Friends, Injective (INJ) has been going crazy lately! If before everyone thought it was just a 'high-end DEX chain', then the series of operations in 2025 is simply putting ambition right in front of us - it doesn't want to be just a trading venue, but aims to become the underlying operating system for the entire on-chain finance. Today, let's set aside those official statements and deeply discuss what big moves INJ is planning, as well as the real challenges it faces.
1. Core killer move: it's not 'EVM compatible', it's 'devouring EVM'
The native EVM launched on the mainnet in November is the biggest bombshell of the year. But this is by no means just riding the Ethereum wave. The key lies in these three points:
Native embedding, not a side chain: EVM is directly integrated into Injective's L1 architecture, meaning developers can use familiar Solidity and toolchains to directly call Injective's core financial modules—such as that institutional-level high-throughput order book. This is equivalent to giving Ethereum developers a VIP ticket to a 'high-performance financial chain' with extremely low migration costs.
MultiVM is the soul: EVM and WASM (the mainstream environment of the Cosmos ecosystem) run in parallel and seamlessly interact. Assets under the 'MultiVM token standard' are the same set in both environments, allowing free flow without needing cross-chain bridges. Imagine a contract where part of the logic is written in Solidity and part in Rust (WASM), yet they can collaborate efficiently; this play is too slick.
Ambition is to absorb developers: lowering the threshold is not the ultimate goal. Injective aims to attract high-quality teams that want to innovate in financial applications but are limited by Ethereum's performance and costs through the combination of 'EVM compatibility + native high-performance financial modules.'
II. Economic Model 'Atomic Bomb': Community BuyBack
The community buyback and burn program launched in October fundamentally restructured the deflationary logic of INJ.
Old model (burn auction): Mechanized, with strong participation sense from large holders.
New model (community buyback): Once a month, any token holder can voluntarily send INJ to the burn address within a designated window. The burned coins are permanently destroyed, while you, as a participant, can share in the actual income of the protocol for that month in proportion (for example, USDT).
What’s clever about this move: it directly ties the interests of each token holder to the actual income of the protocol. You are no longer a 'shareholder' passively observing inflation and deflation, but a 'partner' participating in profit distribution. The more you use the protocol, the higher the income, and the more significant the buyback and burn efforts, the greater your returns. This is a minimalist practice of 'capitalism for token holders.'
III. Making money is the hard truth: the ambition of iAssets and RWA
iAssets are not simply 'tokenized Tesla stocks.' Its core is a programmable real-world asset (RWA) framework.
You can create structured products based on a stock iAsset (for example, a 'principal + call option' combination).
Can algorithmically hedge risks.
Can dynamically adjust the risk exposure of a basket of assets.
Key: All these operations are on-chain, utilizing Injective's existing high liquidity DeFi Lego for efficient capital combinations. What it aims to connect is: the rich assets of traditional finance x the composability and efficiency of DeFi. If successful, it means a substantial amount of traditional financial traffic and strategies will choose to execute on-chain with Injective.
IV. The 'Future Weapon' That Takes Your Breath Away: iBuild
The iBuild demonstrated at the launch event can be described as 'magic'—using AI + no-code, allowing ordinary people to generate financial applications (such as a DEX or derivatives protocol) simply by describing them in language. Although some features are still in development, the direction is extremely clear: significantly lowering the barrier to building financial innovations. If in the future, an investment banker or fund manager can quickly productize strategies, the resulting application explosion will be nuclear-level.
V. Halo and Concerns: A Calm Look at the 'Other Side'
Advantage aspect maximized:
Star team endorsement: The 'Injective Committee' composed of Google Cloud, Deutsche Telekom, and others provides trust backing for institutional entry.
Data growth: Monthly active addresses exceed 100,000, and ecological activity is healthy.
Precise positioning: Focused on the financial base layer, not a generic chain, with sufficient depth in the toolchain.
But the challenges are equally sharp:
Homogenization of ecological applications: this is the community's biggest complaint. Currently, many applications are merely 'high-performance replicas' of other DeFi protocols, lacking native killer applications that stand out. Technology is the highway, but the vehicles running on it aren't cool enough.
Execution is hellishly difficult: the stability and security of MultiVM, the reliability of iBuild's AI, and the compliance and implementation of iAssets, each is a massive pitfall for engineering and ecology. The blueprint is grand, but the path to realization is fraught with anxiety.
The double-edged sword of the deflation model: the positive effects of Community BuyBack depend on the sustained high growth of protocol revenue. Once growth weakens, deflationary expectations diminish, which could backlash against token prices and community confidence.
The cruelty of competition: other financial-specific chains (such as dYdX Chain) and continually improving general chains (such as Solana and Monad) are all eyeing Injective. The first-mover and architectural advantages of Injective need to be quickly transformed into ecological barriers.
Conclusion: A gamble on a new era
All actions of Injective in 2025 can be summarized as a precise gamble: betting that institutional-level financial infrastructure + an exceptional developer experience + a deeply binding economic model for the community can give rise to the next generation of on-chain finance paradigms.
It is no longer satisfied with being just an 'exchange' in the DeFi world, but aims to become the on-chain Wall Street backbone that supports complex financial activities such as stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and derivatives. The year 2025 is indeed its 'decisive year.' The technological, economic, and ecological cards have all been played; now it depends on whether this grand blueprint can be built brick by brick into a skyscraper that everyone can use.
If it succeeds, we may look back on today and say: the real explosion of on-chain finance began when Injective decided to no longer just be a single chain but to become an operating system for a financial universe. This is just the beginning.
