Injective CEO Drops Major Updates You Can't Afford to Miss! | Eric Chen

**Tony Edward** (0:05)
Hey, folks, we're recording at the Injective Policy Summit, and joining me is Eric Chen, who is the CEO of the Injective Foundation. Eric, good to see you.

**Eric Chen** (0:13)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Tony Edward** (0:14)
Eric, you and I spoke years back about Injective. Lots has happened in the Injective ecosystem, lots of adoption and more, and I'm excited to be doing this at the summit with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

**Eric Chen** (0:27)
Thank you.

**Tony Edward** (0:28)
Eric, just so folks know, tell us a bit about your background, what led to the founding of Injective?

**Eric Chen** (0:35)
Initially, we were primarily focusing on resolving some of the common technical issues when it comes to building a fully decentralized infrastructure, especially for on-chain order book or on-chain exchanges, etc.
We came up with this very clever cryptographic primitive and applied it in a very creative way to resolve one of core issues at the time which was front running. That prompted us to build this decentralized exchange infrastructure, and then it prompted us to build this layer 2 environment for exchange ecosystem, and then it allows us to transition into a layer 1 blockchain for the exchange ecosystem. Then very soon after, a blockchain bill for finance, and now the next generation of on-chain economy.

**Tony Edward** (1:27)
What type of building are you seeing on the Injective blockchain? Is it tokenization and much more?

**Eric Chen** (1:32)
Yeah. I think the most recent exciting part for the ecosystem for us is about tokenization and also all these institutional adoptions and use cases, especially when it comes to tokenizing not only just real-world assets, but also data itself and also a lot of very interesting, like Anjing perpetuals on different types of RWAs. I think these are so far gaining a lot of steam. Sure. Of course, this is on top of a very much diverse and blossoming builder ecosystem that ranges from AI agents to different types of DeFi applications, the lending, to everything.

**Tony Edward** (2:09)
AI agents are all the rage right now. A lot of people are building infrastructure for that, for the agentic economy. Do you see that being possibly growing bigger than tokenization or maybe second to tokenization?

**Eric Chen** (2:22)
I think it really depends on the metric that you measure them against.
We just released the AI SDK designed specifically for AI agents, so that it's very much of a well-harnessed safe environment for different types of AI agents to engage with the Injective blockchain. It makes it easier than ever to integrate. So this way, user don't even have to know how the Injective blockchain works. Not even users, developers don't even have to know. You can just tell the agent to like, hey, buy something for me, maybe on Injective, maybe not. But if it's on Injective, the AI agent will be able to acquire it.

**Tony Edward** (3:00)
So as a layer one, how are you preparing to handle the volume of transactions for not only tokenization but AI agents over time as that grows?

**Eric Chen** (3:09)
I mean, scaling is like a consistent priority and what we've always been decently good at, to say the least.
So being an OSHA-performing blockchain out there and being able to scale as a specialized modular blockchain that can be hyper-optimized for a specific type of transaction, we have plenty of experience, so lower the cost down to make sure the overall bandwidth of the blockchain can satisfy all the agentic payments or different types of DeFi use cases or different types of institutional use cases. And you can always be faster and that's always what we're working on.

**Tony Edward** (3:52)
Oh, absolutely. I know it's a work in progress to continue to scale and make things better because we're in what, Eric, we could call the early innings of Web3, right? Correct.
Now, there are a lot of institutions that are looking to tokenize and do a lot more. What type of demand are you seeing from these institutions when they come to you and say, here's our plan, here's what we want to put on chain? Has that demand grown and are they looking to put stocks, real estate, things on chain?

**Eric Chen** (4:19)
Absolutely. I think, you know, not only are they trying to put on, you know, different types of equity or different types of like asset, I think they're slowly starting to learn that this is a very unique fundraising environment or like a kind of like a capital discovery environment. So one of the really interesting example is that, let's say like, you know, there's an asset or exotic asset that's kind of like having trouble to find, you know, the necessary buyers or investors via their existing rails within like a limited like a user base or audience within the US. And then once they tokenize it, they realize, you know, hey, like turns out a lot of different folks in Asia or in Europe really love this asset.