Injective Protocol Launches Mainnet, $120M Incentive Program

Key Takeaways

Decentralized derivatives exchange Injective Protocol has announced launch of its mainnet.
To accompany the mainnet launch, Injective is also releasing a $120 million program to incentivize liquidity provisioning and trading.
The program will allocate the funds to market makers and traders who utilize the protocol based on their activity.

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Injective, a cross-chain DeFi protocol for derivatives trading, has announced the public launch of its mainnet today. It’s also rolling out a $120 million liquidity incentive program for traders, market makers, and DeFi projects. 

Derivatives Trading Protocol Injective Heads to Mainnet

Injective Labs has announced the mainnet launch of its derivatives exchange. 

Injective Protocol is a Layer 2, cross-chain protocol for decentralized derivatives trading. It’s built on top of the Tendermint consensus engine using Cosmos-SDK. The Injective decentralized exchange lets users permissionlessly create and trade spot and derivatives crypto instruments across different chains with zero fees and instant transaction finality.

Injective Labs claims that the exchange is fully decentralized. It’s also built to be fully trustless, censorship-resistant, transparent, and interoperable while providing a comparable user experience to that found on centralized exchanges.

In a press release, Injective Labs co-founder and CEO Eric Chen said of the launch:

“Our mission at Injective has always been to build the most powerful cross-chain protocol for completely decentralized derivatives trading. As Injective interconnects new chains, the ecosystem will continue to serve as a DeFi gateway for trading across the multi-chain universe. Injective’s Ethereum-native tooling allows users to simply create and trade new cross-chain markets without the typical roadblocks associated with making transactions across distinct blockchain networks.”

To accompany the mainnet launch and promote liquidity provisioning and trading on the protocol, the team has also announced the launch of a $120 million protocol incentive program named Astro. It’s the largest incentive program to date within the Cosmos ecosystem. According to the announcement, the program will allocate the funds to market makers and traders who utilize the protocol based on the volume of their activity.

The launch comes during a busy year for Injective Labs. In April, the firm raised $10 million at a $1 billion valuation from some of crypto’s most well-known venture capital firms, including Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed, Cadenza ventures, and CMS. Shark Tank host and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban also backed the project. Injective’s decentralized exchange has also seen significant adoption, counting over $1 billion in average daily trading volume across 25,000 unique monthly users. Besides exotic financial instruments, the protocol has also added support for commodities, forex, and synthetic stocks trading in 2021.

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