized nature, members of the community can actively shape the protocol and play a role in Injective’s development. To allow external developers to build new apps on Injective, the community will be building a highly performant CosmWasm smart contract layer on top of the protocol. In many ways, the possibilities for Injective’s future are limitless.
While last year was mostly a year of initial product development, Injective is focusing this year around increasing global adoption. Now with game-changing innovations and major investors behind it, Injective is set up to make 2021 the best year yet!
About Helios Staking
Joining forces with Injective is Helios Staking, a Netherlands-based, staking-as-a-service provider that works exclusively with Proof-of-Stake blockchain networks. It adds to a growing list of validators aimed at helping Injective on its mission to unlock the full power of DeFi through. Helios Staking is actively helping to build this promising protocol’s future alongside nine other staking networks as part of Injective’s Equinox Staking Validator ecosystem.
Helios Staking is proud to have been named for several of Injective awards, which included:
- First place: Top Staker
- Community Content Award: Big Brain Thought Leader
- Second Place: Most Delegates
- Honorable Mention: Team Player
Read more about the awards we’ve won with Injective here.
