While a substantial amount has already been written about NFTs, this short and exploratory “article” seeks to introduce a creative way of imagining NFTs by taking them out of their current categorization of tokenized assets ( i.e. existing exclusively to serve as exchange and tracking mechanisms for rare and marketable assets).

Instead of thinking ( read: obsessing ) about digital, bored apes, I am asking you to imagine an exceptional city in the far-flung future: the year is 2024 (because with all the alot-of-ness happening in the present, even 2024 feels like the far-flung future…) and the city is New York City ( obviously ).

Below we will review a master use-case in its entirety, albeit we will do it in an expeditious manner. First, the important stuff:

(1) The goal of this ( very ) high-level walkthrough of the master use-case is to shed the light on NFTs as “instruments of finance”, rather than elaborate on how they are currently framed as financial instruments.

(2) The below master use case is my own personal, innovative, and creative ideation based on my work with the underlying technologies ( e.g. crypto, smart contracts, etc … )

(3) This walk-through is brief by design, and should be relatively easy to follow along.

(4) This written ideation is by no means a road-map to implementation, but rather a fun and curious speculation on what the future may hold.

Let’s get started.

Master Use Case: New York City has widely adopted the use of NFTs in order to help manage and distribute some of the perks that come with being a New Yorker. The new slogan for their NFT programme is, “8 Million New Yorkers. NFTs for all of us!” The city has released the following graphic to facilitate programme adoption by New Yorkers.

In the above graphic we encounter a couple of scenarios were a, previously verified, user has access to a city sponsored dApp, and funded crypto wallet. The dApp allows the user to buy a tiered travel package at a give price-point; based on what package the user selects, they are awarded certain perks. All of this information is stored in a smart-contract and on the block chain.

What makes this NFT unique is that the underlying assets are the value of the transportation package and the associated perks. A draw-down on both, the package value and any available perks, is recorded with each usage ( i.e. when the user rides the subway the value of the package is drawn on and thus decreases; the same is true when the user claims or transfers a perk ). Perks may expire if not used, and both the balance of the package and perks are transferable to another verified user. (It’s important to note here that user verification and onboarding ( or KYC as we affectionately refer to it in certain circles ) needs to be both timely, efficient, accurate, intuitive, and have the proper mechanisms in place to guarantee user data security — phew!

“What is the purpose of this approach?” You ask. “This just seems like another speculative waste of technology and resources”, you say? Well, that’s one way to look at it, and perhaps it is wasteful from the perspective of the moment that this little article is being written. However, I ask you to look at an even more outrageously far-flung future: the third quarter of 2024.

Let’s imagine that by this time the city of New York has successfully adopted the above model via the leveraging of their already existing NYS Excelsior Pass and the fruits of this good decision are already being seen. What can some of these benefits look like? — Glad you asked:

(a) The early adoption of crypto-hybrid smart contracts by city residents and eligible visitors, via already existing technology infrastructure

(b) The development of a sustainable micro-economy relevant to what the city and state can produce and based on the needs of its people and businesses

(c) An upgrade on the coolness factor of the city — as if we needed it — by serving as a master model for a sustainable, distribution platform for the “e-conomy” of the Americas.

Thanks for reading and happy to hear your thoughts!

1

@gladiator__123

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https://twitter.com/gladiator__123/status/1384525483661008897

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https://twitter.com/LottoFinance/status/1383504894691184654?s=19

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https://twitter.com/kayn83893588/status/1385693697531056133

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https://twitter.com/bitflippin/status/1384963755759521795

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https://twitter.com/papahaliff/status/1385580854051688448?s=19

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https://twitter.com/AirdropPilihan/status/1384416419014602753

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https://twitter.com/OpahKehed/status/1385559804169490438?s=19

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https://www.reddit.com/r/SatoshiStreetBets/comments/mn6mqj/when_you_win_the_lotto_token_lottery/

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https://www.reddit.com/user/Bjaydugso/comments/mnyv5m/meme_lotto/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

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https://www.reddit.com/r/LottoFinance/comments/muwoti/lotto_meme_entry_before_and_after_claim_your_free/

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https://www.reddit.com/r/LottoFinance/comments/mwui5y/my_meme_entry_you_must_watch_it/

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https://boards.4channel.org/gd/thread/410703

