Last winter, I was staring at the order confirmation interface on the trading platform, watching that $2000 transaction fee, suddenly realizing: in the traditional financial world, we are not trading, but paying a "faith tax" to the system.
I once worked as a derivatives trader at an investment bank, handling millions of dollars in orders every day. We were taught to trust this system: trust that custodial banks wouldn't misappropriate client assets, trust that clearinghouses would settle on time, trust that brokers would execute orders faithfully. These "trusts" ultimately turned into lines of fees on the client's bill.
When I completed my first derivatives trade on Injective, the total cost was less than 3 cents, the confirmation time was 0.6 seconds, and I could verify the flow of every fund on-chain in real-time. I felt a strange sense of loss—after all those years of paying 'faith tax', most of it was unnecessary.
01 From 'waiting for confirmation' to 'seeing execution': when trading is no longer a gamble
In traditional financial markets, what you often see after placing an order is just a line saying 'submitted'. The rest relies entirely on faith:
Trust that your order has not been swallowed by dark pools.
Trust that the exchange does not share your strategy with market makers.
Trust that the liquidation process will not kick you out during market volatility.
At Injective, my first perpetual contract order was created, and the entire process from placing the order to execution and margin settlement was as clear as fish in a transparent fish tank. Every flow of funds, every price update, and every position change can be tracked in real-time on the block explorer.
What’s even more surprising is the execution speed—0.64 seconds for confirmation, almost indistinguishable from centralized exchanges. And the gas fee? $0.00008, even lower than the tip for my daily coffee.
This reminds me of my time in investment banking when, during periods of market volatility, the trading floor would fall into a collective anxiety: did our orders actually go through? Would we miss the best price due to queuing? Now, these questions have disappeared on Injective. When trading no longer requires 'faith', you can truly focus on the strategy itself.
02 Not a 'Ethereum killer', but a 'financial exclusive space': the power of focus
Many people ask me why I left the Ethereum ecosystem for Injective. My answer is simple: when you want to drive a race car, you don’t choose a 'universal vehicle' that can carry cargo, go off-road, and also serve as a motorhome.
Injective does not attempt to be a 'do-all' public chain, but focuses on one thing: becoming the best vessel for on-chain finance.
Native on-chain order book: no longer just a function of a DApp, but the infrastructure at the protocol layer.
Anti-MEV design: reduces frontrunning and sandwich attacks through frequent batch auction (FBA) mechanisms.
Multi-VM architecture: simultaneously supports Cosmos ecosystem and EVM developers without compromising familiarity and performance.
As a former Solidity developer, what I appreciate most is Injective's respect for developers—it does not require you to abandon familiar tools and relearn, but allows you to write code with familiar Solidity while enjoying Cosmos-level performance. This 'wanting both' design philosophy makes migration exceptionally smooth.
03 From 'creating products' to 'creating markets': ordinary people can also be financial architects
What has most disrupted my perception is the low threshold for 'creating financial products' on Injective.
I remember last month, a few community members and I created a perpetual contract tracking the AI index in just three days. The process was surprisingly simple:
Through Injective's developer documentation, understand the core parameter settings.
Define the underlying asset portfolio (weighted average of several AI-related tokens).
Configure oracle data sources (directly use existing services within the ecosystem).
Repeatedly verify performance under extreme market conditions on the testnet.
Deploy to the mainnet; the entire process costs less than $1 in gas fees.
The next day, this contract had already exceeded $30,000 in daily trading volume. A trader from the Philippines even messaged me saying that this product helped him capture the volatility opportunities in the AI sector, which he could only achieve through complex cross-platform operations before.
In the traditional financial world, this is unimaginable—creating a financial derivative usually requires months of compliance processes, tens of thousands of dollars in startup capital, and a full legal and technical team. Yet on Injective, with two weekends of spare time, a laptop, and less than $100, anyone in the world can access your financial ideas.
04 The temperature of finance: when the system begins to 'understand' the human rhythm.
Technical parameters are easy to replicate, but what Injective truly finds difficult to imitate is its understanding of 'people'.
Optimizing gas fees is not just about having good-looking numbers, but making small transactions economically viable.
EVM compatibility is not just a technical choice, but a respect for developers' habits and historical investments.
On-chain order books are not just functional implementations, but are designed to solve the long-standing problem of liquidity fragmentation in DeFi.
Even the economic model of the INJ token reveals a kind of restrained wisdom: through a regular burn mechanism, it links token value to network usage, rather than relying on speculation and hype. This reminds me of a core developer of Injective who said: 'We are not building a casino; we are designing a financial system that people will truly use in the future.'
This perhaps explains why the community atmosphere of Injective is so different—few discuss 'how much will the price rise tomorrow'; more people discuss 'how to optimize this derivative structure', 'how to provide better access for emerging market users', 'how to make oracle data more accurate'. When an ecosystem starts to focus on problems rather than prices, it is already on the right path.
05 The future of finance will not be born in conference rooms, but from the keyboards of global developers.
Last week, I participated in an online hackathon for Injective. A developer from Kenya demonstrated how to build a price hedging tool for agricultural products using Injective, helping local farmers avoid market volatility risks. A trader from Brazil shared how he created a stablecoin derivative that tracks local inflation. These are not grand plans from large institutions, but attempts by ordinary people to solve real problems around them.
At that moment, I understood Injective's true value: it does not attempt to 'disrupt' traditional finance, but provides low-friction soil for financial innovation. Here, innovation is not driven by slogans and PPTs, but by code and rapid iteration based on real user feedback.
The financial system built by Wall Street over a century is full of wisdom, but it also bears historical burdens. On-chain financial infrastructure like Injective has the opportunity to start from scratch and rethink: what kind of financial system truly serves people, rather than forcing people to adapt to the system?
When I look at the transparent, efficient, and low-cost financial interactions in my account, I don’t feel a victory of technology, but a return—a return to the essential value of finance: to let resources flow efficiently, to allocate risks reasonably, and to share opportunities fairly.
Perhaps the future financial history will record it this way: while traditional finance is still debating the regulatory framework, real change has quietly occurred on the keyboards of global developers during ordinary weekends. And Injective is one of the stages of this silent revolution.
On this stage, you don’t need to be Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley to innovate; you just need an idea, a bit of coding ability, and a daring weekend afternoon to try. And this may be the truest form of financial democratization.
