Injective raises $40 million to build finance-focused blockchain
Injective, a company that has built and deployed a purpose-built blockchain for finance, said today that it has raised $40 million in new funding.
The move capitalizes on a trend where blockchain-based applications are redefining finance with decentralized technologies. The funds were raised in a private token sale led by Jump Crypto. BH Digital, the crypto asset unit of investment firm Brevan Howard, also participated in the round.
Injective is a fully scalable blockchain product developed for decentralized financial applications, also known as DeFi, which is a rapidly growing industry. DeFi avoids the traditional concept of banks and intermediaries by allowing participants to conduct peer-to-peer transactions using self-executing smart contracts to complete transactions.
With Injective’s platform, fully decentralized financial applications can be built, such as cryptocurrency exchanges, prediction markets, derivatives and options trading. It is done by provisioning a large library of cross-chain primitives, such as an order book for on-chain financial transactions for DeFi apps.
This allows Injective to power existing decentralized applications such as decentralized exchange Injective Pro and sports betting site Frontrunner.
Injective’s platform is designed to be highly interoperable with other blockchains, including Ethereum. It also contains Cosmos, allowing it a cross-chain infrastructure. This is part of a larger mainnet upgrade that occurred in July, which added CosmWasm smart contracts to the ecosystem.
“CosmWasm is a much more resource-efficient smart contract environment compared to a traditional Ethereum virtual machine,” Eric Chen, Injective co-founder and CEO, told ZDNet about the upgrade. “And more importantly, this chain upgrade added a major feature where it can self-execute smart contracts at the beginning of each individual block.”
The entire platform is designed to be developer-friendly and allows Ethereum-compatible DeFi apps to be launched in minutes. It is designed with extremely fast transaction times and zero “gas” fees to execute a contract, so transactions will not suffer from bottlenecks once implemented.
Since the launch of the mainnet in November, Injective has already processed more than 90 million transactions, and dapps built on the platform have generated more than $7 billion in cumulative volume.
The total locked-in value of the DeFi market is $44 billion as of today, down from $86 billion in January, according to DeFiPulse. That’s because of what experts call “crypto winter,” a slowdown across cryptocurrency markets caused by a number of factors. These factors included the collapse of the Terra stablecoin ecosystem and the bankruptcy of several major crypto lending platforms such as Three Arrows Capital.
Despite the decline, DeFi has remained a hot topic among developers and businesses that continue to build on it and participate in it.
“Companies and financial institutions have already begun to participate in DeFi in a big way, and the natural next step will be to build personal decentralized applications,” said Kanav Kariya, president of Jump Crypto. “Injective offers these institutions a ready solution that can be used to build any financial app.
Injective said it will use the cash infusion to further develop its platform, with the goal of creating a better finance-enabled blockchain. It will also use it to increase the utility of the original INJ token, which is used on the blockchain to increase the liquidity of dapps built on it.