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https://boards.4channel.org/biz/thread/33670142

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https://boards.4channel.org/gd/thread/410702

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https://boards.4chan.org/biz/thread/33654588

Follow the LOTTO social media channels to stay up-to-date on new developments, winners, and more:

Website: lotto.finance

Claim LOTTO: lotto.finance/claim

Telegram: https://t.me/LottoFinance

LOTTO Results Telegram: https://t.me/lottoresults

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LottoFinance

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lottofinance

Medium: https://medium.com/lottofinance

Discord: https://discord.gg/6PujUsrJkD

Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0xb0dfd28d3cf7a5897c694904ace292539242f858

Element Finance provides a trustless and permissionless market to trade interest rates. Element’s markets leverage custom Balancer pools to trade the yield on certain whitelisted Yearn vaults. These vaults include base assets such as DAI and USDC as well as more exotic ones such as stETH, MIM-3POOL and Curve’s TriCrypto. Users can interact with Element Finance in a couple ways, the most straight forward of which is simply buying assets at fixed rates via the Element dAPP. These principal tokens (PT tokens in the Element nomenclature) represent a fixed rate earned over the stated term; you are effectively buying the future rights to these assets at a discount.

So for example, if you purchased the steCRV principal token you’d lock in a 6.74% annualized fixed rate over the term ending on January 28th, 2022. Though the rate may be annualized you will only realize the pro rata yield of that, given the expiration. When the term is up you simply redeem your PT tokens for the underlying asset. Rinse, repeat. Rumor has it the gigabrains at Element are working hard on an auto-rollover feature that will make managing these terms a lot easier. But don’t worry, anon, if you do need liquidity before the term expires you can always sell your principal tokens on the Element AMM.

For those who consider themselves more of a “power user” Element also allows you to mint principal and yield tokens from supported underlying assets. Minting these tokens allows users to take one of these variable rate Yearn vault positions and split the principal from the yield, leaving the user with two tokens. As we mentioned before the PT token will always be redeemable at face value at the end of term. The YT tokens, on the other hand, are redeemable for the average interest accrued over the term thus representing a tokenized variable rate.

This splitting of yield from the principal creates greater capital efficiency when speculating on variable rates. Users who want to speculate on increases in the variable rate can mint the PT and YT tokens, sell the PT token and repeat the process known as yield compounding. Our frens at Component have even made a tool for all the degens out there. For the less degen among us Element also allows users to become market makers, providing liquidity on the principal or yield token to earn additional yield via trading fees.

One of the more exciting use cases for Element’s fixed rates is in treasury management. The team wrote about this initiative back in August 2021. Since then companies such as Gnosis Safe, Drift, and ChainSafe have all started leveraging the Element protocol as part of their treasury management strategy. Additionally, there is an active governance proposal on the ENS forums to allocate a portion of their treasury to fixed rates. Why does this matter?

When you’re managing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in assets for a protocol with thousands of users you have a responsibility to take a more risk-off approach to managing said assets. Recall the Messari report from May which revealed most top protocols were massively over indexed in their own native token. We saw first hand how this can have large negative implications for a protocol as the DeFi bubble started to deflate and some protocols experienced exploits. Rari Capital, for example, saw their token price fall by around 50% following their exploit, and pretty much all DeFi protocols are well off all time high status.

Through smart treasury management, such as asset diversification and yield hedging, protocols can better insulate themselves from both normal market variance and black swan events. This is where Element can be leveraged to ensure the stables or just plain ETH a treasury has can still be deployed as productive assets while locking in a fixed income on some portion of those assets. This leads to more predictable revenue streams for protocols and DAOs, ultimately making operations run much more smoothly.

Big things are on the horizon for Element finance! If you’ve spent any amount of time in the Element Discord you will know that the most commonly asked question is “wen L2”. Good news on that front: the Element Finance team announced a partnership with Aztec! Aztec is a zkRollup based Ethereum Layer 2 that brings privacy and scalability to the Ethereum ecosystem. Depending on the term and asset the Element team estimates that trading principal tokens on Aztec can bring down gas costs by as much as 40x. The partnership will initially launch with DAI as their only asset but Element will be working closely with the Aztec team to determine which additional assets and user actions to onboard.

