Mainnet Chain Upgrade: Smart Contracts Are Now Live On Injective

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Summary:
1️⃣ Injective has undergone a mainnet chain upgrade that includes support for CosmWasm smart contracts, interchain accounts, binary options, negative maker fees and more.
2️⃣ Injective’s unique implementation of CosmWasm allows smart contracts to be executed both manually by external users and automatically at every block.
3️⃣ Negative maker fees will provide more benefits to market makers while encouraging more liquidity on-chain.
4️⃣ The chain upgrade has started a new Injective Chain application binary.

The highly anticipated Injective CosmWasm Mainnet upgrade is now LIVE!

Smart contracts are now ready for implementation on Injective, with the Injective Canonical 1006-rc1 (or the Injective CosmWasm Mainnet Upgrade).

On top of smart contract support with CosmWasm, this upgrade will include:

Negative maker fee support
Binary options markets support
Interchain account support through IBC v3
And more

A full list of all updates can be found in the "Release Notes" section.

What is a mainnet upgrade?

A mainnet upgrade (or chain upgrade) is a set of new features and/or improvements that are made at the chain-level to continue to advance the blockchain’s capabilities.

Chain upgrades allow all ecosystem builders to have access to the latest technology, ultimately providing end-users with the most up-to-date, cutting-edge applications.

Upgrades to Injective are proposed and approved by the community through governance proposals on the Injective PoS blockchain. The CosmWasm Mainnet upgrade was part of Injective Improvement Proposal 159 (IIP-159) and passed with 99.56% of participants voting “Yes".

To learn more about governance proposals, click here.

What is in the CosmWasm Mainnet Upgrade?

Injective’s CosmWasm Mainnet Upgrade includes smart contract support, binary options support, negative maker fees, interchain accounts, and a handful of other major improvements.

Smart Contract Support (CosmWasm)

Injective now supports CosmWasm smart contracts.

CosmWasm is an advanced smart contracting platform built for the Cosmos ecosystem. Cosm refers to “Cosmos” while Wasm refers to WebAssembly. CosmWasm uniquely enables developers to build multi-chain smart contracts, making use of the InterBlockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol.

This new CosmWasm implementation will allow any developer to build a diverse set of applications on Injective while still utilizing the existing core modules that Injective provides. A core example is Injective’s order book module which allows builders to utilize the only decentralized order book out-of-the-box to create dApps such as exchanges, prediction markets, lending protocols, and much more.

Automatic Smart Contract Execution

Injective’s CosmWasm implementation is uniquely different from any other CosmWasm layer within the Cosmos ecosystem. This Injective mainnet upgrade will allow smart contracts to be executed automatically at every block.

Smart contracts traditionally require an external agent, like a user, to invoke the contract and trigger the logic that is associated with the contract.

Injective’s implementation of CosmWasm, however, will also allow smart contracts to be triggered at each block on its own without the need of this external agent, further allowing developers to create advanced applications that are truly decentralized and permissionless.

How does this upgrade impact the Injective community?

CosmWasm will allow developers to build more complex features and applications on Injective. Additionally, the ability to automatically execute smart contracts is a paradigm shift in the methodologies of interacting with a blockchain.

Injective will now be the only blockchain that allows for self-executing smart contract logic. This will bring more builders, users, and community members, growing the Injective ecosystem as a whole.

Negative Maker Fees

Injective will now support negative maker fees for approved markets across all exchange dApps built on top of Injective.

Negative maker fees are fees that will be distributed to, instead of taken from, market makers who provide liquidity to Injective. All or a portion of the taker fees will be redirected to the makers in this scenario.

How does this affect the Injective community?

Market makers who provide liquidity to certain spot or perpetual markets with negative marker fees will receive a percentage of their total trade as a rebate. This will provide more incentives and certainty to a market maker when trading on Injective.

For the larger Injective community, more liquidity will allow for more orders and more trading options. Community members may submit governance proposals for which markets they would like to implement negative maker fees for and upon governance approval, market makers will receive the new incentives.

Binary Options Support

Binary Options markets will now be supported on-chain with the latest upgrade.

Similar to perpetual markets, binary options are another type of financial derivative. Binary options, however, are financial contracts in which a payoff occurs based on one of two outcomes of an underlying asset or question.

For example, binary options can be a contract for the outcome of an election: will candidate A become president? The options given are binary - candidate A will either become the new president or he will not - and the correct answer will come with a payoff in a binary options market.

How does this affect the Injective community?

Binary options will provide support for new types of applications to be built on Injective, diversifying the ecosystem for Injective users.

Frontrunner, for example, can utilize binary options to power its fully decentralized sports betting platform.

Full Upgrade Details

The Injective CosmWasm Mainnet Upgrade includes major updates to the Injective blockchain and an assortment of improvements for the broader ecosystem.

Release Notes:

Smart contract support with Cosmwasm
Adding the wasmx module which includes automated execution of smart contracts through BeginBlocker
Adding support for new synthetic trade and position transfer actions executed by smart contracts
Adding historical price and trade volatility tracking on the exchange and oracle modules
New provider oracle type support
Binary options markets support
Interchain accounts support through IBC V3
Negative maker fee along with fee discount support
Changing the Trade & Earn and fee discounts metric from fees paid to trading volume contribution
Adapting the existing feesPaid tracker to volume by scaling the previously recorded feesPaid values by 500
Passing arbitrary data when depositing ERC-20 tokens from Ethereum to allow for additional post-processing (e.g. MsgDeposit directly into the exchange)
Improved clearing price calculations protecting against extreme trade price execution
Performing subaccount trade nonce increments before most order validation, in order to support more deterministic order hash computation
Adding a new market settlement capability through governance
Parameterizing the liquidator reward share rate as an exchange module parameter, set initially to 5%

About Injective

Injective is a lightning fast interoperable layer one blockchain optimized for building the premier Web3 finance applications. Injective provides developers with powerful plug-and-play modules for creating unmatched dApps. INJ is the native asset that powers Injective and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by prominent investors such as Jump Crypto, Pantera and Mark Cuban.