Helios Horizons - Episode 2 - Redefining Finance Through Blockchain with Mirza Uddin

There are teams in the space that deliver, and then there's teams, like Injective, that actually over-deliver, from different updates every week, from updated tokenomics, from bridges with other chains, from going from a DeFi chain to an ecosystem that really sort of is offering it all. Injective has been one of the chains that I think has been very, very impressive to watch in every respect, and I'm joined today by one of the ninjas behind all of this, who's Mirza, the Head of Business Development. Welcome, Mirza.

Hello, hello. Yeah, great to see familiar faces and obviously I've known Kevin for years and years. He was actually the first validator on Injective. Many people don't know this, one of the first two or three for sure. So, yeah, excited to be chatting here and the Helios family has always been a huge supporter of Injective. So glad to be chatting with you all.

Very much appreciate you being here and very excited to talk about all things Injective. But I want to get a little bit of background on you. You know just knowing a little bit about who we're talking to and how you got started in the space. So maybe if you could take us through your Web3 journey, what you did before, how you ended up at Injective, that'd be super interesting yeah for sure I would say the first time I first heard about Crypto was actually in high school.

This is a long, long time ago in 2013, when a couple of friends of mine were mining Bitcoin. I didn't know what it was at the time, so that's when, I would say, I first heard about Bitcoin. When I got a little bit deeper into it would be in 2015. I was doing an internship out in Tokyo and the firm I was working for, Ease Ventures, was investing into a bunch of different crypto assets at that time. Assets you guys might have heard of if you guys have been around the block a while like OmiseGo, etc. Which is like this Japanese altcoin back in the day. So that got me more interested into it - Oh, there exists a world more than just Bitcoin. Obviously, I was just a broke college kid, so I didn't really have much money or time to invest at that time, which I now very much regret.

And then, come 2017, I was working at a firm called Two Sigma, which is a huge hedge fund here in New York, and I was on their ventures team. And if you guys remember 2017, towards the beginning of 2017, Crypto was really heating up and they needed someone on that team to cover sort of the Crypto sector in general. So I sort of raised my hand because I've been sort of introduced to it in the past, obviously so started researching day and night into Crypto, put all the money I earned from the internship into crypto, and then we also ended up investing in a bunch of projects you guys might know, like UMA, which was one of the OG, let's DeFi, protocols. We also invested in some funds, like Placeholder, which has gone on to invest in a bunch of different Crypto projects you know today. So that's when I really in, in my opinion, got into Crypto full-time and never left since then, in 2017, and then in 2018 is when I first met Eric. I actually skipped my graduation room.

Eric is the CO of Injective. I met him at Consensus in New York, at just some random event, some breakfast with the Neo Founder. If you guys remember Neo, it was a pretty hot L1 back in 2017, 2018. So I go to this breakfast. I still don't remember how I was invited there, but there's like 15, 20 of us and me and Eric are the only like kids there not kids, but like people below the age of like 40.

And, yeah, we just got to chatting and he's been one of my best friends ever since then. I was one of the first people to read the Injective white paper back in 2018 to get feedback and, yeah, I joined Injective full-time. I was working at Two Sigma, but joined Injective full-time in 2020, right around the time they did their seed and the rest is history. I've been here ever since, for four years, one of the first people at Injective. So that's my journey. I don't even know if many people in this chat know about all this history, but since it's a small group, I thought I would share all the deets about the past and how I got it.

No, and that's super interesting, because I think it's interesting how Injective got started right, because a lot of blockchains back in the day had real specific ideas of what they wanted to do and how they wanted to get things started, and Injective had this idea of revolutionizing specifically like sort of traditional finance and going towards bringing them on chain and going towards bringing them on-chain. And if you can talk about this initial vision and what you saw in the white paper that maybe stood out to you before joining and then how that developed, yeah, 100%.

So some of you might even be able to find this white paper if you look deeply enough. Injective has changed a lot since 2018. But initially it was just a front-running resistant DEX. So back in 2018, there were a few DEXs out there that were horrible to use, like way worse than Uniswap ever was, in terms of just like you can't get transactions through, people would constantly manipulate and front-run in front of you.

Eric and, of course, the co-founder, Albert, who's the CTO, wanted to build a front running resistant DEX. So it's like oh, I can trade completely permissionlessly without having any sort of manipulation. That was the initial vision and this is way before, years before, DeFi even became a word. But effectively, that's what they were doing. Injective was one of the first ever DeFi protocols. In my opinion, that really was years ahead of its time in thinking about what is to come.

So since then, obviously, Injective has evolved a lot. Over time, we realized, hey, we're facing issues while building on Ethereum, we need to create more bespoke infrastructure to create a front-running resistant Dex. That's how we found Cosmos in 2019, started experimenting with the SDK when no one was building with the Cosmos SDK, so we ended up building a lot of the core components ourselves, in in terms of like, hey, how do you bridge from Ethereum, how do you use Metamask wallets to acquire assets on this new chain? And it was just like we were just building in the wild, wild west it, if you think it's the wild west now there was no one building in Cosmos and there was very little DeFi activity on Ethereum; zero Defi activity on Ethereum in like 2018, 2019.

