Injective Protocol Launches Into Mainnet With $120 Million Incentives Program

Injective Protocol, the crypto industry’s first layer-2 decentralized exchange protocol for decentralized derivatives, has launched into its final, canonical mainnet.

Injective Protocol has been around for over a year now, with a Solstice testnet phase that stretched back to its early days in mid-2020. Since then, the protocol has grown to a fully-fledged decentralized platform, supported through investments from luminaries in the crypto world, including Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal, Pantera Capital’s Joey Krug, BoxOne Venture’s Josh Felker, and serial crypto investor Mark Cuban. The protocol is also backed by Binance, Blocktower, Hashed, QCP Capital, Bitlink Capital, and Figment, among others.

The Injective Protocol mainnet launch was accompanied by the rollout of Astro, a $120 million incentives program, aimed at widening its user base further and is targeted to run over the course of five years. Astro will help Injective Protocol attract new market makers and provide traders with rebates on fees from using the platform.

Injective Protocol is one of a  few DeFi projects that offer a one size fits all approach to financial instruments, providing access to a host of cryptocurrencies. Currently, however, the protocol offers five tradable assets in the form of Injective’s native token, $INJ, Wrapped Ethereum ($wETH), Bitcoin ($BTC), Chainlink ($LINK), and Axie Infinity’s $AXS. Access to trading synthetic assets such as tokenized stocks and gold is also being considered by Injective Labs, the team behind the protocol.

According to Mirza Uddin, Injective Protocol’s head of business development, the community of INJ token holders will be deliberating on listings for ETH, INJ, and BNB perpetuals, a voting phase that would occur within the month of November.

"Moving forward, the idea will be to have every single market listed on Injective including low-cap [and] mid-cap [altcoins] as well as synthetic assets,” Uddin adds.

Earlier in May, CryptoDaily covered the launch of Injective Protocol’s first incubated project, Burnt Finance. This event followed a $10 million Series A fundraising round in April, which attracted its primary investors, who have been attracted to the project because of its similarity to Robinhood, a popular trading platform that also offers access to crypto.

In December 2020, Injective announced that it would launch top stocks like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others on its Solstice testnet. In April, the project raised $10 million from investors like Mark Cuban and Pantera Capital to continue building out its decentralized version of the popular trading platform Robinhood, except that it operates with the core aspects of DeFi baked into its design.

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