Recently, in the ecosystem, whenever the public chain "really working hard" is mentioned, Injective is basically always on the list. The native EVM officially launched on November 11 and within just a few days, the mainnet EVM completed over a million transactions, and during the testnet phase, it accumulated over 5 billion transactions and 300,000 addresses. Given the current cooling period, this scale is already quite eye-catching. For someone like me, who has been closely monitoring on-chain data, this means one thing: it's not just the officials shouting "MultiVM, EVM is great", but there is indeed a group of real users and scripts that have started to treat it as their main battlefield.
I have been experiencing it in the simplest yet most intuitive way over the past two weeks—connecting MetaMask directly to the Injective native EVM, importing the wallets I used in the Hub, and then trying out several DeFi protocols that have just migrated. The signature paths, contract interactions are almost identical to Ethereum, but the confirmation time is clearly faster, gas fees can be largely ignored, and placing orders, canceling orders, and on-chain queries are all very smooth. When I looked back at the news, I realized that Injective this time is not just 'adding a compatibility layer and calling it EVM', but has written the native EVM into the core protocol, with WASM and EVM running on the same chain under the same consensus, allowing assets and liquidity to be completely shared. This is also why it can simultaneously handle traffic from more than thirty, even forty dApps and infrastructure right from the start.
For developers, the benefits brought by this design are more direct. In the past, many friends complained to me that creating a somewhat complex strategy protocol on Ethereum, from assembling contracts to developing the front end, integrating oracles, and pulling liquidity, would take at least several months to start. Moreover, cross-chain and cross-asset would be even more of a hassle. This time, Injective has fixed the path on the Build page: the MultiVM layer has already provided a high-performance execution environment, an open matching engine, cross-chain asset channels, and oracles. The official team has also set up an ecological fund of 150 million USD, willing to invest specifically in teams building on this chain. You will feel that it is not competing for the concept of being the 'first EVM chain', but is clearly aiming for the position of 'the chain most suitable for financial dApps'.
What truly lowers the threshold is actually iBuild. When Injective officially released this no-code AI platform on November 5, my first reaction was 'another no-code marketing term', but after seeing the details and getting hands-on, I felt it was somewhat beyond expectations. iBuild itself is a native application running on the Injective MultiVM architecture, allowing users to create financial dApps like lending protocols, yield vaults, RWA issuance tools, etc., using natural language or drag-and-drop modules. The underlying contract generation, deployment, and parameter tuning are all handled by AI and scripts, which traditionally would have taken a small team months to complete. The official statement says that now one person can produce a prototype in minutes, and this has been amplified in various media and analysis articles.
From my actual experience, the core value of iBuild lies not in 'helping you drag a simple page', but in fully leveraging Injective's own advantages: all financial logic can directly call the chain's native matching engine, RWA modules, cross-chain bridges, and asset management components, rather than creating a no-code toy that barely connects to an off-chain database. When configuring yield strategies or capital flow paths, the thought process is about 'how to split this TVL', rather than 'which table does this field correspond to'. Coupled with the slogan given by the official on Twitter—'Think it through ▶️ Type it out ▶️ iBuild generates ▶️ One-click deploy', it indeed aligns well with the heat of media coverage surrounding iBuild.
At the same time, the drama at the institutional level is increasingly vibrant. In September, Pineapple raised 100 million USD through a private placement, specifically to create a treasury of digital assets related to Injective, becoming the first publicly listed company to include INJ in its balance sheet on a national-level exchange; in October, it purchased over 670,000 INJ in the open market, worth nearly 8.9 million USD, and clearly stated that it aims to become 'one of the largest holders and nodes of INJ' through continued buying and staking; to ensure that this treasury is both compliant and efficient, they have introduced Crypto.com for custody and staking solutions, and then made Kraken the core validation node to provide security and returns for this part of INJ.
Just yesterday, Pineapple solidified this cooperation through a new move—establishing the Digital Asset Treasury Advisory Committee, with the first batch of advisors directly invited three core members from the Injective Foundation: co-founder and CEO Eric Chen, business development head Mirza Uddin, and institutional liaison Cooper Emmons. The official disclosure is very clear about the committee's mission: based on Injective's technology roadmap and DeFi development direction, help Pineapple plan the future on-chain allocation of this 100 million USD treasury over the next few years, discussing everything from staking, RWA to structured mortgage products. For on-chain observers like me, this is somewhat like a 'long-term option' on Injective granted by the real world: if Pineapple wants to truly move traditional assets like mortgages and real estate onto the chain, it must ensure that the technology, governance, and ecology of this chain remain healthy continuously, and this binding of interests is far more significant than a one-time purchase of tokens or short-term marketing.
From a developer's perspective, I see an entry point that has been systematically reconstructed. The native EVM allows you to develop directly without changing the toolchain, MultiVM ensures that assets and liquidity are not fragmented, and iBuild transforms many financial ideas that 'want to be done but lack resources' into rapidly testable prototype platforms, backed by a 150 million USD ecological fund and an increasing number of institutions like Pineapple ready to act as long-term LPs. For ordinary users, these abstract concepts will ultimately translate into a very concrete experience: the next time you open a new dApp on Injective, it is likely to be an MVP created by a team using iBuild, supported by the ecological fund, integrated with institutional-level liquidity and real-world assets, and then you can participate with an EVM wallet, with every operation contributing to real fees and protocol revenue on the chain.
If I were to wrap it up in Azou's own words, I would understand the current Injective as a 'multi-layer dividend chain': at the bottom layer are the speed, cost, and compatibility dividends brought by the native EVM and MultiVM; the middle layer is the efficiency dividends brought to developers and teams by tools like iBuild; and the top layer is the trust dividends built up by institutions like Pineapple using a 100 million USD treasury, advisory committee, and compliant custody. The combined force of these three dimensions allows this chain to maintain its heat and construction pace even when the market is not particularly crazy. If you still regard Injective as 'just another derivative public chain', you may really be underestimating it—now it feels more like witnessing an infrastructure specifically designed for finance, completing a comprehensive 'version update' from the underlying code, development path, to institutional capital.
