In recent years, whenever I look at project announcements, I subconsciously categorize them into two types: one is the 'crypto price narrative,' discussing what new trading pairs have been launched and what incentive programs have been initiated; the other is the 'balance sheet narrative,' talking about who has staked how much real money on a particular chain or asset. Injective has recently combined these two narratives: on one side is SBET, this on-chain Digital Asset Treasury (DAT), which moves a company’s tens of billions of Ethereum reserves entirely on-chain; on the other side, Pineapple Financial has raised $100 million for the INJ treasury, planned ETFs, and integrated native EVM and MultiVM visions, binding the entire company’s asset sheet and business logic directly to the Injective chain.
If this is seen merely as 'institutions are buying INJ', it is somewhat of a waste. What is more interesting is that the rules themselves are changing: company treasuries are transforming from 'passively storing money' to 'programmable assets', and the asset table is evolving from a few lines of numbers in Excel to a financial foundation that anyone can query, trade, stake, and compose on-chain. The operating system behind this is precisely what Injective aims to achieve.
Let's start with SBET. Injective announced in July 2025 that it had tokenized SharpLink Gaming's Ethereum treasury, making it the world's first on-chain Digital Asset Treasury called SBET. The underlying asset is an ETH treasury exceeding $1 billion, fully staked and earning interest, which superficially resembles a stock or token, but essentially is a 'share certificate of the company's asset reserves', while also being a programmable asset that can be traded 24/7, staked, and used as a base for derivatives. SBET is built on Injective's iAssets framework, which inherently carries 'composability': it can be traded on Helix, used as collateral in DeFi protocols, and packaged into structured products or index components, rather than just sitting quietly on the company’s books waiting for the finance department to adjust the portfolio each quarter.
This is a completely different paradigm from traditional company treasuries. In the old world, when a listed company makes treasury allocations, it usually shuffles between US dollar cash, short-term US Treasury bonds, money market funds, and a small amount of high-grade credit bonds: returns are stable, volatility is controllable, but liquidity is wrapped up by layers of 'business hours', 'intermediaries', and 'settlement cycles'. If you want to do something with this money, you either go through internal approval processes or structure a product for external investors through brokers, resulting in lack of transparency, high barriers, and low efficiency. Most of the time, the tasks of this money are just three things: preserve capital, slightly outperform inflation, and avoid problems.
On Injective, the SBET DAT has fragmented these layers. At the asset level, it is still 1:1 exposed to SharpLink's ETH position, with yields coming from price changes in ETH itself and staking yields; at the market level, it has 24/7 secondary liquidity, with prices being continuously discovered on-chain; at the credit and leverage level, it can be used as collateral in the lending market and can also integrate into derivatives protocols, becoming a base for interest rate, volatility, or spread trading; at the compositional level, it can also be packaged into ETFs or indices, even layered with other RWAs, forming a basket of assets together with gold, foreign exchange, and government bonds. For the first time, a company treasury is not just a 'result' but a financial primitive that can be utilized multiple times.
From the perspective of the enterprise, this change is very specific. Taking a company heavily invested in Ethereum as an example, in the past, to let shareholders understand 'we have this much ETH on the balance sheet', you could basically only explain it through a few lines in the quarterly financial report and occasional investor meetings. Now, with Injective's iAssets module, you can store this ETH treasury as a DAT, cut it into tradable shares on-chain, allowing the secondary market to provide a real-time pricing for the 'company treasury strategy'. Financial strategies have transformed from an invisible, intangible internal decision into a public asset that can be tracked, traded, and even hedged. This is the first layer of meaning behind 'moving the company asset table on-chain': a systemic upgrade in transparency and liquidity.
The second layer of change is that the 'production relationship' of the treasury itself has changed. In the traditional world, the money in the treasury is a company's 'static safety cushion', and its responsibility is to survive with the lowest risk; the place where the company truly creates value is in the business line. Under the DAT model like SBET, the treasury itself is also continuously working: ETH staked brings on-chain yields, which can flow back to the company or be redistributed through dividends, buybacks, long-term investments, etc.; the DAT token itself is traded on-chain and used as collateral, continuously directing new liquidity and leverage towards this treasury asset. In simple terms, assets no longer just 'work' internally within the company, but are also 'working a second job' in the DeFi world.
Injective After this road was successfully run, it quickly welcomed the second heavyweight case: Pineapple Financial, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, announced the raising of $100 million to specifically implement a Digital Asset Treasury strategy based on INJ, becoming the first company to publicly disclose its holdings of INJ on a national exchange. This company is not here to 'hoard coins for appreciation' but to use INJ as the infrastructure for its business — what they aim to do is bring the mortgage business on-chain, rewriting the logic of collateral, profit distribution, and risk management using Injective's financial infrastructure.