So yeah, It was a great time and I think that's why Injective has come really, really far to this day, because most people, when they start chains, start because they want to build a really really good chain. I think Injective's thesis was quite different, because our history, if you remember, is more so like, how do we create this extremely performant protocol, this DeFi protocol, and we needed to build a chain around that to support it. So that's why we've created such a custom stack today. That's, in my opinion, the best chain for building financial or finance-related applications. So that's kind of the background, history and evolution, and I can get more into it, but that's kind of the background.

Yeah, and I'm super curious, like targeting this niche initially, was that something? How did you think about that? Where did you see sort of the initial need? What was the initial vision to really like get you know, address this specific need that you saw, and how did you go about sort of acquiring the first partners and acquiring the first people that you know were open enough to trying out this technology, and how did it grow from there?

Yeah, I'll tell you the truth. I think, as me, Eric et cetera we're all like in in the U S, like there are certain things we just couldn't do or access and it just didn't seem fair. It's like, okay, we know all this stuff about Crypto. We just can't access anything, we can't transact certain assets, and like we can't get a Binance account, and then even Coinbase was locking us out of accounts. That's really the need. It's like, okay, there's all this opportunity out there, there's all these assets, all this amazing tech, but people are being kept out. How do we create that in a decentralized world? That was really the impetus for us, right? Because yeah, it's probably happened to many of us where suddenly the exchanges lock you out, et cetera. How do we prevent that? That's what really inspired us to start building in this space and obviously now it's become pervasive. It's like, hey, everyone knows what DeFi is today, but back then no one knew. But that was the genesis of really the vision behind why we built what we did and how the protocol sort of evolved.

And how did you approach the first sort of financial institutions and people that were like, hey, we have this protocol, we're offering these specific solutions, this is what we can do that maybe traditional finance doesn't do yet, and here's how we do it. What was sort of that process and how much convincing did it take, especially, you know, we're talking about a few years ago, when really this wasn't at all mainstream, right. What was the first initial reactions, the sort of first obstacles you had to

Yeah, this is a very, very good question and it's something we grappled a lot with, or struggled a lot with, in our early days, because we would go talk to most of the large traders or most of the large institutions that were trading on places like Binance, later on trading on places like FTX. The biggest pushback for us initially was like, hey, you can never replicate the same levels of speeds you can get in centralized exchanges. There's going to be a lot of latency. So it's really about us understanding hey, speed is so, so important. How do we actually get speeds down as much as possible or speeds up in a way, as much as possible so we can actually transact here? Right? Because if you think of high frequency traders or anyone who's trading in size, they're not going to wait several minutes. They're definitely not going to wait and want to pay like tremendous gas fees to get a transaction through, because they're sending hundreds and thousands of transactions every single second. So unless you can replicate that in a decentralized stack, no one is actually going to migrate over. So that was the first learning experience. It's like, okay, we have to do a lot of work in terms of optimizing the infrastructure to actually be as fast as possible, and not only fast for the sake of being fast, but fast for people who want to transact in things like DEXs, so people being able to, let's say, batch thousands of orders into one transaction and batching it through. Because, yes, we on Binance or we on Unisoft today might go and click once and, hey, I want to buy this much Bitcoin or I want to buy this much ETH or I want to buy this much ETH. That's totally fine, that's okay for us. But these sophisticated traders are literally executing hundreds of transactions, the hedging, different orders, trading perps and spot all in one block. So how do we make those block times as fast as possible? That's, that was learning experience one.

Learning experience number two was how do we get costs down as much as possible? Right, because if you're sending that many trades and on Ethereum, of course there's like high gas fees. Even the l2 solutions that were coming out it wasn't scalable. We realized it's like, even if you're having to pay 10 cents, 10 cents might not seem like a lot if you're sending one transaction, but if you're sending thousands and thousands of transactions every single second, it does add up to quite a lot, to the point where, if you're trading basis points, like you're only making, let's say, one BIP on an order, or let's say a thousandth of a BIP on an order. It doesn't even make because your transaction fee would supersede the return you're making from that individual trade.

So that's why it's not just lip service for us in terms of like, hey, we need to be the fastest. The cheapest Injective today, arguably, is the cheapest chain. It's because of this need. It's like okay, how do we get people onboarded without speed or cost being bottlenecks, right? And then the last component that we've been facing and that we faced for a while now was compliance hurdles, right? So when you think about institutions, yes, it's cool to say like, institutions are coming. It's been a meme in Crypto forever. But for institutions to actually come, they will only come when there's compliance needs that are met on their end. Right? Like because these are guys managing billions and trillions of dollars in assets. They're not just going to trade on some random DeFi protocol just because the yield is good. Right, because even though the yields are better traditionally in DeFi versus TradFi, it's not really worth the risk for them and DeFi versus TradFi. It's not really worth the risk for them.

So how do we create those permissioning modules or permissioning sectors? To onboard these institutions was a big thing we did over the last year, so now we, about two months ago, introduced the RWA module where you can issue assets in a compliant manner on Injective. Basically, you can gate certain individuals based on KYC processes they have passed, or maybe you gate individuals based on how much AUM they have. This is something we struggled a lot with internally, because on one hand, we're like cowboys right, we want to build DeFi for everyone, but at the same time, if you want to get big money in, you also need to have a way for them to enter in a compliant way.

