Validators process transactions and receive transactions fees (supply-side fees).

Injective is a smart contract platform for decentralized finance applications (a blockchain) and an orderbook exchange protocol. Injective was founded by Eric Chen, Albert Chon etc. and launched in 2020. Note that this dashboard only tracks Injective's blockchain business.

INJ holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue) via Burn Auctions. Injective's investors include Binance, Jump Crypto, Mark Cuban, etc.

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Injective

# Injective Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Injective expenses represents the total token incentives paid by the protocol, measuring the cost of maintaining network security and validator participation. This metric captures staking rewards distributed to network participants as a form of protocol expense. The calculation aggregates token incentive distributions across Injective's dual-chain architecture: Injective Cosmos (which distributes staking rewards through token minting) and Injective EVM (which currently has zero token incentives). All values are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds and aggregated daily.

## 2. Data sources

- **Injective Cosmos block events**: Blockchain event data from Injective's Cosmos SDK implementation, specifically focusing on mint events generated during block processing
- **Injective EVM transaction data**: Transaction records from Injective's EVM-compatible chain, including gas usage and fee information  
- **Injective EVM block data**: Block-level data containing base fee information for EVM transactions
- **End-of-day price feeds**: INJ token pricing data from CoinGecko for USD conversion

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Injective Cosmos token incentives extraction
- **Purpose**: Captures staking rewards distributed through the Cosmos SDK minting mechanism
- **Logic**: Filters block events for mint events that occur during the `BeginBlock` phase of block processing. Extracts the `amount` field from the event attributes JSON structure, which contains the newly minted INJ tokens. Converts amounts from wei format (dividing by 1e18) to standard INJ token units. Aggregates all mint events per day by summing the converted amounts.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, `event_type` filtered to 'mint', `event_attributes` JSON containing the mint `amount`, and `source` filtered to 'BeginBlock'

### Component B: Injective EVM token incentives tracking  
- **Purpose**: Establishes that Injective EVM has zero token incentives while maintaining consistent time boundaries
- **Logic**: Uses transaction and block data from the EVM chain to establish daily time boundaries but sets token incentives to zero for all days. This ensures the final metric includes both chains even when one has no incentive distributions.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation, with `token_incentives` hardcoded to 0

### Component C: USD price conversion
- **Purpose**: Converts INJ token amounts to USD values for standardized reporting
- **Logic**: Retrieves end-of-day INJ token prices from CoinGecko feeds. Performs left join between daily token incentive amounts and corresponding price data. Multiplies native INJ amounts by USD prices, using zero as fallback when price data is unavailable.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` for joining price data, `price` from CoinGecko feeds, calculated USD `token_incentives` amounts

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Union operation combines Injective Cosmos token incentives (which have actual values) with Injective EVM token incentives (which are zero) into a single dataset covering both chains
- **Currency conversion**: All native INJ amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds, with missing prices defaulting to zero
- **Time aggregation**: Daily timestamp truncation ensures all data is aggregated to day-level granularity using the start of each day
- **Final calculation**: Token incentives amounts are directly relabeled as expenses since token incentives represent a cost to the protocol. The finalize_metric macro applies standardized processing including gap-filling with zeros for missing days and chain availability filtering to ensure data quality

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

InjectiveINJ

Expenses

Expenses

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown