Injective Protocol

An introduction

Eric Chen is CEO and co-founder of Injective Labs, a core contributor behind the Injective decentralized exchange. Injective Protocol decentralized exchange protocol (DEX) backed by big names like Binance and Mark Cuban. The protocol is designed to be permissionless, fully decentralized, and fast with low gas fees. It runs on a governance proposal procedure, community members are a pivotal part in all of Injective’s decisions. “Injective is purely community driven. Governance dictates everything.”

What is Injective Protocol?

“It’s pretty similar to the overall model of Uniswap. Which is basically all the protocol upgrades and contract upgrades are dictated by the community, a governance vote is required for major changes. It really empowers them all to come up with initiatives to really leverage the power of the masses, the might of the masses, to basically have this self driven community effort to grow the overall ecosystem.”

Although Injective and Uniswap are in similar markets, Eric doesn’t consider them in competition, “I wouldn’t consider Uniswap to be a competitor necessarily. The objective of both communities is really to do the same thing which is to take away the market share of the centralized counterparts. Uniswap has a pretty interesting exchange model that is drastically different from Injective’s.” He goes on to explain Injective’s main goal, “Injective at the end of the day is trying to create a seamless onboarding and user experience from the architectural and chain level for exchange users.”

Scalability

Eric says that scalability is the biggest issue facing DeFi today, “Basically, the entire DeFi industry has been focusing on creating an efficient and scalable contract design around the constraint of Ethereum Virtual Machine. The entire current landscape of the DeFi exchanges is kind of constrained about having to design around EVM, all of the gas measurements, and the scalability bottleneck. And that’s why Injective is special. It serves as a native, fully decentralized, solution towards an order book exchange that has a lot more expressive, dynamic liquidity.”

The Ethereum network has had issues with scalability, with gas fees reaching as high as $200. It can process around 15 transactions per second (TPS), which with the popularity of the network, can lead to high wait times along with the gas fees.