The May Community Update: Hackathon Demo Day, Polygon Integration, and Cascade Upgrade!

In May, we witnessed the fruit of April’s labor, as numerous projects joined the Injective ecosystem following the Injective hackathon.

Additionally, Injective accomplished several significant integrations this month. This included collaborating with the leading trading software Hummingbot, launching IBC connectivity for Cascade with Eclipse and integrating with Polygon. These achievements demonstrate Injective’s relentless commitment to providing the next generation of layer-one infrastructure.

Builders have effectively utilized the capabilities of the Injective infrastructure to tackle real-world challenges and push the boundaries of innovation across various sectors. Looking ahead, Injective will continue to introduce exciting initiatives, fostering an environment for developers to thrive within the rapidly expanding Web3 ecosystem!

For a recap of May, check out this highlight reel 👇

Highlighted News

First Injective Hackathon Concluded with Resounding Success

The inaugural Injective Hackathon concluded successfully in May, with an impressive turnout of over 300 submissions from 357 active builders. This four-week online event brought together brilliant minds from across the globe, including developers, entrepreneurs, and blockchain enthusiasts, resulting in the generation of new innovations within the Web3 space.

During the hackathon, builders showcased the transformative potential of Injective blockchain technology in various sectors, such as lending, NFT-Fi, options, trading, RWAs, AI, and more. For more information and to explore the highlighted projects, please refer to the hackathon recap blog.

A special congratulations to all the winning teams:

Grand champion: Exotic Markets

2nd place winner: iLend

3rd place winner: Black Panther

Community choice award: Elixir

To make sure you catch up on all hackathon events, check out any one of the workshops and demo day that have occurred since it started.

A playlist of workshops to start building dApps on Injective: Link

Injective hackathon demo day: Link

Injective Integrates Polygon to Accelerate Cross-chain Composability

Injective launches a groundbreaking integration with Polygon, allowing native assets from Polygon and Injective to be utilized for a diverse array of cross-chain use cases within the two ecosystems. Utilizing a new connection from Wormhole, assets such as MATIC and INJ can now be transferred. In turn, this integration paves the way for increased collaboration, liquidity and accessibility, benefiting both chains and their respective communities.

Pyth Mainnet Launches on Injective

The leading market data provider Pyth is live on the Injective mainnet with over 200 price feeds. As Injective is the only IBC-enabled layer 1 to integrate Pyth, this integration marks the first for the Cosmos IBC ecosystem to allow users to build with Pyth’s low latency pull oracles.

Cascade: Major IBC Upgrade

Injective and Eclipse have launched IBC connectivity for Cascade, enabling Solana developers to seamlessly interact and build with Injective and the broader Cosmos universe for the first time. It brings a new level of composability that tightly couples new VM environments with Injective’s Layer 1.

Injective Ecosystem Updates

Helix: User Growth & PEPE Listing

Helix started the month of May with steady growth in active users, unique wallet addresses, and total trades. In addition, Helix listed Pepe (PEPE) perpetual trading, becoming the first on-chain derivatives exchange supporting this trading pair.

In addition to the new listing, Helix pushed out two campaigns: the Profit and Loss (PnL) card sharing campaign, which aimed to incentivize users to trade on Helix, and the Hotbit user giveaway bonus, which helped onboard users to switch from CEX to DEX.

Get started on Helix:

Trade on Helix: Link

Trading guide: Link

Deposit assets with fiat currencies: Kado & Transak

Deposit assets via Injective Bridge: Link

Dual Rewards Batch 2 Live on Astroport

Astroport’s deployment on Injective has topped its volume chart for the first time since Astroport’s multichain launch in March. Injective dual rewards batch 2 started on Astroport, to reward liquidity providers with both ASTRO and INJ tokens.

Furthermore, all INJ stakers can earn staking rewards while earning yield on liquid staked INJ (stINJ) via the stINJ-INJ pool with incentive rewards.

Get started on Astroport:

Check the latest rates and liquidity by selecting the Injective network: Link

You can find a step-by-step guide on how to start earning yield via Astroport here.

Frontrunner: Waitlist Signup Started

Frontrunner, the premier sports predictions market on Injective, is getting closer to launch its “Real Money” app.