So what we realized is why can't we do both? So we can be cowboys and let anyone enter like the great dapps on Injective today, let's say, like DojoSwap or Helix or Mito or any of these amazing dapps but at the same time, we need to have some levels of permissioning. If someone wants to move really huge size, someone's a big institution, someone's a big market maker and they only want to deal with other people who have KYC, that's fine. They can play in this little wild garden on the side while the rest of us can still be cowboys.

So that took a lot of engineering effort behind the scenes to build, because we weren't going to change our chain and make it permission, because that would. That's not something I would ever want to do. So this is like a way for us to do both, where we can onboard institutions, continue to onboard normal everyday users and really create the best of finance in one integrated chain where you have large money coming in and you also have normal people like us who can sort of enter this process in a very accessible and democratic way. So I I know that was very long-winded, but that's how we sort of thought about the optimizations we built for institutions and how we onboarded them.

Yeah, that's such an interesting this sort of next to each other of like the cowboy sector and the traditional sector right like providing a space for both of them to sort of exist peacefully in some way. I think a big component of that is also user safety, or you know you talked about compliance, but there's also the sort of individual aspect of it that is safety, like having your wallet drained and all of these concerns that retail has and that happens all the time. Can you speak to that sort of experience and how you guys at Injective sort of think about that aspect and how to improve that and how to invite retail to really be able to participate in this sort of DeFi space in a safe and, you know, sometimes compliant way?

Yeah, we think a lot about this actually. So, for instance, security is paramount in every single aspect of Injective itself. So, whether it be just the way we built the stack, so, even if you think about something as simple as oh, when I stake my INJ, it secures the chain. Why does it take 21 days to unlock the tokens right? Many people often don't realize the reason it take 21 days to unlock the tokens right. Many people often don't realize the reason it takes 21 days to unstake is because if you have a malicious attack where a lot of people on stake all at once, the chain becomes entirely unsecure. So that's why these little backstops are put into place to ensure security.

Injective today many people might not know this, but is one of the top proof-of-stake chains out there, so there's literally billions of dollars securing the chain. It's very like a Cosmos chain. To this date has not been hacked. On top of that, Injective today is perhaps the largest tendermint-based chain out there, so it is quite literally one of the most fool-proof blockchains out there. On top of that, once you go abstract away the chain part itself, once you get into a UI level, there's, of course, like little backstops you can put in place for individuals, like warnings etc. Like, hey, you're leaving this site. We do this all over our product pages. Like, hey, we'll showcase our dapps. But even when you click onto a dapp, we'll say, hey, you're leaving the Injective bridge. Are you sure you want to leave Little things like that just to remind people that, hey, you might be interacting with something you might not be familiar with. Those things help. I know, sometimes it's very annoying, but those things do help in terms of tool tips et cetera on a UI level, especially for new users.

And the third really is onboarding rails and mitigating risk on the value of money, right? So, for instance, how much can you sort of bridge out at any one time? Or, for example, we have like little checks in place where, if we see movement in size, we can sort of track it much more easily on the Injective bridge. So little things like that just to safeguard users. Obviously, when you have permissioned environments or permissionless environments, there's only so much you can do.

I think Injective goes beyond that in some ways. One super unique fact that people often overlook about Injective is the fact that its governance is actually permissioned, which means to upload any new application on Injective you need to go through a four-day community vote, which actually reduces a lot of scams and noise on Injective versus other chains, because you can't easily deploy any random BS on top of Injective right and the community has to buy into it and basically vote yes to upload your smart contracts onto the Injective chain, so that adds another level of protection on top of Injective that I think other chains unfortunately are not able to. So yeah, it's really like finding that balance between protection and still allowing people free will as much as possible to do what they want on the chain. I think Injective sort of seeks to strike that balance as best as possible.

Yeah, very interesting. Two things - One, this is Helios Horizons, Episode Two. We're here with Mirza Uddin, the Head of Business Development of the Injective Chain. Thank you so much for being here, Mirza. The second thing is I see that comments on this space for some reason are not possible, so if you have a question that we can ask Mirza later, please go to the pinned tweet. Also, retweet that pinned tweet for a chance to win some injective and hopefully we'll have like 10 minutes at the end of this episode to ask some of your questions, so feel free to ask them right there.

Coming back, I think it's so interesting. You talked about sort of the vision of Injective and how it all started as this interesting idea to bring DeFi into this traditional space, and how you think about users. How is it like from an inside view? You have this vision, you have this mission and all of a sudden it starts working right, like you've. You've seen such an explosive growth, I think, over the past six to 12 months. That's been very, very interesting to watch from the outside. You know all of these new ecosystems, NFTs and and memes and all of these things popping up. How does that feel like from the inside, if you know you're this thing and all of a sudden your community keeps contributing and all of a sudden all of these new things start popping up. Kind of give us the insight view of how this works.

