Over the past year, I have clearly sensed a change when chatting with many old friends in the crypto circle: people are asking less about 'where the next Ethereum is' and instead starting to question 'who is the underlying layer that can really run derivatives and institutional funds next.' On the surface, this question seems to be about narrative disputes, but fundamentally, it's still about where the money should go. After so many cycles in the crypto world, there have been countless stories of spot trading multiplying several times, but in reality, only a few tracks can truly accommodate large volumes and leverage demands. The Injective chain is increasingly being researched repeatedly by more and more 'old players' in this context.
If you've used traditional centralized exchanges and then experienced most DeFi on-chain, you'll find a very magical reality: claiming to be 'decentralized finance', yet most products when dealing with derivatives actually perform worse than the old exchanges from a few years ago, with high slippage, large delays, and insufficient depth. Once the market fluctuates a bit, orders can be directly messed up. Injective initially focused on this very specific pain point, positioning itself from the very start as a 'high-performance chain born for derivatives and professional trading', rather than replicating the old path of a general L1.
It has made many subtle yet critical designs at the underlying architecture level, such as a native order book module and good compatibility with existing infrastructure, enabling high-frequency order placement, cancellation, and matching to run smoothly. If you take a look at recent data, it has basically reached the level of a 'mainstream derivative narrative public chain', rather than being one of those air coins that only have stories without substantial trading. Further breaking it down, on-chain protocol trading volume, active addresses, and developer contributions have also shown relatively stable growth over the past few quarters, although it's not the kind of craziness where there's a new high every day, it wins on 'realism'.
An interesting point is that Injective's strategy on user migration paths is very pragmatic but also very useful—rather than requiring you to change your habits, it allows you to move your CEX operation path directly onto the chain. Most front-end interfaces will give you a sense of 'doesn't this feel like some centralized exchange?'. This familiarity lowers the barrier, and combined with self-custody, transparent settlement, and combined strategies, it’s actually not that hard to persuade a group of older players who are increasingly sensitive to security to migrate some of their funds over to try it out.
Of course, the competition is also fierce, with chains in the same lane, Rollups, and modular solutions all vying for this market. To maintain its position, Injective must continuously improve three indicators: first, the richness of tradable assets, which cannot rely solely on a few major assets like BTC and ETH; second, liquidity depth, which directly determines whether large orders dare to enter; third, the number of strategy protocols and structured products in the ecosystem, so that both 'those who can write strategies' and 'those who can only click buttons' can find suitable gameplay on the same chain. There are many detailed tasks involved, which, to put it bluntly, lack glamour, but determine whether it can truly become the 'underlying chain for derivatives veterans' in the next two to three years.
This round of market conditions is still in the brewing stage, and everyone is looking for the next wave of high beta directions. If you are already somewhat aesthetically fatigued by various 'meme + high multiplier stories', it might be worth taking some time to seriously flip through the current ecological distribution of Injective, the top protocol data, and then compare the differences in depth and stability with several centralized exchanges you use daily. You might get an answer that is quite different from most people's. As for whether this answer is valuable, we'll have to wait for the next real big fluctuation to test it.