Finally, Element will be launching governance for the protocol, as they mention in their blog. The team has spoken about their governance primitive at conferences such as EthCC and written about its implementation. I highly encourage you to check Element smart contract developer and general gigachad Paul Vienhage’s talk on the governance contracts if you haven’t already. This is an excellent primer for how these governance primitives can be leverage to usher in an exciting new era in on-chain governance.

Anyone interested in participating in the DAO should pop over and say hello in the #governance channel in the Element Discord, where team and community members will be happy to answer any questions. Additionally, you can browse through the contracts on GitHub if you want to see how the sausage is made.

While fixed rates might not have the sex appeal of the degen ponzi box du jour, I hope we have shown how in mature and stable financial markets fixed rates play a crucial role. As the entire crypto ecosystem moves towards less volatility Element is well positioned to be a foundational Lego piece. Protocols, DAOs, and users can hedge risk or speculate on variable rates while the primitives themselves can serve as a platform for the next wave of builders. Add to that the imminent move of the DAI markets to a zkRollup-based L2 in Aztec, the progress being made on rolling out governance, and the teased Elfiverse and I’d say there is plenty to get excited about.

Disclaimer: Yunt Capital is an investor and advisor in Element. As always, please do your own research. This is not financial advice. Every strategy is not for everyone. Each investor needs to understand what is right for them.

February may be the shortest month of the year but that doesn’t mean a shortage of Injective updates to report. From launching a digital music festival in the metaverse to unveiling the Injective Pro V2 Early Access Beta, February raked in a record number of milestones for the community. Read below for the full highlight reel.

In the last 2.5 months…

Soft-forking Ergo Emission

There are a lot of concerns about the emission being over in less than six years from now.

The long-term sustainability of the short emission schedule is an inherent risk to the long-term viability of the Ergo Network.

The UTXO set is seeing good growth (visible here), but due to the nature of storage rent (which charges a fee on unmoved UTXOs after four years), the viability of storage rent economy as a way to protect the long-term economic viability and security of the network is in question.

We would like to create a system that offers economic incentives to miners in the short term while protecting the long-term crypto-economic security of the network.

Having unlimited emissions has given ETH tremendous flexibility in playing with its economic policy and network adjustments.

Ergo is committed to the principle that the total supply must be preserved.

Unfortunately, post-non-outsourceable puzzles, the governance scheme has changed. The governance model shifted from a democratic model where individual miners vote to a representative model where mining pools vote.

We know that this is not a very efficient form of governance as a select group of actors has massive representation.

We have encouraged mining pools to poll individual miners and as soon as we hear back from pools, we will be open and transparent about which pools are in favor of and which are not.

Getblok, one of our community pools, has created a Proof of Vote (PoV) voting mechanism.

A 90% approval rate is required, which is a supermajority.

The governance model we are following is modeled on the following paper. https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/577.pdf

Emission and Treasury Emission are boxes created before the genesis block and associated with corresponding contracts.

This is a part of the Proof of No Pre-mine and the associated monetary policy of the network.

It is important to understand that the original emissions contract is still valid. It is simply interacting with a re-emission contract that is collecting rewards to be used to extend the original emission.

This EIP offers the following procedure for that:

Starting from block #699,393 (first block of 684th epoch), new emission rules “If Approved” would be applied on top of the rules described in the Ergo Whitepaper.

The current Block Reward 66 ERGs

The initial change would drop the mining reward per block by 12 ERGs.

Subject to approval the block reward would be 66–12= 54 ERGS

In simple terms, the initial reduction of 12 ERGs is being put into a box where it will pay miners after the initial emission period is complete.

66 Old 54 New Block Height 699,393

63 Old 51 New Block Height 720,000

60 Old 48 New Block Height 784,000

57 Old 45 New Block Height 849,600

54 Old 42 New Block Height 914,400

51 Old 39 New Block Height 979,200

48 Old 36 New Block Height 1,044,000

45 Old 33 New Block Height 1,108,800

42 Old 30 New Block Height 1,173,600

39 Old 27 New Block Height 1,238,400

36 Old 24 New Block Height 1,303,200

33 Old 21 New Block Height 1,368,000

30 Old 18 New Block Height 1,432,800

27 Old 15 New Block Height 1,497,600

24 Old 12 New Block Height 1,562,400

21 Old 9 New Block Height 1,627,000

18 Old 6 New Block Height 1,691,800

15 Old 3 New Block Height 1,821,600

12 Old 3 New Block Height 1,886,400

9 Old 3 New Block Height 1,951,200

6 Old 3 New Block Height 2,016,000

3 Old 3 New Block Height 2,016,000

0 Old 3 New Block Height 2,080,800

The Original Emission hit zero at block 2,080,800.

