Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010 )
On the evening of November 6, Eric Chen, CEO of Injective Labs, and Steven McClurg, founder and CEO of Canary Capital, appeared together in New York's Times Square to ring the opening bell for the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in celebration of the staking INJ ETF INJC's listing. This was not an IPO of Injective's own stock, nor a traditional fund's listing, but the first time in history that a buying channel for the INJ token was opened to ordinary brokerage accounts, with plans to include staking yields in the net asset value.
From a project born in a university dormitory in 2018, to a graduate of YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs), and then to Wall Street, the global financial center, Injective completed this feat in 8 years. But just three days after ringing the INJC opening bell, on the evening of November 9, the Injective mainnet experienced an outage of over 4 hours.
About half an hour later, the official YZi Labs account posted to congratulate Injective on ringing the Nasdaq opening bell, and YZi Labs Managing Partner Ella Zhang subsequently followed up with a congratulatory post. But what felt rather incongruous was that as numerous congratulatory messages spread far and wide, this public chain that had been running for 8 years came to a halt.
Injective's New Story: Becoming Institutional-Grade Financial Infrastructure
On the eve of the INJ ETF's listing on Nasdaq, Injective officially presented its new narrative roadmap: becoming institutional-grade financial infrastructure.
Compared with previous public chain narratives, this narrative is undoubtedly more aligned with the current demand created by the deep coupling between traditional financial markets and crypto markets.
On November 2, Injective launched Institutional Rail, which it officially described as "a channel for banks, trading firms, and institutional applications directly to block validators," emphasizing features such as predictable inclusion times and the ability to receive receipts before block production.
On November 5, the INJ ETF officially launched;
On November 6, the Nasdaq bell was rung;
On November 8, Injective officially published a review of the fifth anniversary of its mainnet launch, recounting the various achievements of the past 5 years, highlighting its Nasdaq listing as a particularly important milestone, and setting its sights on technical and numerical milestones such as bringing $10 billion in RWA assets on-chain and quantum-resistant security technology.
No one expected that at this critical juncture when it was entering the view of institutional clients, the Injective mainnet would suddenly face an outage.
Less Than 3 Days After the ETF Listed on Nasdaq, the Mainnet Experienced an Outage of Over 4 Hours
According to Injective's official node monitoring, the Injective mainnet had stopped producing blocks, with the latest block height at 191,016,661, generated at 21:04 Beijing time.
Affected by this news, crypto exchanges Upbit, Coinone, and Kraken successively announced that due to the interruption of block generation on Injective (INJ), INJ deposits and withdrawals had been suspended, while spot trading was unaffected; after confirming the stability of deposits and withdrawals, they would notify the resumption through announcements.
As for the specific cause of the mainnet outage, there are currently 2 explanations, making the situation murky.
According to information on the incident page of validator Figment, initially the explanation for the event was that, at the request of the Injective Foundation, mainnet validators were suspended that day under network-wide coordination as a precautionary measure against a potential attack path; later, the updated explanation changed to "tracking a security patch and preparing to apply it." At 2:04 a.m. on November 10, the conclusion given was that "validators have completed the patch and returned to normal." From this perspective, this outage lasting about 4 hours and 24 minutes was merely a precautionary security patch update.
But the statement from the official Injective Telegram community administrator was not entirely consistent.
According to Telegram community messages, the official statement was: "Injective is working with validator nodes to conduct a scheduled mainnet upgrade test, continuing to advance preparations for a major network upgrade in the coming weeks. This drill is part of our new network readiness plan, designed to test emergency upgrade procedures and, after the launch of Injective's institutional channel, strengthen coordination among validators and ecosystem partners."
In other words, the earlier reason given for the outage was "preventing attacks and applying security patches"; later it was said that "the outage was part of the plan, just an upgrade drill." One can only say that the Injective official side may not have been able to unify its messaging.
Fortunately, as a token with relatively strong recent price performance, INJ's price did not suddenly plummet with the Injective outage; before and after the outage, the price remained around $7.9-8.1.
Perhaps, for a public chain that has set its business goals on the traditional financial market, a technical outage at the beginning of the ETF's launch is not such a big deal.
Injective officially released today a branding advertisement on New York taxis for "INJ lands on Wall Street"
In the track of crypto mainstreaming, Injective has finally found its ecological niche and development path, but in the future, if it wants to persuade more traditional financial institutions to join this ecosystem and put in real liquidity and capital exposure to buy INJ and INJC, perhaps Injective will still need more stable technical performance.
Fortunately, 8 years have already been persevered through, and the next 8 years belonging to Injective are still worth looking forward to.
