In recent years, observing the narrative of public chains, I often have the illusion of a "renovation market": most general-purpose L1s resemble newly opened residential areas, first leveling the land and roughly paving the roads, then putting up a sign—"anything can be built here," and then expecting developers to gradually fill it with commercial, residential, schools, and shopping malls. You will hear very familiar slogans: general computing, unlimited scalability, GameFi, SocialFi, DeFi can all come. Financial applications are just one of the many "residents" in this narrative.
Injective's path is somewhat the opposite. The official account has always described itself on X as "the only blockchain built for finance," and the technical documentation repeatedly emphasizes: it is not a general-purpose "blank canvas," but a chain that has grown according to the logic of "exchange" from day one—based on Cosmos SDK, PoS consensus, specifically optimized at the underlying level for high-performance order books, derivatives, and capital efficiency. This is why, although it is also L1, Injective resembles a complete set of "already renovated financial districts," rather than a bare piece of land waiting for someone to build on.
On most general-purpose L1s, the core functions of trading, matching, and clearing in the financial world are all 'built by dApps': Uniswap-style AMMs require writing a complete pricing and liquidity curve logic, futures protocols need to rebuild matching, margin, and liquidation engines, options must re-duplicate risk models, and each project must individually connect to oracles, insurance pools, and auction clearings. The chain itself is only responsible for one thing: keeping your accounts. The advantage of this model is that it is sufficiently neutral, allowing anything to stack on top; the downside is that the financial sector is exceptionally complex, and when broken down, each piece requires extremely high performance, stability, and security, yet has been redundantly built countless times.
What Injective is doing is precisely to create these most difficult parts as 'chain-level modules' first. The official documentation states it directly: the exchange module is the heart of the entire Injective chain, implementing a complete centralized limit order book (CLOB) and matching engine at the protocol level, responsible for creating spot, perpetual, futures, and even options markets, as well as order management, transaction matching, and settlement. To prevent the issues of front-running and MEV extraction that are common with traditional order books, it introduces mechanisms similar to 'frequent batch auctions' in its matching logic, reducing the attack surface caused by time priority through batch matching. For developers, this means you no longer need to write an entire matching engine yourself but can directly call the order book and market primitives already provided by the chain, layering your product logic on top.
If the matching engine is the 'trading hall', then the oracle is the 'information big screen'. On Injective, oracles are also not just an accessory of a single dApp but are fundamental modules of the chain itself. The official oracle specifications clearly state: the oracle module is primarily called by the exchange module to obtain external price data; new price source providers must be approved through governance proposals before they can push prices onto the chain. To connect with richer external data, Injective has also integrated Chainlink's OCR module, creating a chain-level facility for the entire Off-Chain Reporting data aggregation logic. This means that when constructing perpetual contracts, futures, and binary options markets that are highly sensitive to price accuracy and update frequency, developers can default to a governance-audited high-quality price channel instead of each project scrambling to find several oracle brands to 'piece together'.
Looking further up, we have derivatives and RWA primitives. Both the official technical articles and research reports from institutions such as 21Shares regard Injective's exchange module as 'one of the biggest innovations': it not only supports traditional crypto spot and perpetual trading but also packages real-world assets such as stocks, gold, and foreign exchange into iAssets to trade within the same matching and margin system. This is why, today on a front end like Helix, you can see Nvidia, Meta, gold XAU, major currency pairs along with BTC, ETH, and INJ all listed on a single order book system, all powered by the same chain-level engine instead of rewriting risk and clearing logic for each asset class.
At this point, the difference between 'general-purpose L1' and 'financial L1' can be translated into a more down-to-earth statement: the former treats the chain as a 'canvas to draw on', with all market structures left to the dApp to solve; the latter first paves the roads, electricity, drainage, schools, and hospitals, even pre-fabricating exchanges, clearinghouses, and information disclosure systems into the city, before inviting developers to build buildings. Injective itself has emphasized in multiple analytical articles that it is not a DEX but a 'Layer-1 specifically designed for order books, derivatives, and capital efficiency', embedding trading engines, oracles, and settlement logic into the execution layer of the protocol.
This design is particularly important for high-frequency trading and complex derivatives. Traditionally, to achieve a CEX-like trading experience on a general-purpose L1, you have to fight several hard battles at once: competing for block space with the infrastructure, competing for oracle bandwidth with other dApps on the same chain, and writing your own set of high-concurrency matching logic while constantly making trade-offs between gas costs and risk control. Injective's approach is to optimize performance and latency at the base layer specifically for financial applications: based on Cosmos SDK + PoS consensus, combined with chain-level performance adjustments, it compresses the block time to about 0.64 seconds and achieves an average transaction fee of around $0.0003. Such latency and cost can truly support the pressure of dense order books, complex margin requirements, and multi-asset RWA combinations.
