#InjectiveBehind the block times and throughput numbers of Injective there is a quieter system that decides how value moves between users, validators, and the protocol itself. That system is the $INJ token economy. On the surface INJ is used for gas, staking, and governance. Validators stake it to secure the chain, users spend it to pay fees, and holders can vote on protocol parameters and upgrades. Underneath that, recent upgrades have turned INJ into a kind of programmable monetary engine that responds to actual usage rather than following a fixed script.
The most visible part of this engine is the weekly burn auction. Instead of simply burning a slice of every fee, Injective collects protocol fees from exchanges and other applications into a basket that can contain many different assets. Once a week, participants bid for this basket using $INJ . The highest bidder receives the assets, and the INJ they spend is permanently removed from circulation. Historically a large share of fees from trading dapps has flowed into this mechanism, and with the two point zero and later upgrades, any application on the network can choose to direct a portion or even all of its collected fees into the auction. The result is that deflationary pressure scales with economic activity. When usage is low, fewer fees accumulate, so the auctions tend to burn less INJ. When volumes and ecosystem revenue grow, more value is routed into the basket, and bidders often commit more tokens to win it, driving higher burns.
On the other side of the ledger the mint module introduces new $INJ as staking rewards, but here again the rules are dynamic rather than static. With the I N J 3.0 upgrade, which passed through governance in April twenty twenty four under proposal I I P three nine two, the community approved a new schedule that tightens the long term inflation corridor and makes the supply rate much more sensitive to how much INJ is actually bonded. In simple language the protocol looks at the share of total INJ that is staked, compares it to a target level,
