Injective, a company that has built and deployed a purpose-built blockchain for finance, said today that it has raised $40 million in new funding.

The move capitalizes on a trend in which blockchain-based applications are redefining finance with decentralized technologies. The funds were raised in a private token sale led by Jump Crypto. BH Digital, the crypto asset unit of investment firm Brevan Howard, also participated in the round.

Injective is a fully scalable blockchain product developed for decentralized financial applications, also known as DeFi, which is a rapidly growing industry. DeFi eschews the traditional concept of banks and middlemen by allowing participants to transact peer-to-peer using self-executing smart contracts to complete transactions.

With Injective’s platform, fully decentralized finance applications can be built, such as cryptocurrency exchanges, predictions markets, derivatives and options trading. That’s done by provisioning a large library of cross-chain primitives such as an on-chain, financial transaction order book for DeFi apps.

This allows Injective to power existing decentralized applications such as decentralized exchange Injective Pro and sports betting site Frontrunner.

Injective’s platform is designed to be highly interoperable with other blockchains, including Ethereum. It also incorporates Cosmos, allowing it a cross-chain infrastructure. This is part of a major upgrade to its mainnet that happened in July, which added CosmWasm smart contracts to its ecosystem.

“CosmWasm is a much more resource-efficient smart contract environment compared to a traditional Ethereum virtual machine,” Eric Chen, Injective co-founder and chief executive, told ZDNet about the upgrade. “And more importantly, this chain upgrade added a big feature where it can self-execute smart contracts at the beginning of every single block.”

The entire platform is designed to be developer-friendly and allows Ethereum-compatible DeFi apps to be launched within minutes. It is designed with extremely fast transaction times and zero “gas” fees to execute a contract, so transactions will not suffer bottlenecks once deployed.

Since the launch of its mainnet in November, Injective has already processed more than 90 million transactions, and dapps built on the platform have generated more than $7 billion in cumulative volume.

The total locked-in value of the DeFi market is $44 billion as of today, down from $86 billion in January, according to DeFiPulse. That’s because of what experts are calling “crypto winter,” a downturn across cryptocurrency markets caused by a number of factors. Those factors included the collapse of the Terra stablecoin ecosystem and the bankruptcy of several major crypto lending platforms such as Three Arrows Capital.

In spite of the downturn, DeFi has remained a hot topic among developers and businesses who continue to build on it and participate in it.

“Businesses and financial institutions have already begun to participate in DeFi in a big way and the natural next step will be building personalized decentralized applications,” said Kanav Kariya, president of Jump Crypto. “Injective offers these institutions an out-of-the-box solution that can be leveraged to build any finance app.

Injective said it will use the cash infusion to develop its platform further, with an aim to create a better finance-enabled blockchain. It will also use it to increase the utility of its native INJ token, which is used on its blockchain to fuel liquidity for dapps built on it.

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