In February 2022, Forbes India credited a DeFi protocol built by two brothers from Kota with routing more than $10 billion in assets and ranked it the world’s fifth-largest decentralised finance project. By September 2026, the protocol’s own governance token had lost 77% of its value in a single year, even as the business behind it — rebuilt and renamed Fluid — was still carrying $1.56 billion in deposits and clearing tens of millions of dollars in fees.
That gap between what Instadapp built and what its token is worth is the whole story. Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain dropped out of college to build middleware that let people move money between decentralised finance protocols with one click. They raised comparatively little money to do it — $12.4 million (~₹119 crore at $1≈₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) across two rounds — survived a brutal crypto winter, absorbed two security incidents in 2026 alone, and rebuilt their product from scratch under a new name. The protocol is still standing. Whether that has made anyone rich is a separate question.
Quick facts
| Company | Instadapp (protocol and token rebranded Fluid, December 2024) |
| Founded | 2018 — built at ETHIndia hackathon, Bengaluru, August 2018; publicly launched November 2018 |
| Founders | Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain (brothers, Kota, Rajasthan) |
| Businesses | Fluid Lending, Fluid Vault, Fluid DEX, Fluid Lite, Avocado smart wallet, Instadapp PRO/Lite |
| Protocol revenue (trailing 12 months) | $10.46 million, as of 25 September 2026 (DefiLlama) |
| Protocol TVL | $1.56 billion across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Plasma and Polygon, as of 25 September 2026 (DefiLlama); down from a reported $10.16 billion in February 2022 (Forbes India) |
| Listed | Private company; no IPO. The FLUID governance token trades on public crypto exchanges — this is not an equity listing |
| Market value / last valuation | No company valuation was disclosed for either funding round (Inc42). FLUID token market cap: $119.9 million, as of 25 September 2026 (CoinGecko), down from a reported $525 million in September 2025 (BingX) |
| Key backers | Pantera Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Standard Crypto, Alliance DAO, Andre Cronje |
What Instadapp actually does
Instadapp is not an app that ordinary savers open to buy crypto. It is infrastructure that other DeFi products and power users route money through. Under its current name, Fluid, the protocol runs a shared pool of deposited crypto assets — mainly ETH, staked ETH, USDC, USDT, DAI and GHO — that simultaneously backs three things: lending markets, collateralised borrowing vaults, and a decentralised exchange (DEX). Instadapp’s own site describes this as “8+ years of DeFi expertise” distilled into a single liquidity layer, alongside its older products: Instadapp PRO and Lite (automated yield strategies) and Avocado, a smart-contract wallet (Instadapp, September 2026). The customers are, in effect, two groups: retail and institutional depositors who want yield on idle crypto, and other protocols and traders who need deep, cheap liquidity to lend, borrow or swap against.
The origin
Sowmay Jain, who once planned to become a chartered accountant, and his younger brother Samyak Jain, a computer science student in Kota, both dropped out of college in their second year to work on crypto full time (Forbes India, February 2022). In August 2018 they built a prototype at the ETHIndia hackathon in Bengaluru and won it; the win brought them a grant from Kyber Network, and by November 2018 they had a live public product (Forbes India, February 2022). The insight was narrow but useful: DeFi in 2018 was a scattering of separate protocols — MakerDAO, Compound, Uniswap — that did not talk to each other, and moving a position from one to another meant several manual, gas-expensive transactions. Samyak Jain described the fix simply: “you can move from one protocol to another with just one single tap. So it’s connecting all the financial things together” (Forbes India, February 2022). Instadapp’s “smart wallet, bridges contracts and reserve pools” sat between the user and the underlying protocols, doing the routing the user would otherwise have had to do by hand (Sowmay Jain, quoted by CoinDesk, October 2019). At launch it was already the fourth-largest DeFi application by locked assets, with $30.8 million on the platform (CoinDesk, October 2019).
The struggle years
The company’s setbacks were less about running out of money than about the ground shifting under a business built on other people’s protocols and a boom-bust asset class. Three episodes stand out, each with numbers attached.