Yeah, I've actually gotten this question a lot and I've thought a lot about what I think attributes the most to our success. I think it's twofold. One is just relentless focus on community and relentless focus on building. And that's not me trying to be cliche. I think what really really helped us honestly is, in the bear market, most people just disappeared. Most projects you would chat with and they would literally tell me so I run the business team at Injective right, so I'm literally on calls all the time. I chat with other projects you have no idea how many projects I spoke to over the last two years who would literally hop on a call with me and just say, oh yeah, we have this XYZ news or XYZ product, but we're going to wait till the bull market starts coming back. We're gonna save this news till then because, like, it's gonna have no impact on price and like in my head it's like made no sense to me, because it's like, why does it? Why are you only building for price? Why aren't you just building for the sake of building and acquiring users? So that's where we really capitalized, because we went ahead and said, okay, this seems, this seems very basic, but I guess no one is doing it. How about we just launch even better than we did in the previous bull market and just really try to corral a community around us? Because then people are just not lighting money on fire in the bear market because they have no money. In a bull market, everyone has too much money, right. So you have a lot of competition for social media, for noise, right, there's a lot of things happening on Twitter and other things when you go, but in a bear market it's very quiet, so you don't actually need to spend a lot of money on ads or anything else to capture that attention or capture audience. So that's where we really honed in on. So that's why you pretty much saw Injective to this day, launching new things almost every other day, just going at it, because every single thing sure by itself it might not be that impactful, but every single thing you launch, likely it's helping to acquire some users, it's helping to cultivate noise or cultivate community attention in some way.

And I think people started to notice that last year in a big way, where it's like, wow, all of my other projects not to knock anyone down, but it's like most other projects were not doing anything, but look at this project, Injective. They don't care at all about price, they're just going at it building, launching new products, launching ambassador programs, trying to really speak to the community, still hosting community calls. That helped us create this snowball effect of community, in my opinion, where people never really left, like the core loyal supporters of Injective didn't leave us during the bear market. In fact, it just grew. Whoever was left in crypto started noticing Injective and coming back and the snowball effect just continued.

Because our goal last year and said this like, two years ago, when we actually built a marketing team, it's like I want to be able to go to different conferences and I want, people at inject, like people in Crypto in general, to just know Injective. Like if I say to someone that, hey, I work at injective, I want them to know what it is, because in 2018 to 2021, yet some people might have heard of Injective, but not everyone. But now I think we're at a point where Injective is a household brand name in Crypto, where you sort of go places and you say, hey, Injective, like they know what it is. Which was kind of the goal. It's like you want people to know it's an l1 for finance. My next goal is really like, how do we make it a household name outside of Crypto? So, in the same way as people know, let's say, something like a chain link, right, like, or, or obviously Ethereum would be the ultimate goal.

But yeah, like, can I talk to my random high school friends who are sort of familiar with crypto, but not really, and just mention Injective and know it? So that's really going to be the next big unlock for us and I think we'll achieve it in the coming years. So, yeah, stay tuned. But yeah, I think that's all it is. It's just building a community, not rocket science. But, yeah, easier said than done, of course, in terms of just being able to have that focus and drive even when the world seems to be ending. Being able to have that focus and drive even when the world seems to be ending. So, yeah, kudos to my team all around and kudos to our community for sticking it through, and reaping the rewards and reaping more rewards in the coming years.

Let's zoom in on this for a second, like this community aspect. If if you could pinpoint sort of what the the beginning, what it looked like in the beginning versus what it looks like now, do you think, like you always had this hardcore you know that stuck around and built stuff and probably onboarded more stuff, is there something new that came in? Is there some way of a development in the community that you see, like more of this new ilk came in, or some people left, the degens left and the, you know, the builders came, or the other way around? Is there, is there some sort of progress development that you could sort of pinpoint that also underwrites the, the success, the current success of Injective?

Yeah it always existed from day one but it just grew, it grew in a couple of different ways. So initially it was like a rat-pack of people who, honestly, were just there because the Injective token launch - of course, like, whenever you have a token, you have some people who like look at it. And then we started to build a community around our Testnet base because in 2020, up until middle of 2021, we were just launching a bunch of different updates, different Testnets, so we start to like gather community members, from other ecosystems as well, because we were just going at it in terms of partnerships, in terms of collaborations, and this was all done during the Testnet days. And then, during the Testnet days, like people like Kevin also joined the community, right like Helios joined the community, right, like Helios joined the community with validation, with different forms of ways to interact with Injective actually. So that was sort of the Genesis or the beginnings of the community. I'd say people really started to coalesce around this theme of ninjas and I would sya middle of 2022 because effectively the issue was such a funny issue in hindsight but nothing rhymed with Injective, it's such a difficult mathematical word that it waqs hard to create a mascot. We thought a lot about that mascot should be, blah blah, but we never came up with it and the community member, his name is Bart, he came up with the idea that hey, what if we call ourselves ninjas? Because it has the word INJ in it? It has the letters INJ in it, which is, of course, the native token of Injective. So, as soon as, and that kind of stuck around like the community like really liked it. So we're like okay, we're just gonna go off on that. So we changed all branding around it, like we put the ninja mascot in our Twitter, we started using that word and we started to build a brand around ninjas, where now in my opinion if you hear Crypto + ninjas, you think Injective. So I think that really helped a lot in terms of gathering that community around and we added other updates as well so last year we introduced a very very great ambassador program which helped onboard a lot of new people into the ecosystem were basically champions for the ecosystem, a lot of our ambassadors are in this call right not who went out and got more people to join the community which then got more people to join the community and it jusst had a great impact on gathering local chapters aswell, like some of our community members will host local events, local talks, they'll host spaces on their own. Sometimes I go on Twitter and it s like people are hosting things on their own. So, yeah, I think, like the ambassador program helped a lot. We just revamped it by the way, if there's an ambassador program 2.0 starting last Friday, so please take a look, because it's even better than ever now in terms of just growing the program, getting more people in.

