Six years ago, I was in Goldman Sachs' New York office, staring at dozens of screens, as global asset fluctuations transformed into pulsating numbers. At that time, I felt we had reached the pinnacle of financial technology. Until last year, when I sold my apartment in Manhattan and bet all my savings and reputation on a blockchain startup called Injective. Almost all my former colleagues' first reaction was: 'Are you crazy?'
Leaving the aura of Wall Street takes courage, but seeing the shape of the future requires vision. My choice wasn’t a moment of impulse, but a rational bet made by an old trader after scrutinizing all the 'tables'. What attracted me to Injective was not empty slogans but its precise solution to the three most painful 'diseases' of traditional finance and early DeFi.
First, it rebuilds the scale of trust—from trusting institutions to trusting mathematics.
In traditional finance, trust is built on the prestigious labels of century-old investment banks, layers of audits, and regulatory documents. In the early DeFi world, trust often hung on a line of code from anonymous developers. Injective has found a more elegant path: verifiable neutrality. Its entire chain, from the order book matching engine to the risk clearing module, operates fully open-source and transparently on-chain. It’s like building Goldman Sachs' trading hall, clearing house, and risk control room all with glass walls in Times Square, allowing anyone to walk in and see how each transaction is completed and how each asset is safeguarded. As someone who has come from the 'black box' era, this extreme transparency brings not unease, but a long-lost sense of security. For institutional funds to come in, they do not need to trust my new company; they only need to trust the mathematical logic that has been scrutinized by countless global developers and is automatically executed on Injective.
Second, it provides institutional-level 'weapons' while dismantling exclusive 'walls.'
The competitive advantage of Wall Street is often built on information gaps and tool disparities. High-end derivatives and complex quantitative strategies are games for a few players. What excites me most about Injective is that it 'democratizes' institutional-level trading infrastructure through its native order book protocol and cross-chain derivatives module. My startup is building advanced structured products that were previously only available to hedge funds. On Injective, I don't need to build a potentially crashing trading system from scratch; it has already provided a low-latency, high-throughput infrastructure comparable to traditional exchanges. More importantly, traders anywhere can use these products seamlessly as long as they connect their wallets. This is no longer a zero-sum game but rather creating a huge, liquid pool. We are not dividing a fixed cake; we are making a new cake from vast demands and ideas that previously could not enter the market.
Third, it understands that compliance is not the enemy, but the future's track.
Many crypto projects are terrified of 'compliance,' thinking it contradicts the spirit of decentralization. This is naive. True scaling must dance with the legal framework. The Injective team has demonstrated sophisticated institutional design thinking from the very beginning. Its architecture allows for compliance adaptations for specific markets or assets on a fully decentralized basis, such as incorporating KYC verification modules. This has cleared the biggest psychological and practical barriers for entrepreneurs like me—I know that what I am building is not a temporary tent wandering in the gray area but a robust infrastructure that can exist for ten or twenty years. The massive volume of institutional capital demands this certainty and foresight.
So, I did not escape traditional finance. On the contrary, I came to a more efficient, open, and transparent 'new continent' with all the lessons about risk, liquidity, and scale that I learned from traditional finance. Injective is the fertile land on this new continent, where cities have already been planned, and ports and roads have been built.
In the past, I served the top 1% of clients globally. Today, on Injective, my team and I are building products for the potential 100% of future financial users. From the glass curtain walls of Wall Street to the rows of open-source code forming a free market, this path excites me more than any trade. Because this time, I am betting not on quarterly reports, but on an era where everyone can have financial sovereignty. And Injective is the most solid cornerstone of this era.@Injective #Injective $INJ