The first was scale reversal. Forbes India’s profile put Instadapp’s assets under management at $10.16 billion in February 2022, ranking it the fifth-largest DeFi entity globally at the time. By 25 September 2026, the successor protocol’s tracked TVL was $1.56 billion (DefiLlama) — a decline of roughly 85% from that peak, spanning the 2022 crypto downturn and a full product rebuild. The two figures are not measured on an identical basis (2022-era Instadapp tracked assets moved through user-owned “DSA” smart accounts across many external protocols; the current Fluid TVL is protocol-owned liquidity in its own lending, vault and DEX markets), but the scale of contraction is real and both numbers are independently reported.
The second and third were direct financial losses in 2026. In March 2026, Fluid absorbed roughly $70 million in bad debt stemming from an exploit of a third-party protocol, Resolv, that had borrowed against Fluid’s liquidity — and repaid it in full from protocol reserves (CryptoTimes, 31 May 2026). Two months later, on 27 May 2026, an attacker compromised the off-chain infrastructure that signs Fluid’s Merkle-tree reward claims and drained roughly 125,000 FLUID tokens and 51,900 GHO stablecoins across multiple reward-distributor contracts in a 24-second window, later routing the funds through Tornado Cash; Fluid did not disclose the breach publicly until 31 May, four days after on-chain researchers had already flagged it (CryptoTimes, 31 May 2026). Fluid said its core lending and DEX contracts, and user deposits, were unaffected, and that only the off-chain rewards system was compromised.
- February 2022: reported AUM of $10.16 billion, fifth-largest DeFi protocol globally (Forbes India)
- 2022–2024: broad DeFi TVL contraction industry-wide; Instadapp’s own wallet-aggregation model loses relevance as usage shifts to focused lending and DEX products
- March 2026: ~$70 million in bad debt from the Resolv Protocol exploit absorbed and repaid by Fluid (CryptoTimes)
- 27–31 May 2026: key-compromise attack drains ~125,000 FLUID and 51,900 GHO from off-chain rewards infrastructure; disclosed four days after detection (CryptoTimes)
The turning point
The pivot came in late 2024, when the team stopped positioning Instadapp as a wallet layer sitting on top of other people’s protocols and shipped its own decentralised exchange inside a “unified liquidity layer” it called Fluid. The DEX went live at the end of October 2024, and within three weeks it had processed more than $1 billion in trading volume, making it the third-largest DEX on Ethereum by that measure — a milestone reported by both The Defiant (December 2024) and Gate.com’s later protocol review. On the back of that traction, the team filed a governance proposal on 3 December 2024 to rebrand the entire protocol and token from Instadapp/INST to Fluid/FLUID, swapping the token 1:1 (BingX). Before the rebrand, Instadapp was a legacy middleware brand with a token trading far below its 2021 highs and a TVL a fraction of its 2022 peak; after it, Fluid had a genuine top-three Ethereum DEX, a lending and vault business built on the same liquidity, and — within a year — TVL back up near $1.8–1.9 billion (BingX, citing September 2025 figures). The name changed, but so did the product actually generating the numbers.
The money behind it
Instadapp raised comparatively modest venture capital for a protocol that would go on to move billions in assets — a common pattern in DeFi, where token sales and protocol-owned liquidity substitute for later equity rounds.
- Seed round, announced 1 October 2019: $2.4 million, with Pantera Capital as the most-cited lead and IDEO CoLab Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Robot Ventures and Kyber Network’s Loi Luu also participating (CoinDesk, October 2019; Inc42). Instadapp was Hyderabad-based at the time (Inshorts, October 2019).
- Series A, dated 6 October 2021: $10 million, with Alliance DAO, Yearn.Finance founder Andre Cronje and Balaji Srinivasan among the named backers, alongside Standard Crypto and DeFi Alliance reported elsewhere as participants (Inc42).
- Total raised: $12.4 million (~₹119 crore) across two rounds; no valuation was disclosed for either round (Inc42).
