I was twenty-nine, broke, and living off instant noodles in a shoebox apartment in Lisbon when I first felt Injective save me.
It was one of those nights where everything in crypto felt rigged. I’d spent three hours researching a small altcoin, convinced myself the chart was ready to run, put in what was left of my rent money, and watched the price dump the second my transaction landed. Front-run. Again. Gas fees had taken another bite on the way in and would take another on the way out. I closed the laptop, lay on the floor, and just stared at the ceiling fan spinning like it was mocking me. “This isn’t freedom,” I remember whispering out loud. “This is the same casino with worse lighting.”
A couple of days later I was doom-scrolling Twitter at 3 a.m. (classic) and saw a screenshot someone posted: a perpetual trade on something called Helix that confirmed in 0.4 seconds and cost $0.0007 in fees. No gas. No MEV. No sandwich. The caption was simple: “Injective just works.”
I laughed, bitter and tired, because I’d heard that line a hundred times. But I clicked anyway.
That was the night I fell in love, quietly and completely.
The story behind it is almost stupidly human. Two kids—Eric Chen and Albert Chon—still in college or freshly out—looked at the mess we’d made of DeFi and said, “Let’s build the chain we actually want to use.” Not the fastest, not the cheapest in a headline, but the fairest. They wanted a place where a broke trader in Portugal and a hedge fund in Singapore stood on the exact same footing. No special RPC endpoints, no paid priority, no secret handshakes.
They picked Cosmos tools because those tools let chains talk to each other without middlemen. They picked Tendermint because it settles in under a second and doesn’t guzzle electricity like a data center on fire. They built a real, honest-to-god orderbook on-chain and then hid your orders until the auction closed so nobody could cheat. Every single decision felt like someone had been in my shoes, felt that same stomach-drop of being gamed, and decided, “Not here. Not on our chain.”
I started small. Fifty bucks in INJ, staked it, forgot about it. A month later the rewards had paid for groceries. Six months later the burns were eating supply faster than new tokens could ever dream of coming in, and I realized I wasn’t just using a blockchain—I was part of something that was slowly, stubbornly getting rarer because people like me were actually using it.
There are nights I still can’t sleep because I’m afraid it’s too good to be true. A bridge could get hacked tomorrow. Regulators could wake up cranky. A bigger chain could copy the homework and win the popularity contest. INJ could crash 70 % on a random Tuesday because that’s what crypto does. I know all the risks by heart; I recite them like prayers when the charts go red.
But then I open the app, place a limit order, watch it fill instantly for pennies, and feel that same unclenching in my chest I felt years ago in Lisbon. I think about the kid in Nigeria who just hedged his first forex position without a bank account. I think about the single mom in Manila who’s earning 16 % staking rewards that pay her kid’s school fees. I think about Eric and Albert, still in their twenties, still shipping code like the world depends on it.
And suddenly the fear feels smaller than the gratitude.
We’re not there yet. The TVL is still tiny compared to the giants, the marketing is still quiet, half the crypto world still hasn’t heard the name. But every week a few more people stumble in the way I did—burned out, skeptical, a little bit broken—and something here hugs them back to life.
If it becomes what I think it can become, we’re going to look back on these years the way people look back on the early internet: clunky, chaotic, full of scams and hope in equal measure, but quietly laying wires that rerouted the whole world.
I don’t know what the price will be next month. I just know that for the first time in years, when I send a trade, I don’t feel alone on the other side of the screen. There’s a chain that remembers why we started this in the first place.
And honestly? That’s more than enough to keep me here, staking, trading, believing—noodles long forgotten, heart wide open.
#injective @Injective #Injective $INJ
