Binance-Backed DeFi Project Raises $10M At $1B Valuation From Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, Others

Decentralized derivatives exchange Injective Protocol has raised $10 million in a “party funding round” from new investors.

What Happened: According to TechCrunch, billionaire investor Mark Cuban has made a strategic investment in the project, joining other high-profile venture firms like Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed, Cadenza Ventures (formerly BitMex Ventures), CMS, and QCP Capital.

"This was a private placement token sale," Mirza Uddin of Injective Protocol told The Block on Tuesday.

"We sold tokens with a lockup period at a $1 billion+ valuation."

The lockup period for investors is said to be one year, while the tokens issued to the new investors were taken from the protocol’s private treasury.

Why It Matters: The cross-chain derivatives exchange was launched in December 2020, backed by leading crypto exchange Binance.

As part of Injective’s goal is to make currency exchanges completely decentralized, there is no centralized governing body that enforces control of its development.

Essentially, the exchange is solely operated by people who hold INJ tokens. 

“Why do I invest in Injective: the whole stop out because of the capital requirements, Robinhood didn’t do it on purpose to hurt traders, they just didn’t have enough equity and they would have gone bankrupt because they had too many customers.

But if you’re doing it in a decentralized manner, every investor gets to see how much Injective has of all of this, there’s no hiding it and that creates an opportunity,” said Mark Cuban.

What Else: In addition to trading cryptocurrencies, users can also trade stocks, forex, NFTs, and synthetic assets like tokenized versions of Apple Inc AAPL and Tesla Inc TSLA.

Injective CEO Eric Chan stated on Twitter, “Many times, we've seen centralized legacy financial infrastructure decouple and fail before our eyes. We will not sleep until we build a network that will not only disrupt crypto but the entire financial market and exchange landscape.”