Go to https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/injective, search for Chorus One from the list of validators, and click on it.
Go to https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/injective, search for Chorus One from the list of validators, and click on it.
Enter the amount you want to stake (leave some amount in your wallet to pay for the fees)
Click on the Delegate button
Click on Delegate and then Approve the transaction in your wallet/ledger. You're now staking with Chorus One!
The Cosmos ecosystem is one of the most diverse in crypto as it allows for experimentation and simple bootstrapping of new ideas, due to the accessibility of the Cosmos SDK stack. The result is the launch of multiple chains on a monthly basis, each one targeting specific issues or innovative solutions. As a recent highlight, the Cosmos Hub is on the forefront, with the implementation of ICS v1 (“replicated security”), becoming the first shared security solution in production.
The previous edition of our Quarterly Insights report covered the basic concepts and related projects pushing the boundaries for innovative solutions in staking. You can download it here.
This article starts a series of reviews of well known projects, aiming to uncover the present state of these “long lived” protocols. This edition focuses on Injective, a fast and cheap blockchain built for finance, featuring 0.9s block times and less than $0.01 fee per transaction. Injective provides infrastructure that is optimized for enterprises to build a diverse array of institutional grade financialapplications. An example of a high level contribution is the module that allows the implementation of an on-chain order book. The OpenDeFi Foundation is the non-profit organization behind the Injective protocol. Backers include high profile names, such as Binance, Jump, Pantera and Mark Cuban.
Injective is a Layer 1 (L1) blockchain built on top of the Cosmos SDKand the CometBFT Consensus protocol. The network is operated by60 validators at the time of writing. The number of validators may seem low when compared to other delegated PoS blockchains (e.g.Solana: 1900 validators), but it can still be considered similar to otherCometBFT based chains. The protocol is proof-of-stake based and has a limited validator set to optimize for throughput. The expected tendency is for the network to be secured also by social consensus,with delegators working on identifying more reliable and trustedvalidators to delegate to.
In the Injective case, the super-majority is formed by 4 validators that hold more than 33% of voting power at the time of writing.Aware of the risks imposed by centralization, and to incentivize contributions from other node operators to the development of the ecosystem, the Open DeFi Foundation recently announced theFoundation Delegation Program to increase the voting power controlled by relatively smaller validators.
From a validator's perspective, Injective can be a demanding network to run due to its short block times and, consequently, higher chance of failing to sign blocks. This characteristic is reflected in the validator “uptime”, which varies from 80% to 99% on Injective amongst all validators, while for other networks the uptime is on average closer to 100%. The update process has consistently been well-managed and smooth. Overall, we have a positive impression of the network's technical architecture.
The most popular dApp on Injective is Helix, a decentralized exchange that allows for spot and derivatives trading of cross chain assets. More than $10B have been traded since the launch in November 2021, with derivatives being responsible for $9.3B. The total value locked in pools (TVL) is $11.5M and the most active perpetual markets are BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT. INJ/USDT is the most liquid spot market.
Helix creates a seamless trading experience, with a user interface comparable to a centralized exchange, low costs and advanced features, such as order types, graphical indicators and liquidity analysis. To start using Helix, users can connect from a Metamask, Keplr, Ledger, Cosmostation, Leap, or Trezor wallet.
The Open Liquidity Program (“OLP”) is an initiative recently announced to foment on-chain liquidity: beginning June 13, 2023,60,000 INJ can be earned during each epoch by those executing trades through the API or on decentralized exchanges built onInjective. The program prioritizes deep, long lasting liquidity, by using the following metrics to measure the quality of the activity: dual sidemarket making, uptime, volume and spread. All information on the reward calculations and API can be found in the OLP docs here.
Additionally, the first Injective Hackathon recently concluded, with the submission of 300 projects, and 357 builders, attracting developers, entrepreneurs, and blockchain enthusiasts, the four week online event fostered new innovations across Web3. Highlights from submissions involve options trading, asset management tools, money marketing platforms and NFT marketplaces. Additionally, the Injective Ecosystem Venture Group is a group of prominent institutions and venture funds that have come together to back the future of the protocol with a $150 million initiative. The focus is to support promising projects building within a diverse array of sectors including interoperability, DeFi, trading, PoS infrastructure, rollups and scalability solutions. Visit the official page to be informed on criteria and the process to apply.
Given Wormhole integration and IBC compatibility, from the userperspective, it is fairly easy and cheap to interact with multiple blockchains from- and to- Injective. According to the Map of Zones, Injective communicates with 19 different Cosmos chains. The biggest flow of assets happens between Injective and the CosmosHub.
In May 2022, the protocol started working with the Wormhole bridge, making it easier for users and developers to interact with other blockchains. The most common asset bridged to Injective isUSDT, with more than 11 million of USDT at the time of writing. Other bridged assets include wETH, USDC, SOL, wMATIC and LINK.
