Those high-frequency trading guys on Wall Street will drop tens of millions of dollars on dedicated fiber optic lines without batting an eye, just to get a few milliseconds of speed advantage. Time is money—this has never been an empty saying in the financial world.

Now, Web3 is starting to compete on speed too. There’s a chain called Injective that’s pushed transaction confirmation times down to under 0.8 seconds—don’t underestimate that number. What it’s doing isn’t just making your orders a few seconds faster. This thing is essentially redefining how on-chain high-frequency trading works. The low-latency advantage that used to be exclusive to institutions is now within reach for retail traders as well. More importantly, strategies that rely on speed—like derivatives hedging and cross-chain arbitrage—finally have real room to operate on-chain.

Speaking of pain points—traditional public chains are so slow, it’s like putting shackles on high-frequency trading. A single transaction confirmation on Ethereum takes tens of seconds, and even with Layer2, it still takes several seconds. What can you do with that kind of lag? The market price will have changed completely. Think about commodities like crude oil futures, where prices can jump several ticks in a second—a 5-second delay means what? The price you see when you place the order and the actual execution price could be totally different, with slippage so big you start to question your life choices. Sometimes, a single order can wipe out all your profits, or even turn into a loss.

Solana once promised to be a paradise for high-frequency traders, and its TPS numbers are impressive. But the problem is—it keeps going down. What happens to your open positions when the network goes offline? You just have to watch as you get liquidated. For real high-frequency traders, this kind of instability is even deadlier than being slow. A single outage can trigger a chain reaction of liquidations, blowing up an entire strategy group in an instant.

So this 0.8 seconds from Injective...