The Block: Injective raises $10 million from Mark Cuban and others

Decentralized derivatives exchange Injective has raised $10 million in a new funding round.

Several investors, including billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed Ventures, CMS Holdings, and QCP Capital, participated in the round.

"This was a private placement token sale," Mirza Uddin of Injective told The Block. "We sold tokens with a lockup period at a $1 billion+ valuation."

The lockup period is one year, said Uddin.

Injective's native token INJ is already live and trading, but new tokens were issued to the investors from the protocol's treasury, Uddin told The Block. "It's difficult to buy in the market because the size is quite large," he said.

With fresh capital at hand, Injective looks to enhance its platform and double its current team of 22 by next year, Uddin told The Block.

"In addition, we are setting up an internal proprietary trading desk to help provide liquidity to our exchange," he said. "In that effort, we have recruited a head trader from Tower Research and are quickly ramping up that internal desk."

Injective was launched last December and is built on Tendermint, a Layer-2 scaling solution. The protocol allows users to trade crypto, stocks, forex, crypto, non-fungible tokens, as well as synthetic assets.

The private token round brings Injective's total funding to date to over $17 million. The protocol has previously raised $7.1 million, according to Crunchbase.

This article originally appeared in The Block.

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.