Both Coinbase Ventures and Pantera participated! Injective Protocol completes a new round of private token sale, successfully raising $10 million.

Injective Protocol raised $10 million in a new round of financing. Prominent institutional investors including billionaire Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and BlockTower participated in the funding.

Injective Protocol Completes New Round of Financing

Injective Protocol, launched in December last year, is a decentralized derivatives trading platform built on a Layer 2 scaling solution. The protocol allows users to trade investment products such as cryptocurrencies, stocks, forex, NFTs, and derivatives.

According to a tweet from the founder, the protocol raised $10 million in a new round of financing. Institutional investors including billionaire Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed Ventures, CMS Holdings, and QCP Capital participated in this round of financing.

1/ Excited to welcome @mcuban, @BlockTower, Cadenza Ventures from @BitMEX, and many other new ecosystem participants including market makers and validators to the @injectivelabs family. With our mainnet around the corner, this round is critical for aligning major stakeholders https://t.co/3UmYFRnU9H

— Eric Chen 🥷 (@ericinjective) April 20, 2021

Regarding this investment, Mark Cuban stated:

"The need for capital can cause an entire trade to be forced to stop. Take Robinhood, for example, they aren't intentionally trying to hurt traders, they just don't have enough equity to trade, they could go bankrupt because they have too many customers. But if you invest in a decentralized way, then every investor can see how much Injective has, there is no hiding in this, it creates opportunity."

This financing is not equity investment but a direct token sale, with the allocations coming from the protocol's reserves and distributed to investors in this round. Mirza Uddin, a member of the Injective Protocol team, mentioned in an interview:

"We sold INJ tokens at a valuation of over $1 billion and attached a one-year lock-up condition."

Mirza Uddin also mentioned that the team will utilize this new funding to enhance their platform and double the existing team of 22 people before next year.

"We are setting up an in-house proprietary trading platform to help provide more liquidity for our trading platform, for this, we have hired a head of trading from Tower Research (a US-based financial services company) and are rapidly expanding our internal staff."

According to information from Crunchbase, Injective Protocol had previously raised $7.1 million from Binance and Pantera Capital.