Another dimension that is often overlooked by many is the execution environment itself. Most general-purpose L1s operate within a single VM, such as fully stacking EVM-compatible ecosystems, while leaving performance issues to Rollups or some form of scaling solution. Injective, on the other hand, chose a more complex financial logic-friendly WASM contract environment, CosmWasm, from the beginning, and later in 2025, launched a native EVM, embedding EVM directly into the core architecture of the chain as part of the MultiVM route, allowing CosmWasm, EVM, and even SVM in the future to run on the same settlement layer. This means for developers, you can enter using familiar Solidity and Ethereum tools, but also write risk control and clearing logic in the core parts where performance and security are needed using Rust/CosmWasm, with assets and states ultimately settling on the same financial L1 instead of being fragmented across multiple Rollups and sidechains.
From a regulatory perspective, what is happening here is a substantial 'institutional migration'. Under the general-purpose L1 model, the chain guarantees only two things: state machine + security; everything else—from the order book, oracles to settlement, clearing, and insurance—relies on the application layer to solve; risks are dispersed across countless contracts and protocols, requiring users to individually study the design and security of each dApp. In the Injective financial L1 model, the chain itself plays the role of 'exchange + clearinghouse + data infrastructure', with pre-fabricated modules unifying matching, price sources, clearing, and margin systems, while dApps innovate more around 'how to package products' and 'how to serve specific demographics'. The rules shift from 'each application builds its own wheels' to 'the chain builds the wheels first, and applications differentiate based on that'.
This will have dramatically different impacts on users in different roles. If you are a developer, the biggest change is the shift in mental burden: previously, you had to switch back and forth between 'first building a set of infrastructure' and 'focusing on the product'; now you can devote more energy to the latter. For instance, you can directly open a high-frequency perpetual market on Injective's exchange module, letting the chain handle matching, matching fairness, and basic risk control, while you focus resources on creating a more refined trading interface, smarter order routing, or designing complex strategy tools for institutions; you can also, based on chain-level RWA primitives and oracles, design cross-asset products that are nearly impossible in the traditional world, such as a structured combination of 'GPU rental prices + a basket of US tech stocks + crypto indexes', without worrying about having to manually maintain the matching, margin, and price sources for every asset.
If you are a heavy trading user or involved in quantitative trading, the focus should not only be on whether 'this chain is fast or cheap', but whether its architecture is inherently suited to you. A direct benefit of the order book as a chain-level module is that all applications share the same depth and matching rules; when you switch between different front ends or migrate funds between different strategies, you won’t be affected by slippage due to each protocol building a thin liquidity pool. Chain-level oracles and RWA primitives mean that when you perform cross-asset hedging or multi-leg arbitrage, the underlying data and settlement logic consistency are far superior to an environment where 'each protocol connects to several oracles, each with its own clearing logic', making the predictability of strategy execution and safety boundaries much clearer.
If you are an institution or a more traditional asset manager, the thinking space provided by Injective’s financial L1 focuses directly on 'how to move the asset table onto the chain'. You don’t have to understand from scratch what AMM is, what DeFi Lego is, but can see it as a pre-fabricated financial backbone for exchanges, clearinghouses, and digital asset vaults: there are already order books, oracles, margin systems, RWA primitives, and multi-VM execution environments, turning the problem into 'whether I am willing to and how to map my assets and business logic onto this chain'.
From the perspective of a stakeholder, if I were to give more practical action advice for the 'general-purpose L1 vs financial L1' comparison, it would probably be three points. First, don't just focus on marketing slogans; look at the real designs of chain-level modules: check out Injective's exchange, oracle module specifications, and MultiVM documentation to understand how order books, margins, and oracles are integrated at the protocol level, then compare with those 'chains that want to do everything', and ask yourself a simple question—if you want to create a derivatives market with daily trading volumes in the hundreds of millions, which architecture would you choose to bear the risk? Second, as a trading user, you can deliberately conduct a small experiment of 'same strategy, multi-chain experience': using the same position structure, run for a period on both general-purpose L1 DEXs and Injective's order book, comparing execution quality, capital utilization efficiency, and strategy implementation complexity, rather than just looking at one-time gas costs. Third, if your team is discussing 'whether to do RWA' or 'whether to create an on-chain treasury', consider adding Injective's financial L1 to the candidate list and try to map out a 'on-chain version' of the balance sheet using asset tables, risk exposures, and business needs, to see if this chain can help you open up more channels, rather than just watching token prices fluctuate.
In the end, it's still that old saying: public chains built specifically for finance, and those that want to do everything, differ fundamentally not in who tells a bigger story, but in who really sinks the most difficult and fragile parts of the infrastructure to the bottom layer. How far Injective will go on this path still needs time to validate; for us participants, what's truly important is to learn to understand the changes in rules behind these architectural differences, and then decide whether or how to participate.