More critically, this $100 million INJ treasury itself is not static. Pineapple is simultaneously buying INJ in batches on the public market and completing custody and native staking through licensed custodians like Crypto.com, using this locked-up, continuously generating yield INJ in on-chain financial scenarios: it can provide a safety margin for future mortgage products while also feeding back some profits to shareholders or using it for further capital expansion. Traditional exchanges like Kraken are also participating as validator nodes, specifically providing institutional-grade staking infrastructure for this INJ treasury. From an asset perspective, this is a 'corporate treasury = equity assets + staking yields + business synergy' three-in-one structure.
When you look at the ETH treasury DAT like SBET alongside Pineapple's INJ treasury, you'll find an interesting comparison: the former is more like 'activating the crypto reserves that the company already has', while the latter is 'actively building a treasury around the chains it will use in the future'. Behind these two paths actually corresponds to the same set of rule changes. First, the company asset table is no longer limited to fiat currency and traditional financial instruments but can be significantly exposed to on-chain native assets while maintaining transparency, auditability, and composability through the form of DAT; second, the asset side and the business side are no longer separated, and companies can choose to unify 'the rails their business will take' and 'the assets held by the treasury' on the same chain, such as Pineapple tying together its INJ treasury, future mortgage products, and Injective's financial infrastructure; third, market participants can no longer only bet on a company's asset strategy through buying stocks and looking at financial reports, but can directly trade its DAT shares on-chain and even layer their own leverage and hedging in DeFi.
Looking at Injective's other actions now makes more sense overall: on one side, iAssets is bringing SBET-type DATs, stocks like Nvidia, Meta, Robinhood, and assets like gold, silver, and foreign exchange on-chain, while on the other side, in the U.S. market, it is working with Canary Capital to promote the application for INJ ETFs with staking yields, providing compliant entry points for institutional funds. Coupled with the launch of the native EVM and the MultiVM architecture, the entire chain is being transformed into a one-stop environment for 'asset on-chain + programmable finance'. You will realize that what Injective aims to do is not to create 'another DeFi public chain', but to provide enterprises, institutions, and developers with a financial operating system that can directly interface with asset tables, reports, and product lines.
For ordinary users, this may sound a bit 'distant', but the impact will gradually seep into the daily decisions of every participant. The most intuitive aspect is the asset allocation logic: Previously, when we talked about allocating crypto, it was more about choosing between 'Bitcoin, Ethereum, platform coins, and a bit of leading DeFi'. Now, there will be an additional category of assets — DAT, on-chain stocks, on-chain gold, which are 'backed by real assets and have on-chain composability'. Their risk-return characteristics are between traditional assets and pure crypto assets. For example, SBET follows the performance of the ETH treasury and has variables related to company operations and on-chain liquidity, while Pineapple's INJ treasury simultaneously affects stock prices, the INJ market, and the DeFi ecosystem. If you only look at the 'price K-line', you might feel there's a lot of noise; but if you treat it as a 'visual chart of the company treasury strategy', you'll see another layer.
Of course, the change in rules does not mean that risks are eliminated; in fact, in some aspects, risks are amplified. The backing of on-chain DAT comes from the underlying assets and the issuer. If the company changes its treasury strategy, reduces holdings, or reallocates, these will directly reflect in the price of the DAT and on-chain data. By moving the asset table on-chain, a company enjoys liquidity, transparency, and compositional efficiency but must also accept the pressure of 'being evaluated by the market in real-time'. For retail investors, participating in these assets requires understanding not just on-chain operations but also company cash flows, financial reports, governance structures, and compliance risks, which have actually raised the barriers. In other words, 'programmable treasury' does not bring risk-free returns but creates a more refined, transparent, and also more ruthless financial environment.
If I were to give some action advice from the perspective of Azou, I would break it down like this. First, if you are in finance or strategy within a company, it would be wise to seriously examine the entire link of SBET and Pineapple's INJ treasury: where the assets come from, how they are tokenized, who is doing custody and staking, what protocols on-chain are using these assets, and where the yields and risks lie. Even if you do not plan to move your treasury on-chain for now, you can still mentally construct a 'DAT version of the company asset table' to think about which assets have the potential to become programmable treasuries. Second, if you are a DeFi player, you can select one or two projects and try to switch from 'just watching prices' to the perspective of 'looking at the asset table + on-chain usage': observe changes in the underlying assets of DAT like SBET, the distribution of on-chain holdings, collateral usage, and compare them with purely meme or narrative coins. You will intuitively feel the differences in asset quality and funding behavior. Third, if you are a participant wanting to follow the Injective chain long-term, you can treat 'putting the company asset table on-chain' as a long-term main line, focusing on several key data points: total scale of DAT assets, the size of institutional treasuries like Pineapple, on-chain and off-chain flows related to INJ staking and ETFs, and combining this with the continuously emerging DeFi applications on the native EVM to see if this chain is truly taking on more and more 'real assets' and 'real cash flows'. Finally, regardless of which type of person you are, do not forget the old adage: all these discussions are observations of new financial infrastructure, not buy or sell advice for any single asset. Before making decisions, one must return to their own asset table and risk tolerance.