And then I think the final thing that really helped us is expanding outside of just Core DeFi and encompassing finance in general, because then we were able to get projects in the NFT ecosystem or NFT-Fi. Now we have GameFi. We just started entering more and more verticals, which got more individuals. We were able to get projects in the NFT ecosystem or NFT-fi. Now we have game-fi. We just started entering more and more verticals, which got more individuals interested in Injective, who previously might not have only wanted DeFi, they wanted XYZ other things. So now we're starting to gather those communities. The NFT community on Injective is absolutely booming. There was a huge airdrop today for, let's say, the Premier Ninjas collection from Omni, which just went on Binance and Coinbase, for instance. So a lot of cool things happening in sub-communities of Injective as well, which helps this sentiment or this camaraderie to only grow further. So, yeah, I think that was sort of the natural progression for our Ninja community.

Yeah, let's highlight some of this because I think it was the natural progression for our Ninja community. Let's highlight some of this because I think it's so interesting how you can really go from a niche that you understand this niche. You start onboarding people on this premise but then you maintain some sort of openness to what the community wants, to what community members might want to do outside of the core thing that they're there for. So let's talk about the NFT space and how that has developed. I know you're I mean you're rocking an NFT PFP. I think the team has been pretty supportive of this entire space. Tell us how you think about that from you know, like a business development point of view, making these decisions and making sure that these communities that might be a little bit outside of what the first vision for Injective was are allowed to exist, coexist and to thrive, outside of this initial idea.

Yeah, of course, and we thought the same thing actually and and that's why I love it so much, because it's not actually like I can't take any credit for it. Actually, I I take zero credit, and i injective business development takes zero credit for these communities , especially the NFT community, because it just happens so organically. What actually happened was one of our community members his name is illust illustrious said he wanted to create an NFT collection because he noticed that an NFT marketplace that had okay, I'll give you the full backstory. Unfortunate events happened around Terra in 2022, a lot of the projects from Terra started looking for other homes or other places to build on, and Injective was pretty much the best chain in my opinion at that time. Who had Cosmos and smart contracts, who had all of these rails to Ethereum where people could come in on board. So Talos got in touch and they said they would love to migrate over to Injective and we were like, ok, but we're sort of like a DeFi chain. Do we really want NFTs? But the people were just honestly, so great we're like, ok, let's work together, let's make this big, because we think there's something here. So we started working closely with the Talos team. They deployed on the Injective mainnet by middle of last year and our community was thrilled because, like I said, we were building in the bear.

We had corralled all this community support and some of our community members wanted to build sort of collections on Injective. So we're like, oh, this is amazing. So Premiere Ninjas was the one I'm rocking right now, the first NFT collection on Injective that was launched by Atalus, and I think the way it really happened is because it was just the loyal supporters of Injective. It wasn't a cash grab, it wasn't about money. For instance, premier Ninja's minted for one INJ which at that time was like $7. So it was like no money at all, right, $5 or $7, I forget, but very low, so very accessible for anyone to come and mint the NFT. And it just ballooned from there Like people were launching collections every single week. All the mint, a lot of mints were absolutely free. So there were like free mints here. Like Burb was a major collection on Injected, that was an absolutely free mint and people made hundreds, if not thousands of dollars just from a free mint. So those trends sort of continued, which helped build more community.

And it was really about access. It was really about rewarding the loyal supporters who had been with us throughout the bear and it was entirely community driven. It wasn't us trying to put money to make it work, because you really can't do that with NFTs. NFTs are really about community and that's what Injective had and it just really ballooned organically. And I guess we helped put fuel to the fire by doing little things like hey, like we will support this space, we will like even simple things, like the founders changing their profile pictures into NFTs helps because it shows like, hey, they care, they care about us, they talk to us, they chip in um. Like they help gather support for the NFTs um, and just being communicative with them. Like people dm d D me all the time little questions, I answer them like whatever help them. need, .undefined um.

So yeah, and they helped on board so much new talent and users, a lot of the NFT community that we have came Solana. So we helped onboard a lot of those users onto Injective who now can explore the other amazing applications on top of the chain chain for NFTs. It's like, no, we're a chain for finance, but NFTs in essence are a financial instrument as well, because you're trading it, you, you are buying it, you, you are auctioning them off. So it made sense for us, if you really think about it, to go into NFT5 and why this sort of came up on the chain and and a similar trends now with game five, with projects saying, hey, NFT5 sort of take off, took off on Injective. Should we also introduce games now where there's a financial aspect to it which this amazing performance chain can support and on top of that, the community can support? So it goes hand in hand right the community with the infrastructure that we have.