Also, in March 2023, Cascade was launched - a layer-2 testnet that utilizes the Solana’s Sea Level Virtual Machine (SVM) provided byEclipse. This means that Solana developers can test their apps for use in the Cosmos without needing to change the programming language or tooling used. More information can be found here. April 2023 was the time for Injective to start communicating with Polkadot. The integration happens through the Celer Bridge, and allows users to transfer INJ, ATOM, ASTR and DOT between the Injective blockchain and the Astar parachain. More information can be found here.
Injective mainnet is live since November 2021. INJ, its native token,has multiple purposes in the ecosystem, as it is used:
I. to secure the PoS chain;
II. to participate in the on-chain governance;
III. to pay for exchange fees, and in the buy back and burn model;
IV. as margin and collateral backing derivatives positions. The current supply of INJ is 600m tokens and it increases over time through block rewards - incentives to token holders when locking INJ to help secure the Proof of Stake (“PoS”) network (“staking rewards”).
The emission rate (“inflation”) at the time of writing is 10% per year, and 62.5% of INJ total supply is currently locked in staking, resulting in 15% yearly yield. INJ is being traded at $7.94 and the fully diluted market cap is $794million. INJ price has been showing resilience throughout this bearmarket, as it was able to recover a good part of its value, despitemost of the market still struggling with low prices in the same period.
According to IntoTheBlock, Injective has a 94% concentration bylarge holders, i.e. whales - addresses with more than 1%; and investors - addresses with more than 0.1% of circulating supply.
The protocol suggests a global minimum fee structure, meant tofavor those adding liquidity to markets, also known as “marketmakers''. Maker fee is 0.01% of the total amount of the order, whilemarket taker orders - those trading against the orderbook, pay0.02% of the trading amount. Although the maker/taker model iscommon on centralized exchanges, Injective fees are half of what auser would pay when trading on Binance, for example. For a more indepth analysis of fee models in different exchanges, we recommend this article by Deribit.
Additionally, as a way to support the applications, the protocol transfers 40% of trading fees back to the dApp. This value can be used to source the trading activity on the exchange, offering fee rebates and other incentives to increase financial yield to users. The other 60% are kept by the protocol and periodically auctioned in exchange for INJ. The INJ proceeds of this auction are then burned, thus creating a potential deflating mechanism in the total INJ supply. Each application built on top of Injective may implement fees and incentives in a slightly different way. For example, Helix adds discounts to the taker fees, depending on the amount of INJ staked by the user and the amount traded in the last 28 days. Discounts start at 7.5%, when staking 25 INJ and trading volume $100,000. It can get to 80% for users staking at least 75,000 INJ and $100m trading volume.
Injective has been actively working on growing its ecosystem, tackling the different aspects to promote the activity and adoption of the network. On the TVL level, Injective is the 52nd chain on the DeFiLlama ranking. There are relatively few spot and derivative markets with significant liquidity levels - greater than $10,000 on the top of the book, and trading volumes are still low compared to otherdecentralized exchanges. On the other hand, Injective provides a fully on-chain experience, in contrast with most decentralized exchanges, through its order book and seamless trading experience, including advanced order types and technical analysis tools, that are partially unique in the crypto space, and we consider to be good differentials for the protocol.
Centralization of stake in a small number of validators is another concern for this network. Both points are subjects of the initiatives created by the Foundation and presented in detail in the previous sections.
When looking at tokenomics, the INJ token is one of the most valuable assets in the Cosmos, second only to the $ATOM token according to Mintscan. It also has multiple use cases, from staking to buy back and burn auction, which tend to power the demand and keep its value in the future. In terms of price, it has shown resilience compared to most assets in the Cosmos ecosystem during the recent tumultuous times crypto and global markets went through. The staking yield of around 15% annually is also aligned with other high value Cosmos chains.
As our final impressions, Injective seems to be taking the right steps to address its short comings while pushing ahead with its coremission. Chorus One is an Injective validator. You can find more information on how to stake INJ tokens on https://chorus.one/crypto-stakingnetworks/injective or reach out to us: staking@chorus.one.
To stay up to date with Injective
Blog: https://blog.injective.com/
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Injective is an open, interoperable, layer-1 blockchain built for finance applications.
It provides a powerful smart contracts platform tailored for DeFi developers to build and launch dApps for widespread use quickly. Injective uniquely provides traditional finance infrastructures, such as an order book module, on-chain, and is highly interoperable with prominent layer 1s, including Ethereum and Cosmos.
Injective is built with the Cosmos SDK and utilizes a Tendermint proof-of-stake consensus for secure transactions with instant finality.
Some of the prominent ecosystem players within Injective:
Category | Details |
---|---|
Delegation Address | injvaloper14yeq3lkajldaggj28hmq8xng9xux7x5g46hezv |
APY | 15.28 % |
Wallet | Metamask, Ledger |
Block Explorer | https://explorer.injective.network/ |
Staking Rewards | https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/injective-protocol/ |
Unstaking Period | 21 Days |
Akash is a decentralized marketplace, where cloud providers (providers) can lease their computing power to users (tenants). The Akash marketplace functions by conducting reverse auctions whereby the tenant creates orders for computing power, and providers bid on these orders. When the tenant chooses a provider, they create a lease. After this, the user deploys a Docker container on the Akash Container Platform where users are able to then run any cloud-native application and access a range of cloud management services like Kubernetes.