The proposed Re-Emission Soft Fork creates an extended period of block rewards at 3 ERG

There is an interactive graph available on ergo.watch that model the original emission and proposal.

In the future, it is possible to create a soft fork that requires storage rent to be collected into the re-emission contract to potentially smooth payment and extend the block rewards into the future.

ERG cannot be burned in the conventional manner miners are accustomed to due to storage rent. Any future burns can be directed into the re-emission contract potentially stabilizing the re-emission at 3 ERG.

The goal of this proposal is to secure the crypto-economic security of the chain long-term to create a sustainable ecosystem that incentivizes miners. Our goal is not to rob miners or have developers dictate policy.

We believe that governance in a Proof of Work system should be representative of the opinions of miners. This is a part of why the threshold for Soft Power is set at 90%. Due to the previous hard fork, the governance model changed, which shifted power to mining pools. This is not ideal, but we will try to be transparent about how to vote.

The consensus among miners and those that support our ecosystem is important.

Developers have proposed updates in the past that have been rejected.

This is a part of governance and decentralized management.

If EIP-0027 is rejected we will talk with the community and propose alternatives in the future.

Two community-driven goals currently underpin Injective. The first is enabling anyone to access, create, and trade unlimited DeFi markets. The second is to build a custom layer-1 protocol that can be utilized to build scalable cross-chain trading, derivatives, and Web3 applications. Ultimately, all of Injective’s achievements in 2021 enabled it to continue delivering upon its mission of creating a truly free and decentralized financial network for everyone.

The article here will first provide an overview of major milestones reached by the Injective community in 2021. The piece will then delve into the road ahead towards building the most powerful decentralized derivatives exchange, an interoperable smart contract layer, innovative Web3 applications and novel cross-chain integrations that will allow Injective to reach global adoption.

The Injective ecosystem continues to be one of the fastest growing ecosystems in all of crypto. Alongside powerful exchange relayers built on Injective, a number of decentralized applications and protocols such as Terra have integrated with Injective as well.

You can view all ecosystem projects and collaborators on the official Injective ecosystem page.

The section here will provide an overview of some of the major milestones achieved by the Injective community in 2021.

January

Product | Solstice Decentralized expiry futures launch alongside synthetics for Tesla, GameStop, forex, and much more

Community | The Solstice testnet processes over 1,000,000 trades and Injective is accepted into the prominent Defi Alliance cohort

February

Product | Equinox Staking waitlist begins and genesis validators such as Huobi Pool are onboarded

March

NFTs | Injective works with Burnt Banksy to mint the first ever authentic Banksy NFT, gaining coverage from mainstream media such as CBS & Forbes

Product | Equinox Staking goes live after a successful pre-stake period and the Frequent Batch Auction model goes live to prevent front-running and MEV

April

Capital Raise | Injective raises $10 million from Pantera, Mark Cuban, BlockTower, Figment, and many more with coverage from TechCrunch

May

Product | The first phase of the Injective mainnet commences alongside the insurance fund release

Ecosystem | Injective incubates Burnt Finance: a fully decentralized auction protocol

June

Product | The canary chain is launched with a revamped Injective Pro exchange

Ecosystem | National Thai Bank venture arm joins Injective as a validator

July

Product |Initial spot markets are released on the Canary Chain

Ecosystem | Binance joins Injective as a genesis validator

August

Product | The Injective Hub is released to provide a unified platform for DeFi, governance and staking

Community | Injective rebrands its products and all visuals

September

Product | The multi-chain Injective Bridge goes live and the Injective API is introduced for institutions

Ecosystem | Picasso Exchange launches on Injective and a new ecosystem page is released for all Injective collaborations

October

Product | The Injective Pro exchange is fully upgraded and the Injective Explorer goes public

November

Product | The Injective mainnet is launched and quickly surpasses $100 Million in volume in just a few days

Ecosystem |The $120 Million Injective Astro program is introduced and new exchanges such as MarsX and Unlimited Exchange are built on Injective