Download the app and join the waitlist:

Download the app on iOS: Link

Download the app on Android: Link

Elixir Begins Integrating with Injective to Enable Algorithmic Liquidity

Elixir is integrating with Injective to unlock unprecedented liquidity for the ecosystem, enabling user liquidity for algorithmic market making. Via Elixir, users in the Injective ecosystem will benefit from lower slippage, tighter bid-ask spreads, and deeper liquidity.

iLend Live on Injective Testnet

iLend, the first money markets protocol built on Injective aiming to provide an array of innovative borrow and lending products, is live on Injective testnet. Check it out at i-lend.org.

NFTs on Injective

As the proposal of Talis to deploy its set of smart contracts to Injective passed with 99.77% yes, Talis is assured to bring the first NFT marketplace to Injective. Compared with other major layer ones, the NFT mint fees of Injective are the lowest, with only $8 to mint 10,000 NFTs on Injective.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen many NFT collections coming organically to Injective, including The Ninjas, CryptoSender, Aliens on Injective, Takeda, Bad Ninjas and more. These collections will land on Talis soon along with its mainnet launch, so please stay tuned!

More Highlighted Projects from Hackathon

In addition to the above ecosystem projects, we’ve seen the emergence of numerous exciting projects from the Injective hackathon.

Exotic Markets: Sustainable yield generation and options opportunities on Injective. Bringing one of the first options protocols to Injective will enable the trading of exotic financial products with parametrized risk-to-maturity customizations.

Talis: The first native NFT marketplace building on Injective, ushering in NFTs to the Injective ecosystem for the first time.

Black Panther: The first native asset management protocol that helps users achieve superior returns. Bringing alpha to the injective community across an array of products such as grid trading, trend following, auto compounding vaults and so much more.

Temporal Exchange: Fixed-Rate lending/borrowing solution for shorter time frames, massively increasing efficiency and creating a safe credit creation cycle. This aims to bring market-determined yield curves to DeFi.

LoopX: The first decentralized AI layer for the Injective ecosystem, bringing new forms of utility for dApps built on Injective.

Injective Chain Updates

Mainnet Upgrade

Injective initiated its latest Avalon mainnet upgrade (v1.11) at the end of May to deliver the most advanced infrastructure up to date. The key items included:

Robust scalability optimizations

PoS validation revamp

Sub-second block times

Integrations with Injective

In May, Injective continued to broaden its reach with multiple partnerships, achieving higher levels of interoperability and reaching mass adoption.

The world’s leading open-source trading software Hummingbot released a novel on-chain integration with Injective, bringing trading infrastructure for arbitrage, perpetual hedging, directional strategies and more into the ecosystem.

Arthswap, a leading DeFi protocol on Astar Network, has supported INJ token on its platform. This allows Injective assets to be accessed by the Astar and Polkadot ecosystem for the first time.

Injective validator Polkachu integrated Injective peggy data and released a new dashboard to track the validator’s bridge performance.

New Validators Join Injective

Along with the growth of INJ stakers, several new validators onboarded to Injective this month. The new additions include Talis, KingNodes, and Partner Staking.

Users can delegate tokens and check each validator’s status on the Injective Hub.

Staking INJ on Injective Hub will help secure Injective’s PoS network and is a great way to potentially earn APY and new rewards, including exclusive airdrops! View the INJ staking tutorial guide showcasing how to get started by using MetaMask wallet and Keplr wallet.

Explorer Update

Mini makeover: https://twitter.com/Injective_/status/1661601428891115522

The Injective Explorer has been upgraded to enable the display of all major Injective stats at the top of the main page. Head to the Explorer to view total staked INJ, block times, transaction count and INJ burned: https://explorer.injective.network/

May Injective Stats:

Injective processed over 227 million on-chain transactions.

Injective produced over 34 million blocks on mainnet.

A total of 8,936 INJ was burned through weekly burn auctions in May, and a total of 5.69 million INJ has been burned to date.

All exchange dApps built on Injective have achieved a cumulative trading volume of $9.54 billion since mainnet.

The TVL (Total Value Locked) on Injective Chain reached over $465 million.

The INJ staking APR on Injective is 15.38%, with over 36 million INJ staked.

Injective has become the fastest blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, with 1.1 block time on mainnet and 25,000 TPS.

The total gas fees paid by users on Injective to date is zero.