Injective (INJ) Price

A chain designed around trading

Injective Labs was founded in 2018 by Eric Chen and Albert Chon and was part of an early Binance Labs incubation programme. The network's mainnet launched in November 2021 using the Cosmos SDK, which allows it to connect with other Cosmos chains through IBC.

Unlike most blockchains, Injective includes a fully on-chain order book as a built-in module. Exchanges and derivatives platforms can tap into shared liquidity instead of building matching engines from scratch. Orders are processed in frequent batch auctions rather than strictly one by one, a design intended to reduce front-running. The chain also supports tokenised real-world assets.

MultiVM and INJ's economics

Injective initially supported smart contracts written for CosmWasm, a WebAssembly environment. In November 2025 it launched a native Ethereum Virtual Machine on mainnet, letting developers deploy Solidity contracts that share the same assets and liquidity as the rest of the chain.

INJ secures the network through staking and is used for governance votes and fees. The initial supply was 100 million INJ, but supply changes over time: staking rewards add new tokens, while a share of fees collected by applications is used to buy and burn INJ through community auctions. The network has adjusted these parameters through governance to make the token more deflationary. Unstaking INJ takes 21 days.

Thinking about INJ as a trader

INJ tends to respond to developments in on-chain derivatives, real-world asset tokenisation and new applications launching on the chain. Burn figures and changes to tokenomics are closely followed by holders.

Its supply is relatively small compared with many layer-1 tokens, which means unit prices are not directly comparable across projects. Stakers also face slashing if the validator they delegate to misbehaves, a risk shared with other proof-of-stake networks.

Frequently asked questions