If you observe the trends of public chains in 2024–2025 carefully, you will discover a brutal truth:
90% of public chains are creating prosperity, while only less than 10% are truly creating value.
The vast majority of chains rely on subsidies to support TVL, rely on airdrops to accumulate users, and rely on 'ecological explosions' to maintain the narrative.
Once the heat stops, the data drops to zero directly.
But Injective is completely not on this path.
It is not about storytelling, but about bringing an extremely dangerous, highly specialized, and high-ceiling track onto the chain:
On-chain financial infrastructure.
The rules of this track have never been about 'who has more ecosystem', but who can become the rule-maker of the underlying market.
CME's logic is:
It's not that I have the most trading volume, but that the entire market has to use my infrastructure.
#injective is replicating the same path on-chain.
This is why it has become one of the very few 'growing stronger and more stable' entities amidst all the noise of public chains.
01 Narrative revolution: Injective did not follow the L2 trend; instead, it developed in reverse
L2 has become the greatest illusion in the world of public chains.
Everyone is doing L2
Everyone is incentivizing users
Everyone is using airdrops to exchange for growth
But Injective chooses directly:
Not competing in L2, not competing in subsidies, not competing in funding schemes, but competing in professional trading markets.
What does this mean?
This means it has not stepped into the traffic track but has entered a more dangerous yet higher value track —
On-chain derivatives, on-chain liquidation, on-chain order book, on-chain structured markets, on-chain financial primitives.
While all public chains are 'competing for users', Injective is 'competing for financial business.'
This is a competition of dimensional misalignment.
02 A more radical view: Injective is the next generation 'on-chain CME', not a peer public chain
With so many public chains, why do you particularly notice Injective?
Because what it is doing is not 'another public chain', but an on-chain derivatives infrastructure empire.
What is CME's value?
It's not trading volume, but it monopolizes the entire mechanical structure of the traditional derivatives world.
Injective follows the same route:
Native order book
Native derivatives engine
Native liquidity framework
Native data layer
Native liquidation logic
Native trading scenarios
And not external applications.
You can understand it as:
On-chain CME as a carrier of public chains is fundamentally not the same species as other chains.
Other chains' DeFi is at the ecological layer
Injective's DeFi is at the system layer
These are two dimensions.
03 The data already shows that Injective's growth is not a 'subsidy illusion,' but 'business-driven'
If you observe Injective's growth curve, you will find a completely counterintuitive phenomenon:
Project numbers skyrocketing
Transaction depth increases
User numbers continue to grow
On-chain activities are becoming more frequent
Ecological developers are doubling in growth
Protocol usage rates are getting higher
But Injective has not spent money, has no large-scale subsidies, no 'ecological subsidies sacrificed to the heavens,' no 'airdrops to sustain the ecology.'
What logic?
This logic is called:
When a chain can carry real business, projects come to make money, not to fleece.
You can fake TVL
You can fake ecological heat
You can even fake the number of airdrop users
But you cannot fake:
Depth of the derivatives market
On-chain liquidation frequency
Professional traders flowing in
Data source call intensity
High-frequency trading activities
These cannot be produced without real demand.
Injective possesses all of these.
04 Injective's underlying advantage is 'professionalism that cannot be imitated'
Can a public chain be imitated?
Yes.
Can an interoperability solution be copied?
Yes.
Can an incentive model be copied?
Of course it can.
But Injective's core competitiveness cannot be replicated:
Deep financial business understanding + professional trading infrastructure + high-performance chain architecture + native derivatives ecology
This is a highly verticalized, long-term accumulation, with a very strong team background in this track.
Not something amateurs can easily copy or pile money into.
This is also why:
Public chains of similar scale
Injective clearly has healthier development quality, ecological types, project depth, and asset integration capabilities.
Because it is creating the 'trading infrastructure layer' for the entire chain,
belonging to system-level value rather than application-level value.
05 In 2025, the key is not the quantity of ecosystems, but Injective's 'financialization inflection point'
Many chains will expand their ecosystems in 2025
But Injective will do something even more important:
Driving the on-chain market into a stage of deep financialization.
This point is extremely difficult
But the value of the result is immense:
On-chain options
On-chain structured products
On-chain perpetuals and indices
On-chain cross-asset pricing system
On-chain professional trading markets
On-chain proactive market making and automatic liquidation systems
Can you imagine?
Today what you see is 'Injective as L1',
But in the future, you will see:
Injective as the global infrastructure layer of on-chain financial markets.
By then, its valuation model will be completely different.
It's not about TVL
It's not about incentives
But rather:
On-chain trading revenue
On-chain derivatives scale
On-chain structured product issuance volume
On-chain liquidation count
On-chain order book depth
Native market demand growth
This is the true way to capture value across cycles.
06 Injective is the chain most likely to gain 'market pricing power' in this round
There are many public chains
Limited capabilities
Severe ecological homogenization
Value capture models are chaotic.
Narrative life cycles are getting shorter
But Injective has a core advantage that others do not have:
It is entering a track with the highest value density in the entire blockchain industry: derivatives and trading infrastructure.
And this is a:
Efficiency must migrate to on-chain
Traditional finance has a massive scale
The competitive threshold is very high
Market growth never stops
The track.
If you look at it from the perspective of financial history, the final winner is never the 'ecological all-in-one', but the 'infrastructure ruler.'
In the traditional world, CME is
In the on-chain world, Injective is likely the next.
This is not just a slogan, but a conclusion derived from data, direction, structure, and real user needs.
I believe Injective is likely to encounter a critical moment in 2025–2026:
Transitioning from a 'growth-oriented public chain' to a pricing system at the 'market infrastructure layer.'
When the market realizes this, Injective's valuation logic will be completely rewritten.