Yeah, I think this is such an interesting aspect of it, one, this interoperability, obviously, Injective is a Tendermint Cosmos chain, right, so you have this sort of as the basis of everything this IBC. But there's also these cross-pollination events, let's say right, like these NFT mints, people come over from different chains. Recently, you guys or not you guys but the Solana ecosystem was somewhat brought closer through this common domain naming service that is now on both Solana and Injective. Tell us how you think about this greater ecosystem of Web3, having users not just live on Injective, about this greater ecosystem of Web3, having users not just live on Injective or benefit from everything that Injective has to offer, but still operate on other chains for different purposes? How does Injective, or how do you, as the business development head, think about this interoperability and this sort of bigger picture and the larger pie?

Let's say, yeah, I think this is where Injective not to toot our own horns is really different from other chains. I think every other chain I don't want to talk about every other chain, but many other chains tend to be very, very competitive in this regard where it's like oh, like we're just going to capture this entire market, like we're going to take it all over, really played that game. We're like no, I think a lot of users, of course, are on Ethereum, a lot of users are on Solana. How do we build bridges to those communities, not both literally and figuratively? How do we build bridges to those communities and onboard those users from other ecosystems? Because, like, like you alluded to, the pie is so small, like Crypto maybe, like on-chain users maybe has a couple million users max, and I I'm not just talking about wallets, I'm talking about actual, real people in DeFi or in on interacting on chain. So what's the point? Because, if you think about major tech companies, you can't even really raise like a series b round with less than like a million users. If you're a consumer company, right, it's very difficult, so I just think it makes no sense to do that. So, Injective's game, consumer company right, it's very difficult, so I just think it's it makes no sense to do that.

So Injective's game was entirely different. It's like, okay, how do we create the best blockchain for finance, which means any user from any other chain should want to use Injective or come on to Injective when, when it's related to something whether it be DeFi or NFT, fire game, fight, you name it like we want to be a chain for anything finance related. So we were the first chain, for instance, to allow for Metamask signing on a cosmos native chain, right? So you could have Cosmos users, you could have Ethereum users all interact on Injective as if they never left Ethereum while still paying almost no fees and, of course, lightning-fast transactions. Right, and we thought the same about Solana. We were actually the first chain to integrate Wormhole so we could have assets from Solana come over STL tokens, come over to Injective and interact on Injective with those tokens.

And that's why these other sort of collaborations you saw came about, because when we started working with Wormhole, bonfita, which is the main name service provider on Solana, reached out to us and said, hey, like let's work together, let's actually build domain names on Injective. And then we actually gave them the idea. What if we created an omni sort of domain name where it can work across Solana and Injective? Took a long time to build. Easier said than done, took like eight months to build, but that's what we worked on together with them. So now you can have the same domain name across Solana and Injective, which allows you to basically have a universal identity standard across Solana and Injective, because these are communities I care a lot about, like how do we bring more people in? How do we expand the pie? Because a lot of people are still on Ethereum, a lot of people are still on Solana. How do we make it easy for them to come onto Injective from a user perspective and a developer perspective, right, some of you might not know, but Injective has spent a lot of time introducing new VM environments on top of the chain, whether it be the Solana virtual machine or the Ethereum virtual machine and, of course, the Wasm or the Cosm Wasm, which is a Cosmos WebAssembly virtual machine. So right now on mainnet we already have live EVM and Wasm, and we'll have SVM in the coming months as well. So it also allows developers from those ecosystems to come and build on Injective much more easily, while the users from those ecosystems can come as well. So that's really what interoperability means for us.

It's not just about building a bridge. It's not just about building a literal bridge to another chain. It's about how do we onboard those users, how do we make UX easier, how do we make UX the same for those users? For example, many chains support bridging from Ethereum right. But how many chains support bridging from Ethereum? Right? But how many chains can say, hey, I don't even have to change the network on my MetaMask from Ethereum to use Injective, right, that's what Injective allows. How many chains can say they can use the same domain name from Solana on the same chain, right? So it's more than just about the bridges. It's about the UX, it's about the user experience. It's about the bridges, it's about the UX, it's about the user experience, it's about the developer experience by having the same sort of DevEx, I guess, for them, or the same VM layers for them. So it's all of the whole. That's what sort of I think the word interoperability doesn't really capture all the things Injective does to sort of bring different ecosystems together under one umbrella.

Yeah, very fascinating. I will open it up. We have some requests already to some speakers, and I'll also check the comments in the pinned post Again. If you have any questions that you might want to ask, please go there. Please retweet that. There is a giveaway that I think we'll just release the winners after that, but everybody who retweets the pinned tweet can win some Injective, and if you don't have any Injective yet, winning your first coin might be a fun way to get onboarded to this ecosystem. Before I open it up, what's sort of the next things that you guys are looking at and looking forward to at Injective? What are the next steps for you onboarding people and this sort of broader, bigger picture? What are you guys looking at to do next?

Yeah, I always get in trouble for this, but I can start leaking some alpha.

I think one thing we're really focused on right now is, of course, the different VM layers, which are well underway.