Please note that the unstake period is 21 days. This means that you can only unstake and withdraw coins to your wallet after this time has passed. We wish you profitable staking!
We will stake via the Injective Hub. Go to https://hub.injective.network/ and click on Connect on the top-right corner to connect with any wallet currently integrated with Injective, which currently includes MetaMask, Ledger, Cosmostation, Leap, Keplr, Torus, or Trezor wallet.
Once you get connected you can view your dashboard. On the top right, you can view and copy your INJ address and the equivalent address in Ethereum. The Disconnect option is also found here.
Your Injective address
On the dashboard, you can click on Delegate Now to view validators and delegate your INJ tokens to them.
When you click the button, you are shown the list of validators.
Search for Chorus One in the search box and click on Delegate Now
A popup window will appear, and you can specify the amount of INJ you wish to stake.
Click on Delegate and you will be asked to sign a transaction, which will take place entirely on the Injective Chain. This means you no longer need to pay high gas fees!
Congratulations! You've successfully delegated your INJ tokens. You can head back to the Wallet page to view your delegations.
You claim your rewards, distributed continuously every block, on the Wallet page. When you unbond your tokens, you will stop receiving rewards, and your original INJ balance will be returned to you after the unbonding period, which is 21 days. The unbonding period can be changed via community-based governance.
Injective is a decentralised exchange (DEX) that facilitates permissionless cross-chain derivative trading.
Since DeFi summer in 2020, there has been an explosion of innovation in the decentralised exchange space. Automated market makers (AMMs) that use mathematical formulas and liquidity pools to calculate token prices instead of order books, have become the standard for swapping tokens on decentralised exchanges. AMMs are practical and accessible, no KYC is required of users and anyone can create pools of assets to be traded against. However, AMMs have been a victim of their own success. As popularity of AMMs has risen, so too have issues that users experience when interacting with them (such as high gas fees and front-running). AMMs are also limited when it comes to interoperability and only spot trading can be done using AMMs. Injective solves the problems suffered by AMMs by creating an interoperable order-book based decentralised exchange that acts as a layer-2 sidechain built using Tendermint-based consensus.
Injective has EVM-compatibility built on top of it’s Cosmos-SDK chain, meaning users experience a fast finality and interoperable network with the benefits of Ethereum tooling. Injective is using Tendermint consensus, which allows trades to be made cheaply and with 1 second finality. Injective is also IBC-compatible, meaning it is able to connect with hundreds of other networks that have been built with IBC compatibility to facilitate cross-chain interoperable trading. On top of this, Injective has its own Ethereum <> Injective bridge for users wanting to bridge their Ethereum ERC-20 tokens into and out of Injective. What is interesting here is that Injective is not limited to interoperability within Cosmos and Ethereum. Injective will also be interoperable with Polkadot in the near future via Moonbeam. It is not hard to envision a future where assets from multiple networks will be bridged onto Injective and be available to be traded with cheap fees and 1 second finality. Injective could potentially be the most interoperable decentralised order-book exchange seen-to-date.
The possibilities for a fast and interoperable order-book decentralised exchange are limitless. Anyone in Injective can also propose an arbitrary derivative market for INJ token holders to vote on. A scalable, interoperable, innovative and community-driven DEX that gives users permissionless access to any derivatives market in the world and is exactly the type of use case that crypto is made for. We are excited to announce our support for Injective and look forward to facilitating the network’s long-term success.
Injective uses the standard DPoS staking mechanism found in the Cosmos-SDK. Users can delegate their INJ tokens to Chorus One to receive a share of rewards generated by the network.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators such as Chorus One is determined by the amount of staking tokens (INJ) bonded as collateral.
INJ Inflation: 7%
Staking Reward Rate: Rewards from staking INJ will vary depending on the inflation and total amount of tokens that are staked at a given time. Learn more about the details of staking reward rates for chains built using Cosmos SDK here.
Chorus Commission: 7.5%
Withdrawal Delay: After withdrawing, your staked funds will only become accessible after the unbonding period (1 day) has passed. It takes a further 7 days withdraw INJ back to Ethereum.
Slashing: You can get slashed (loss funds) in case the validator you are delegated to commits an offense. Make sure to do due diligence to minimize this risk. Offences include double-signing (5% slashing penalty for delegators) and downtime (no slashing penalty, validator is ‘jailed’ and delegators miss out on staking rewards for minimum 2 hours).
Re-Staking: You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns.
Minimum delegation: There is no minimum delegation.
Stake your INJ: https://staking.injective.network/validators
Learn to delegate: Equinox Staking Guide
Wallets: Metamask
Block Explorer: https://explorer.injective.network/
Chorus One Validator Address: injvaloper14yeq3lkajldaggj28hmq8xng9xux7x5g46hezv