First published 26 October 2020, the week the token listed. The chain was not open yet. Expanded in October 2026 so the burn auction is not described as a dividend, and so the Ethereum token is not described as the gas. Injective is a proof-of-stake chain, built with the Cosmos toolkit, with an order book in the protocol rather than only in a website. What is Cosmos (ATOM)? is the Hub in that family. INJ is not ATOM. INJ is the fee coin and the stake. Trading opened on 21 October 2020, from a Binance sale of 9 million tokens out of a launch supply of 100 million. The canonical chain’s mainnet was November 2021. A balance from 2020 may still be the Ethereum token. The native coin lives on Injective. They are connected by a bridge the validators run. A bridge is extra software, not a tunnel.
Ethereum without the jargon is where the old token sits. What is BNB? is the exchange token people already knew. INJ is not BNB, and an order on this chain is not an order on Binance. An exchange balance is an IOU, not a wallet.
Mint and burn at the same time
The launch figure of 100 million is not a ceiling the software refuses to cross. Validators are paid in new INJ. The rate moves with how much is staked, inside bounds governance sets. Working the other way, a share of trading fees — the design has said 60 percent — is used to buy INJ and destroy it. For years that was a weekly auction: people bid INJ for a basket of fee tokens, and the INJ bid was burned. In October 2025 the project replaced the weekly auction with a monthly buyback. The basket, the schedule, and the bounds are parameters. A page that says the supply is frozen at 100 million is describing the sale, not the chain.
A burn reduces the count. It does not pay you. Bidding in the auction, when one is open, is a trade against a basket. It is not a savings account. This page will not walk through placing the bid.
Addresses on the chain start with inj. An Ethereum address will not receive the native coin. The project has also added an Ethereum-style virtual machine on Injective. Code that looks familiar is still on this chain, and the fee is still INJ. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to trade, stake, or buy INJ.
