Injective now uses fixed, published gas amounts for the main actions on its built-in exchange. Governance proposal 709, “Enable Fixed Gas for Exchange Messages on Injective”, passed when voting closed at 17:02:19 UTC on 17 October 2026, according to the on-chain proposal record, and the change applied in that same block. Order placement, cancellation, deposits and withdrawals now come with known gas budgets, so trading bots and wallets no longer have to simulate each transaction to find out how much gas to set. The Defiant reported the activation ten minutes later.
This is a plumbing change, not a price story. Gas is still paid in INJ, trading fee settings were not touched, and a spot market order still costs a few hundred-thousandths of an INJ. What changes is that the number is known in advance.
How gas worked on Injective before fixed gas
Injective is built with the Cosmos SDK, and like other chains of that family it meters every transaction in gas. Each step of execution uses some, and the sender pays for gas at a set price per unit. Our glossary entry on what gas fees are covers the basics.
The catch is the gas limit. A wallet or a bot normally sends the transaction to a node first as a simulation, reads how much gas it would use, adds a margin and then broadcasts it with that limit. The round trip adds latency. If the order book changes between the simulation and the moment the transaction lands in a block, the estimate can come up short and the transaction fails with an “out of gas” error.
For someone placing two orders a day by hand, this hardly matters. For a market maker that places and cancels thousands of orders, every simulation is a delay, and every failed transaction is a quote that never reached the book.
Injective fixed gas: the gas limits for orders and cancels
In fixed gas mode, each core exchange message gets a deterministic gas cost, so a bot can take the figure from a table and set the limit directly. The clearest public copy of that table is in code. Injective Labs merged pull request #772 into its TypeScript SDK on 1 October 2026, twelve days before the vote opened, and it hard-codes a gas limit for each exchange message. The main ones:
| Exchange message (one per transaction) | Gas limit in the SDK | Fee at the minimum gas price |
|---|---|---|
| Spot market order | 300,000 | 0.000048 INJ |
| Spot limit order (post-only) | 300,000 (330,000) | 0.000048 INJ (0.0000528 INJ) |
| Derivative market order | 310,000 | 0.0000496 INJ |
| Derivative limit order (post-only) | 330,000 (370,000) | 0.0000528 INJ (0.0000592 INJ) |
| Cancel a spot order | 185,000 | 0.0000296 INJ |
| Cancel a derivative order | 200,000 | 0.000032 INJ |
| Deposit to a subaccount | 330,000 | 0.0000528 INJ |
| Withdraw from a subaccount | 320,000 | 0.0000512 INJ |
| Transfer between subaccounts | 220,000 | 0.0000352 INJ |
The last column is plain multiplication: the gas limit times the chain’s minimum gas price of 160,000,000 attoINJ per unit, or 0.00000000016 INJ, as set in the txfees module parameters read on 18 October. At $8.53 per INJ (CoinGecko, 04:49 UTC on 18 October), the 300,000 gas of a spot market order comes to about $0.0004.
A few details matter for anyone running a strategy. Cancels are the cheapest messages in the table, at 185,000 and 200,000 gas, which suits market makers who cancel far more often than they fill. Post-only orders get a higher limit than ordinary limit orders. An order that carries an expiration block gets 10% on top. Binary-options orders use the same figures as derivatives, and position-margin changes sit at 185,000 to 200,000.
For a batch, the SDK simply adds up the figure for each message. If even one message in the transaction is missing from the table, it drops fixed gas for that transaction and estimates as before.
More predictable, not necessarily cheaper
Nothing in proposal 709 promises lower costs. Its stated aims are lower latency and fewer out-of-gas failures. A limit taken from a table has to cover the heavier version of each action, so for a simple order it can sit above what a fresh simulation would have asked for.
The SDK numbers also settle a point left open during the vote. Crypto Briefing reported on 13 October that a derivative limit order would be fixed at 330,000 gas, and that is the value in the code. Some figures in other early reports do not match the SDK, and we do not use them.
Proposal 709 passed with 76.8% yes and almost no opposition
The proposal was submitted and opened for voting at 17:02:19 UTC on 13 October and closed exactly four days later. It was not an expedited vote, and its deposit was 100 INJ. It carries a single message that updates the exchange module parameters, and the only change it describes is setting fixed_gas_enabled to true. The text adds: “All other exchange parameters remain at their current mainnet values.”
This was a parameter change, not a software upgrade. The feature already existed in the node software and had been live on Injective’s testnet since July 2026, the proposal says, so no new binary was needed. The proposer disclosed: “I am a member of the Injective Labs team.” In other words, the change came from the main development company behind the chain.
The final tally, in INJ:
- Yes: 23,988,807.97 INJ, or 76.8% of all votes cast.
- Abstain: 7,257,804.89 INJ.
- No: 110.30 INJ, and No with veto: 396.97 INJ.
Leaving abstentions aside, 99.998% of the votes were in favour. About 31.25 million INJ took part. Against the 57.19 million INJ bonded in staking at 04:42 UTC on 18 October, that is a turnout of roughly 54.6%. The figure is approximate, because the bonded total at the moment of the vote was not available.
Block 187,720,178 carries a header time of 17:02:19.733 UTC on 17 October, the first block after the voting deadline, and that is where the result was applied. By 04:42 UTC on 18 October the chain had reached block 187,790,496: 70,318 blocks in about 41,400 seconds, or roughly 0.59 seconds per block.
What bot builders and wallets have to change
The gain only comes if the software sending the transactions uses it. Pull request #772 adds a useFixedGas option to two broadcasters: the one in the core TypeScript SDK, used by bots that sign with a private key, and the one in the wallet package that front-ends use. The option is off by default. When it is on, recognised messages use the preset gas and skip estimation, and any gas value set explicitly by the developer still overrides the presets.
So nothing changes on its own for a bot built on an older SDK version: it keeps simulating as before. Teams that want the latency gain need to update and switch the flag on. We found no statement yet from an exchange front-end or a market maker saying it has done so.
Gas is a small line in Injective’s economics
The change will not move Injective’s revenue much. DefiLlama counted about $8,041 of chain fees over 24 hours, $56,281 over seven days and $238,642 over 30 days, as of 18 October 2026, and an Injective chain staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">TVL of about $14.35 million.
Nor is there a direct link to INJ’s burn mechanics. The token’s supply side runs through the old weekly burn auction, which removed 6.78 million INJ, and the monthly Community BuyBack that replaced it. The first four BuyBack rounds, from November 2025, burned 178,338.03 INJ, Injective said on 10 March. Our entry on tokenomics explains how burns and issuance fit together.
For traders, the competitive point is execution. Injective presents itself as a finance-focused layer 1 with an order book built into the chain, unlike a decentralized exchange running as a smart contract, and it competes with Hyperliquid for on-chain perpetual futures traders. Removing a simulation step per order is the kind of detail professional market makers notice. Whether it changes where they quote is not yet visible in any data.
What is still unknown
Injective had not published a blog post on the activation as of 18 October; its blog index listed nothing on fixed gas. The gas values above are the ones Injective Labs put in its own SDK. We could not check them against the chain’s source code or an official documentation page, and the SDK could change them in a later release.
There is no post-activation data yet on failed transactions, latency or average gas used. It is also unclear whether the chain treats the fixed amount as a flat charge or only as the limit a sender must set. The fee column assumes the fee equals the limit times the minimum price.
No date is scheduled for the next step. The signs to watch are SDK and wallet releases that turn useFixedGas on, an update of Injective’s gas documentation and the first usage statistics from the chain.