- Token, not equity, as the later capital-raising tool: the INST governance token went live on Ethereum on 7 April 2021, when the protocol managed more than $2.3 billion across roughly 18,000 “Smart Account” wallets (Cointelegraph, April 2021). The Defiant reported the 100-million-token supply was weighted 55% to the community. INST hit its all-time high of $24.40 on 16 June 2021 — its full public-trading launch date — and has not come close to that level since (CoinGecko, September 2026).
What each backer changed: Pantera and Coinbase Ventures gave the seed round crypto-industry credibility that helped Instadapp get listed and integrated inside Compound, MakerDAO and Uniswap tooling early; Andre Cronje’s participation in the Series A tied Instadapp’s roadmap to the Yearn/DeFi-native investor network that later fed users toward its “Lite” yield vaults.
How it makes money
Fluid’s pitch is capital efficiency: the same deposited dollar is never idle in just one silo.
- Lending spread: borrowers pay interest on loans; a cut of that interest goes to the protocol treasury rather than only to depositors (DefiLlama fees methodology, September 2026).
- “Smart Collateral” and “Smart Debt”: assets posted as collateral, and even assets currently borrowed, can simultaneously sit inside Fluid’s DEX pools earning trading fees — collateral and debt both work instead of sitting locked and unproductive (BingX).
- DEX swap fees: a share of the fees traders pay to swap through Fluid’s pools accrues to the protocol (DefiLlama).
- Fluid Lite performance and withdrawal fees: a 20% performance fee on ETH-strategy vault yield, and a 0.05% withdrawal fee on the USD vault (DefiLlama fees breakdown, September 2026).
- Cross-chain revenue share: a share of revenue from JupLend, a Solana lending product built on Jupiter that uses Fluid’s liquidity model (DefiLlama).
The part people get wrong: none of this revenue is “profit” that flows to Sowmay and Samyak Jain the way it would at a normal company. Governance has directed that up to 100% of protocol revenue be used for FLUID token buybacks rather than distributed as a dividend (Gate.com) — the theory being that shrinking token supply supports price, but it means the immediate cash beneficiary is the treasury and, indirectly, token holders, not a corporate P&L line.
The numbers
Instadapp/Fluid has not published — and, as an unlisted, non-custodial protocol run substantially through on-chain governance rather than a conventional audited corporate entity, does not appear to publish — a traditional multi-year revenue and profit-and-loss statement of the kind an Indian private company files with the MCA. What is independently trackable, because Fluid’s smart contracts are public, is protocol-level fee revenue by period, reported by DefiLlama, the standard DeFi analytics tracker. That is not company revenue in the audited-filing sense, and there is no disclosed profit-and-loss figure to pair with it — a distinction this piece is keeping deliberately explicit rather than blur it into a company financial statement.
| Period (to 25 September 2026) | Protocol fee revenue | ₹ crore equivalent |
| All-time (since fee tracking began) | $22.92 million | ~₹220 crore |
| Trailing 12 months | $10.46 million | ~₹100 crore |
| Last 30 days | $571,188 | ~₹5.5 crore |
| Last 24 hours | $25,378 | ~₹0.24 crore |
(Source: DefiLlama fees and revenue data for Fluid, as of 25 September 2026. Rupee figures are a reference conversion at $1≈₹96.0 and are not company-reported.)
Where the money comes from
- By chain, TVL: Ethereum $748.2 million, Arbitrum $151.9 million, Plasma $42.4 million, Base $26.6 million, Polygon $4.4 million — Ethereum alone holds roughly 48% of all deposits (DefiLlama, 25 September 2026).
- By chain, borrowed amounts: Ethereum $582.3 million, Arbitrum $131.8 million, Plasma $64.3 million, Base $18.8 million, Polygon $1.7 million — total borrowed across the protocol is $798.9 million against $1.56 billion deposited (DefiLlama).
- By product line: lending and vault interest, DEX swap fees, Fluid Lite vault performance fees, and a Solana revenue-share via JupLend all contribute — DefiLlama’s breakdown shows lending and DEX activity as the largest identifiable components of the $10.46 million trailing-12-month revenue figure.
- The surprise: the protocol’s utilisation — borrowed amount versus deposits — sits above 50% on every chain it operates on, which is high for DeFi lending and is precisely the capital-efficiency pitch behind the “Smart Collateral/Smart Debt” design working as intended (DefiLlama).