Integrations | Injective helps created the first ever IBC enabled markets with a novel oracle integration

IBC | Spot markets for ATOM become available on Injective

December

Product | Injective becomes one of the fastest growing exchanges of all time and reaches $1 Billion in total volume at record time

Integrations | Injective lists Terra UST pairs and the first ever decentralized LUNA perpetuals which reach $50M in volume in just a week

IBC | Injective Bridge onboards the Terra blockchain via IBC

Ecosystem | Picasso introduces a swap interface, the Terra community builds Lunatics Exchange on top of Injective, Unlimited Exchange introduces a new interface and Huobi Pool starts to build a Huobi relayer on Injective

INJ Burn | Injective burn auctions begin and over $700,000 worth of INJ is burned in less than a month

Community | Injective validator Orman creates a Injective stats dashboard

Injective will continue to pave a path towards pioneering the new Web3 economy moving forward.

The focus in 2022 will be to build the most powerful decentralized derivatives exchange, an interoperable smart contract layer, novel cross-chain integrations, and innovative Web3 applications.

Derivatives are currently the most heavily traded asset class globally with a projected total market size worth quadrillions of dollars. However due to the unwavering grasp of centralized gatekeepers, derivatives products remain out of reach for everyday users. As a direct consequence, most individuals around the world are unable to access markets that would allow them to access new financial innovations and sophisticated hedging strategies.

Injective has solved the many of the salient issues that continue to plague the world of traditional finance by creating a permissionless protocol through which anyone can access derivatives markets in an entirely decentralized manner. Currently, users operating the Injective DAO can propose and create markets of their choice using decentralized governance. Developers can also build innovative exchange relayers (frontends) on the protocol which share one aggregate on-chain orderbook to serve distinct user bases.

The success of Injective’s decentralized exchange model cannot be understated. Injective Pro itself has already processed over $1 Billion in trading volume in just a month since the launch of its highly anticipated mainnet. To put this number in perspective, it took Coinbase over a year to achieve the same feat. The permissionless nature of Injective Protocol allows anyone to build new exchanges such as Picasso Exchange which offers a sleek swap interface. Developers have complete control in showcasing markets of their choice such as Lunatics Exchange which primarily is made for the Terra community. A significant benefit of deploying on Injective is the ability for these new exchange relayers to share one orderbook which in many ways rectifies the cold start problem faced by other DEXs that have to recruit users and liquidity from scratch.

Looking ahead, Injective will continue to bolster its infrastructure in order to unlock the full power of decentralized derivatives. A key towards achieving this will be to integrate more decentralized oracle solutions such as Chainlink in order to embed further redundancy into the network. Integrating more oracle solutions will also allow users to have access to versatile price feeds from which new DeFi markets and pairs can be launched on the exchange itself.

Another goal will be to increase orderbook liquidity exponentially through concerted growth in retail usage, exchange relayers and institutional adoption. Unlike most exchanges today, Injective has built an exponentially performant on-chain orderbook which is able to prevent commonplace issues such as high gas fees, slippage and predatory front-running. In other words, Injective has created the only viable solution in the market today that is able to offer traders a user experience that is on par with its centralized exchange counterparts.

Increasing liquidity for the on-chain orderbook will be led by a multifaceted strategy that focuses on growing both the institutional and retail user base.

Market markets are currently onboarded via the Injective API which has been custom built for institutional adoption. The Injective Astro program has already put into place parameters for the Designated Market Making (DMM) program to encourage market makers to offer effective liquidity on the orderbook. The incentive programs on Injective will continue to be iterated by the community in order to encourage more market maker adoption of the exchange protocol. As more market makers are recruited, the DMM process will be much more competitive, thereby leading to healthier orderbook depth for traders.

Injective Pro and other products within the Injective ecosystem will undergo new iterations to offer a much more seamless user experience. Specifically, this entails putting in place intuitive UI for the Injective Bridge and exchange. Some of these parameters are already underway such as seen through a recent mainnet upgrade that showcased an experimental feature that would allow users to trade without having to sign transactions every time with their wallet.

More exchange pairs and market types will be also introduced to attract new retail user bases. Currently, Injective has managed to eclipse over $100 Million in daily trading volume with the help of only a few pairs listed. Over the coming months new spot and derivatives markets will be introduced by the community. The idea is basically to make Injective the go-to exchange for any form of decentralized trading since it will be able to offer access to markets not found elsewhere.