But two, how do we actually onboard users easily using fiat alone, so allowing people to come in directly with their cash or credit cards onto Injective, onto Injective dApps?

I think that's the next unlock for our ecosystem in terms of onboarding net new users, because right now, to onto Injective or get onto any chain almost all of them you have to go get a Coinbase account or you have to get a Binance account and then you bridge into that chain. But what if you didn't need to do that? What if you can just come onto a dApp and interact directly with that dApp or that chain without ever having to go through an exchange? I think that's going to be huge for us. So that's something we're working on. Number two is just like making those rails or those aspects of Injective easier whether that be staking, making it more user-friendly, other aspects of the chain such as yeah, I don't want to get too deep into it, but yeah, just a bunch of different mechanics behind the scenes in terms of chain upgrades, in terms of UX upgrades to just onboard more users and more developers easily onto Injective.

Very nice. I'll just answer a quick question that I saw in the comments about the current APR when staking with Helios. I think we're at 14.58. So if you put your Injective into one of the staking providers, specifically ours at the moment, you're getting about 14% more at the end of the year. Pretty nice. And yeah, I have one question for you here and then I'll start bringing up some speakers. If you have any questions, please request now. Is it allowed Mirza, to build a brand new DEX and connect it to the on-chain Injective order book through existing contracts? That seems like a question designed for you.

That seems yeah, wow, thanks. Simple answer yes. So basically, a big part of Injective is this on-chain order book where all the same liquidity is shared. So one cool aspect of that is so, let's say, helix is one of the major dApps on top of Injective right, it's a DEX. If you build another DEX on Injective so let's say Astroport or CoinHall or DojoSwap they can actually take orders from that order book as well. For instance, if you place a buy order for inj on dojo swap, it can actually get matched with a sell order on helix if you want it to.

So yeah, building that those rails are really easy and that's what makes injective so liquid if you compare it to other chains. Because you don't have to get that liquidity from scratch, you don't have to give out mercenary incentives or anything, right, whether you can build on Arbitrum or you can build on Solana and, yes, they're fast and cheap but you won't have that liquidity, right, you probably have to give out a lot of incentives, you probably have to build everything from scratch. But on Injective you get all these modules where you have templates to build these applications very easily in a matter of hours or days, and on top of that you have liquidity from day one, so you don't have to go out and hunt for liquidity. So that's actually a huge selling point for Injective itself.

Yeah, I think yeah. Such an interesting model and so new and very interesting. Bikram, you're up. If you can hear us, let us know.

Yes, sir, I have a question for Mr Mizaruddin. The question is is there any plan for Hackathons in 2024 in Injective Blockchain?

Yeah, actually we do. So we actually are even planning on doing in-person Hackathons more so because now that COVID's over, we don't have to just be virtual before we're doing virtual hackathons. We'll probably do more of that, but, yeah, definitely. So stay tuned. Hackerhouses, hackathons we have a lot of cool events coming up for developers in general that we didn't really have before. So, yeah, we're going to really expand that effort this year and maybe, Lucas, you can chime in on something we're planning with Helios, but maybe you're not allowed to share. But yeah, we're planning some cool things that Lucas is not allowed to share on the developer front or the in-person event front.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead, Vikram.

And so, like the CW404 and the token standards, so is there any future roadmap for the building on CW404? And you know it's going to be doing the Cosmos and Ethereum very short and it's a semi-fungible token. You can see there's lots of hype going on around a semi-fungible token. You can see there's lots of hype going on around the same fungible token. So is there any planning for building on CW404 in 2024?

Yeah, so CW404 standard was mainly built by DojaSwap, which is one of the major dApps on top of Injective. Yeah, I think you already have a couple collections, let's say the Sushi Fighter collection that uses that standard Effectively. It allows you to buy fractionalized versions of NFTs as tokens, because previously you would have to buy the entire NFT right. It was popularized on the Ethereum ecosystem. Cw44 sort of brought that standard over to Injective. I'm sure a lot of projects are building with it right now. Actually, like a lot of NFT projects probably want to do that unlock. I've seen some murmurings on Twitter. So, yeah, definitely I expect more use cases for 404 in the coming months and years.

Thank you, Vikram. I hope that answers the question. Adrian, you're up.

Hi there, nice conversation. Thanks for having me. I just have a curiosity you were mentioning towards the beginning of the discussion about that. You've put a lot of thought in real world assets and stuff like that and I was just wondering if you could explain a bit. How does web2 legal binds about three world and, in case of disputes, how does it work? Is it per region or how does it ifm

Yeah, yeah, sure, actually it's a good question. So basically, like I was saying earlier, Injective has this rwa module on the chain which effectively allows anyone to come and issue assets based on the compliance standards that they have, right. So injective, like we ourselves, are not implementing the standard right, because, let's say, you're a big bank right for a big bank. Maybe you only want to interact with other big banks that are managing billions of dollars that have passed, like their own KYC check, like that's made by the bank, and Injective allows you to do that. You can implement any policy on that so that the person you're interacting with you can make sure that they pass that KYC check or they have that amount of assets under management, right. But let's say you're a different company. Now let's say you're a regional, local bank in, yeah, and you don't have those hurdles, right, maybe you have lower compliance standards. You can implement that too.

