Azu, I've been keeping my eyes on Injective for the past two weeks: on one hand, there's the native EVM mainnet that just launched on November 11, which truly realizes the vision of Multi-VM by incorporating EVM and WASM into the same state machine; on the other hand, Pineapple Financial has created a $100 million INJ treasury, with Kraken nodes participating in custody, and institutions like 21Shares and Canary pushing forward ETF applications, community buybacks, and burns around $INJ . This has placed this 'L1 born for finance' directly in the center of Wall Street and institutional asset allocation.
First, let's talk about the technical side of 'rule rewriting.' In the past, if you wanted to do something on Injective, you either had to adapt to CosmWasm or use a rollup form like inEVM for compatibility. Now, the EVM is directly integrated into the core protocol itself: after the launch of the native EVM mainnet, developers can use both EVM and WASM on the same L1, with both VMs sharing the same assets and liquidity pool. It is no longer a second-class citizen structure of 'main chain + subordinate rollup,' nor is it the kind of fragmented experience where you bridge to a side chain. According to official data, on the day the EVM mainnet went live, there were 30–40 dApps and infrastructure launching together, including oracles, cross-chain messaging, settlement, market-making tools, etc., making the development environment a ready-made 'financial technology stack.'
From my own on-chain experience, there are three intuitive feelings about this upgrade. The first is that 'migration costs' have been reduced to an extremely low level: I can directly modify a few parameters of an existing Solidity contract and redeploy it on Injective EVM, with MetaMask and common Ethereum toolchains being essentially plug-and-play, without having to learn a strange SDK. The second is the interaction speed and costs; performing a swap, opening a position, or bridging assets on-chain has confirmation speeds close to real-time, and gas fees are absurdly low, aligning with the 'high-performance L1 designed for finance' experience that Injective has always emphasized. The third is the sense of liquidity aggregation; in the past, cross-chain operations often faced issues like 'this pool is deep, while that pool is shallow'. Now on Injective, EVM dApps and native CosmWasm dApps share the same underlying assets and matching logic, making the paths for cross-product arbitrage and combination strategies significantly smoother.
The technical rules have been revised, and the funding rules are also being rewritten by institutions. Pineapple Financial, a financial technology company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, first announced a $100 million strategy for an Injective digital asset treasury, publicly purchasing nearly $8.9 million of INJ for the first time, with the goal of becoming the largest holder and staker of INJ in the long term. Later, they partnered with Kraken, a well-established exchange, to act as an institutional validator, helping to stake this batch of INJ for profits and collateral, with treasury earnings reinvesting in their mortgage and financial product layouts. Recently, Pineapple also specifically established a digital asset treasury advisory committee, directly inviting three core figures from the Injective Foundation to join the board, effectively binding the on-chain protocol development team with a Wall Street-style asset management desk.
The financial shell around $INJ is also thickening. In addition to Pineapple's corporate treasury, 21Shares has submitted an application for the Injective-themed ETF to U.S. regulators. Previously, the staking-type INJ ETF from Canary entered the formal review period, which means that the traditional financial world will expose Injective to more brokers and compliant accounts in a format familiar to them, such as fund shares. Meanwhile, the Injective community is doing the exact opposite: initiating community buybacks and burns based on on-chain fees and ecological income, burning nearly 6.78 million INJ in the first instance, while the on-chain TVL has also increased by more than a dozen points over the past period, attempting to hedge macro price fluctuations with deflation and real cash flow.
If we pull the perspective back to the 'ordinary people playing DeFi', these few things combined are actually quietly rewriting the rules of the game in which we participate in this chain. For developers, the biggest change is that they no longer need to choose between 'high-performance niche chains' and 'compatibility-friendly EVM chains'; you can directly migrate the main battlefield to Injective, bringing your existing EVM contracts over and then gradually utilizing the performance and cross-ecosystem interoperability benefits brought by its WASM and future SVM. For traders, the native EVM paired with the already robust derivatives infrastructure means that more long-tail assets, RWA, and pre-IPO contracts will appear here first. For example, the pre-IPO perpetual contracts from OpenAI and SpaceX launched in the ecosystem recently have already brought billions in weekly trading volume to the chain, making the narrative of 'on-chain derivatives for traditional financial assets' more tangible.
From the perspective of the scenario, Injective now resembles a financial operating system that combines 'multiple virtual machines + multiple assets + multiple institutions'. On one side is the underlying Multi-VM, connecting environments like EVM, WASM, inEVM, and future SVM, with intercommunication with Ethereum, Solana, and other ecosystems through IBC and cross-chain bridges; on the application layer, AI smart agents, cross-chain market-making, oracles, institutional custody, and other modules are stacked, such as the cross-chain AI Agent Hub built in cooperation with Sonic, embedding AI capabilities like OpenAI into the chain to have robots help you monitor data, capture trends, and execute strategies automatically. For a seasoned DeFi player who is used to manually monitoring and writing scripts, this combination means that in the future, 'strategies + capital + infrastructure' have the opportunity to be consolidated on the same chain, truly forming a closed loop.
From the perspective of being an Azura, if I had to give Injective a label right now, I would say it is upgrading from 'high-performance DeFi public chain' to 'candidate infrastructure for institutional-level finance'. The native EVM at the technical level determines whether this chain can catch the new wave of developer and project migration; at the funding level, ETFs, corporate treasuries, community buybacks, and burns determine $INJ 's chip structure and narrative thickness in the macro cycle. The real risk lies in: once market sentiment reverses, the rhythm of institutional fund inflows and outflows will be amplified, making it difficult for on-chain yields and token prices to always move in the same direction. Players need to be mentally prepared for 'high volatility + deep liquidity'.
Finally, here are some more practical action suggestions. If you are a developer, you can first run your existing Solidity project on the Injective EVM using the testnet or with a small amount, focusing on experiencing the combined effects of toolchains, oracles, and cross-chain communication on this chain, before considering whether to migrate your main deployment. If you are a DeFi player accustomed to contract trading, you can first experience the derivatives, pre-IPO, RWA, and other products in the Injective ecosystem with a small position, feeling the depth and slippage of multiple assets and markets on a single chain, and then decide whether to increase your position based on your risk preference. If you lean more towards long-term allocation, your focus should be on several dimensions: whether the number of EVM ecosystem projects and TVL continues to grow, whether institutions like Pineapple continue to increase positions and treasury strategies, and whether the progress of ETFs and community buybacks and burns can form a stable rhythm of 'on-chain dividends'. All this information can basically be tracked directly on the Injective official website and official X account. Understand the rhythm yourself, then decide whether to engage in short-term speculation or long-term participation.