A key component of introducing new markets will also be to connect with new chains via IBC and bridge solutions that can allow Injective to offer markets originating from other protocols. The recent integration of Terra for instance allowed Injective to offer the first ever decentralized derivatives using Terra UST which provided a pathway for the Terra community to onboard onto Injective.

New markets on Injective will create a truly open and limitless ecosystem since every new listing allows new communities to learn about and utilize Injective for their everyday trading needs. As users are able to deploy novel markets on Injective in a permissionless manner, new forms of experimentation with not only perpetual contracts but also more sophisticated financial products will continue to grow.

The Injective Chain is a highly bespoke blockchain created to support the most sophisticated financial derivatives products and orderbook infrastructure.

The upcoming year will see the launch of new products and features that help accelerate the growth of the exchange layer itself. An example of this are passive trading strategies that allow users to earn yield by deploying funds into trading guilds. Essentially, a retail user can park their capital into a vault that a more sophisticated trader or market maker can then use for distinct trading strategies. In other words, the trading guild itself would act as a decentralized hedge fund for users of Injective.

Currently, spot and perpetual markets are available on Injective but the Chain can also support futures, synthetics, options and much more. The upcoming year will likely bear witness to innovative products and financial primitives where users can take part in applications such as decentralized prediction markets.

2021 was primarily a year of initial product development and growth. Moving forward, there will be heightened attention towards adoption.

The Injective community has always been passionate about creating delightful user experiences. A focal point of adoption will be the deployment of more intuitive products that can be used by everyday traders. More exchange relayers will continue to be built that cater to distinct user bases and regions. For instance, an institutional interface is needed for more regulated entities who may only wish to interact with other institutional counter parties. On the other hand, everyday Chinese speaking users may wish to interact with an exchange that meets their particular needs.

New exchange relayers can also focus on meeting specific user needs. For instance, Injective validator Huobi Pool is currently working to create a Huobi relayer on Injective that would enable traders to easily stake assets with Huobi Pool while also being able to access the exchange through a trusted brand name in crypto.

New abstractions for interacting with the protocol layer will also be heavily explored this year. Essentially, users should be able to interact with products on Injective via not only the various exchange relayers but everyday applications. For instance, if Injective is able to integrate with a mobile application that already has fiat rails built into it, a user would be able to simply execute a trade that’s processed on the backend by Injective. In effect, the technical abstractions can lead to much faster mainstream adoption moving forward.

Injective is already a highly scalable chain that is custom built for cross-chain trading and decentralized derivatives. The next step is to enable a smart contract layer that allows developers to build new interoperable Web3 applications on Injective.

Nearly all other layer-one protocols are created as a standalone blockchain that hopes to attract developers. This creates a scenario where the layer-one protocol tries to be a one-size-fits-all solution for all DApps and ends up being subpar since it cannot properly cater to the specifics of each application.

Injective has flipped this traditional model by creating the first custom protocol for cross-chain DeFi and Web3 applications. The Injective Chain is unique in the fact that it was built to specifically support a truly revolutionary DeFi application: a fully decentralized derivatives exchange. While others begin with a layer one, hoping to have DApps on top, the Injective Chain was created with the specific requirements of supporting a highly sophisticated derivatives exchange in mind.

In order to allow external developers to build new applications on Injective it is necessary to create a highly performant smart contract layer on Injective Protocol.

CosmWasm: Multi-Chain Smart Contracts

The plan as it stands is to begin by integrating CosmWasm into Injective.

CosmWasm has become the de facto standard for chains built using the Cosmos SDK such as Terra. As a result, there exists a sophisticated architecture via which developers can interact with the broader Cosmos ecosystem. A significant benefit to starting with CosmWasm is the ability for DApps built on Injective to run across multiple parallel chains with the help of the IBC framework. Since Injective already has much of the core logic for Cosmos embedded into the Chain, deploying CosmWasm will likely be a faster process to enabling smart contracts compared to other alternatives available.

From a security perspective, CosmWasm is devoid of attack vectors currently present in other smart contract layers such as reentrancy. The smart contract environment within CosmWasm is also Turing complete. This means that you have the capability to perform any logic that could be implemented in Ethereum and execute it within the Cosmos SDK without modifying the underlying blockchain.