So what the RWE module or the permissions module on Injective lets you do is you can set up your own walled garden on Injective and you can make sure to set whatever standard you want for your own little garden that no one else can come into if you don't want them to. So that's the way to sort of think about compliance and standards, because what we realized by talking with all the institutions or real world providers every single person has different needs. Every single person has different requirements. The requirement that a big bank might have might not be the same as what a normal sort of let's say, pension fund might have. They're all very different. So we wanted to just create a system where it's very customizable and it can cater to all needs, right, because if we had implemented one strict policy maybe it would have left out a bunch of other people. So that's how it works today and I know that was a high-level answer, but that's how you can sort of think about how the permissions module works.

And just to follow up, because you have this customizable thing there's no room for disputes, right. Everything's in the same shrine at the beginning and there's no unclarities.

The question is more so; Injective is a blockchain, right, we wouldn't handle any disputes, so it's up to the person implementing their policies, etc. To handle those things on their own, like they set, set their own standard. So, ultimately, after they deploy that project or that asset, it rests with them to figure out, like, what they want to do or how they want to handle it, because we, as Injective, we're not authorities for anything, right? That's why we work in blockchain because we want to be free. We want freedom, so we're not telling people how to handle their disputes or anything like that. That's more on them to decide.

Thank you, Adrian CryptoMesh, a ninja coming up to the stage.

Yeah, hello, thank you for speaking. Yeah, hi, Miza, I'm good. Yeah, from Myanmar. I can see inductees actually thriving in DeFi, gamefly, NFTs yeah, social fire. So I want to know are there any plans of you know, bringing up AI based projects and objective in 2024 something, yeah that's my question.

Yeah, I, I actually got this question a lot. There are. So basically, it's, it works. If it's related to finance, right, because we definitely want to focus on. We get that AI is a big hot topic. It's a big trend, but we really don't want to jump into trends if it doesn't fit like our main goal, which is like we want to be the best blockchain for finance. So, for instance, we are indeed thinking about implementing some AI parameters onto existing dApps related to finance, whether that be automated trading or other things related to AI.

Yeah, so, so that's, t he answer is yes, in a way, like, as long as it fits finance, we will. For instance, Zignally is doing some automated trading tools. They're an AI project that's on Injective today. We have like some other things coming up in that vertical related to finance as well from other projects, so I'll leave it at that for now, but, yeah, like very interested. I think AI is one of the biggest things in the world in terms of what the potential can be. What I don't like is a lot of projects claim that they're AI even though they're not really. They're just saying it just because it's hot. So I definitely want to make sure that when we do it at Injective, we do it for the right reasons and not just because it's the current hot narrative. So yeah, Amazing.

I think, really, this is something that's very interesting to me. You guys obviously had this niche that you haven't really strayed from. There's things that have extended from it, but it's not because it's the hottest trend, but because it somehow fits what a community need, or just a need that's there without really abandoning the promise and the vision, and I think that's really something to learn from for for other chains really zeroing in on the, the value proposition, right, and yeah, I want to, I guess, compliment you guys on that and really this sort of focus that you haven't, haven't lost. I appreciate that and we've been doing that for a long time, because trends come and go right, like we saw the same stuff right with metaverse or like play to earn gaming, and lots of people said a lot of things to me at that time.

It's like, hey, why aren't you doing play to earn gaming? Why aren't you doing Metaverse? It's like it's just not what we do and like, yes, those trends have now passed. I'm sure other trends will soon pass as well. But, yeah, the focus is so important, not just for like yourself, but also for your community, because once you try to do everything, it's so hard to also build community. But that's why I think Injective was so successful at it, because we just stayed true to who we are and the people who stayed around also believed in that vision. So it was really hard, to lose them, and it's very welcoming for everyone who buy into that vision yeah, fantastic, we're coming up on the one hour mark, so I don't want to keep you much longer.

I'll just give you the chance here to maybe invite some people. What's the best way to get involved with the Injective space? Where can people find you and engage with this space? Get involved with the community.

Yeah, please join the Injective Discord. Follow the Injective Twitter it's just at Injective on Twitter. And then please only use the trusted links there. You can learn more on the Injective. com website and, yeah, that's the easiest way to start your journey. And obviously, try out the amazing dApps. You can see some of them on the Injective. com website and, yeah, that's the easiest way to start your journey and, obviously, try out the amazing dApps. You can see some of them on the injective. com website. Just explore the ecosystem. That's the best way, in my opinion, to get involved in the ecosystem.

I was, by the way, Kevin gave me permission to leak, I guess, a little bit of alpha. So Helios, as you know Mirza maybe not everybody in the audience knows is on two blockchains. We are very much of the same mind as Injective in terms of fostering collaboration between different ecosystems, bringing people together, growing the pie. So you can expect a pretty, I think, exciting event that has never been done by any chain or by any collective of chains later this year. So very, very excited for that. I think I have to leave it at that, unfortunately. But yeah, keep your eyes and ears open. Hopefully we'll have an announcement quite soon. Yeah, any closing thoughts? Before the closing thoughts Marza.