CosmWasm is also highly flexible since developers can upload code directly to transactions without having to restart the chain. As a result, rapid iteration of new features are made possible for developers who wish to build robust DApps on top of Injective.

A final benefit to beginning with CosmWasm is that it is already being adopted by many applications and bridge solutions. So once injective has CosmWasm integrated, DApps and bridge solutions can integrate with Injective and allow users to seamlessly access products on Injective.

The smart contract layer will directly help to create a much more versatile and integrated ecosystem of decentralized Web3 applications on Injective.

The DApps built on Injective will each add to the positive feedback loop within the ecosystem. For example, an exchange relayer on Injective can also integrate a yield farming application on the frontend. This way a trader can utilize the exchange to trade and then deploy capital into the yield farming pool to optimize their passive returns. The exchange relayer can also use these integrations to attract and retain new user bases who may come to trade initially but stay on the relayer of the other features it is able to provide.

Each of the DApps built on Injective will be able to utilize the custom modules of the Injective Chain such as the orderbook . As a result, many of the initial Web3 applications built on Injective will likely be ones that want to utilize the orderbook infrastructure. A prime example of this is a sports betting application that wants to build prediction markets with a decentralized orderbook at its core. Instead of having to build the orderbook layer from scratch, the betting application can simply embed the Injective orderbook module and launch markets via the Injective DAO.

Currently exchange relayers help to burn INJ since 60% of all trading fees generated go into a burn auction process that allows the token to become more deflationary over time. However, other DApps can help introduce entirely new use cases for the token thereby enabling INJ to acquire new forms of utility. A new lending application for example may leverage INJ as a form of collateral. An insurance DApp may utilize INJ to underwrite the insurance. Finally, a savings application could provide additional yield to users who lock up their INJ into a vault. The possibilities are of course endless.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide the Injective community with the tools and platform needed for them to express their unique ideas and talents. By allowing any member of the community to shape the protocol, the pace of innovation can be accelerated by the collective intelligence of the global Injective community, which is far superior to that of any one centralized team.

Injective was built with the idea that a multitude of chains would thrive in the future. As such many of the infrastructure and product level decisions were made to ensure that Injective is able to interact with other crypto ecosystems with ease.

Cosmos IBC is already enabled on the Injective Chain, allowing for an easy and low cost bridging process to other Chains such as Cosmos and Terra. Injective has also built custom applications for IBC such as the Band oracle relayer that currently uses IBC for markets on exchanges built on Injective. The oracle implementation has already been utilized to make over 100,000 IBC requests. Injective is the first chain to use IBC so extensively on mainnet, creating price feed requests every 10 seconds.

This year, users can expect to see many more IBC integrations with other chains in the Cosmos community. As more assets are bridged over to Injective, DApps built on Injective can directly benefit from the wide breadth of asset availability. Exchange relayers for example can introduce entirely new pairs that leverage assets stemming from distinct blockchain networks such as having a CRO/UST pair which would use assets from both Crypto.com and Terra.

Outside of IBC, Injective has also built a native bridge to Ethereum that allows any ERC20 token to be transferred to the Injective Chain using Ethereum native applications such as MetaMask. There will be significant effort put into integrating with other bridging solutions to allow EVM chains for instance to transfer assets directly into Injective. The idea essentially is to create a network via which the Injective community can seamlessly access new assets, markets and DApps without ever having to leave the wider Injective ecosystem.

Injective and its ecosystem have grown at an unprecedented rate over the past year.

Looking ahead, Injective will continue on its mission to create a robust infrastructure layer and Web3 applications that have the ability to democratize financial access for users globally. Injective has already built a powerful chain for cross-chain trading and decentralized derivatives. Injective will continue to build the most powerful decentralized derivatives exchange platform while simultaneously creating an interoperable smart contract layer, innovative Web3 applications and novel cross-chain integrations that will allow Injective to reach global adoption.

Injective is a custom interoperable layer one protocol for building powerful exchange, DeFi, derivatives & Web3 applications. Injective was created using the Cosmos SDK and is able to achieve instant transaction finality while sustaining lightning fast speeds. INJ is the native deflationary scarce asset that powers the Injective Protocol and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by Pantera Capital.

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