The risks
- Token value has decoupled from protocol usage. FLUID’s market capitalisation was reported at roughly $525 million in September 2025 (BingX) and stood at $119.9 million on 25 September 2026 (CoinGecko) — a decline of about 77%, matching CoinGecko’s own calculated one-year price change of -77.36%. Over the same period, TVL and revenue did not fall anywhere near as sharply. A protocol can keep growing its deposits and fees while its governance token, the instrument through which early backers and the team hold value, keeps falling — because token price also reflects speculative crypto-market sentiment, unlocking schedules and the buyback mechanism’s dependence on revenue that can itself be volatile.
- Repeated security and custody incidents. Two separate loss events hit Fluid within roughly ten weeks of each other in 2026: the ~$70 million Resolv-linked bad debt in March, absorbed from reserves, and the ~125,000 FLUID/51,900 GHO off-chain key-compromise theft in late May, disclosed four days after detection (CryptoTimes). Non-custodial does not mean risk-free — smart contract composability (borrowing against Fluid’s liquidity) and off-chain signing infrastructure are both attack surfaces, and the second incident shows a lag between detection and disclosure that outside researchers, not the company, closed first.
- Concentration and dependency risk. Nearly half of Fluid’s TVL and most of its borrowed volume sits on Ethereum mainnet (DefiLlama), exposing revenue to Ethereum gas costs, congestion and any regulatory action targeting DeFi lending on the chain where most global attention — and most global regulators — are focused; the newer Arbitrum, Base and Plasma deployments are smaller and less proven.
The takeaway
The lesson in Instadapp’s arc is not “crypto is risky,” which is obvious. It is that building infrastructure other people rely on and building something that makes your own equity or token valuable are two different jobs, and succeeding at the first does not guarantee the second. Instadapp moved $10 billion in assets at its peak and, under the Fluid brand, still clears real, growing fee revenue and carries over a billion and a half dollars in deposits today. None of that stopped its governance token from losing more than three-quarters of its value in a year. For any founder building platform or infrastructure — in crypto or outside it — the transferable point is to be honest, early, about how usage is supposed to turn into value for the people who backed you, rather than assuming scale will eventually take care of it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Instadapp the same company as Fluid?
Yes. Instadapp is the original company and protocol name; its team proposed rebranding the protocol and its governance token from INST to FLUID in a governance vote filed on 3 December 2024, following the strong early performance of its new DEX product, and completed a 1:1 token swap (BingX; The Defiant).
Who founded Instadapp and when?
Brothers Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain, who dropped out of college to build it, first built the product at the ETHIndia hackathon in Bengaluru in August 2018 and launched it publicly in November 2018 (Forbes India, February 2022).
How much money has Instadapp raised, and from whom?
A reported $12.4 million across two rounds: a $2.4 million seed round in October 2019 led by Pantera Capital with Coinbase Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures and others, and a $10 million Series A in October 2021 backed by Alliance DAO, Andre Cronje, Balaji Srinivasan and others (Inc42; CoinDesk). No company valuation has been publicly disclosed for either round.
What is Instadapp/Fluid’s total value locked (TVL) today, and is that the same as its revenue?
Fluid’s TVL was $1.56 billion as of 25 September 2026, per DefiLlama. TVL measures deposited assets, not revenue or profit — Fluid’s separately tracked protocol fee revenue over the trailing 12 months to the same date was $10.46 million (DefiLlama). The two figures should never be treated as interchangeable.
Has Instadapp/Fluid ever been hacked or lost user funds?
The protocol has faced two disclosed 2026 incidents: roughly $70 million in bad debt in March 2026 from a Resolv Protocol exploit, which Fluid repaid from reserves, and a late-May 2026 key-compromise attack on its off-chain rewards infrastructure that drained about 125,000 FLUID tokens and 51,900 GHO (CryptoTimes). Fluid has said its core lending and DEX contracts and user deposits were not affected by the May incident.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “Instadapp Funding Rounds” company profile, accessed September 2026
- CoinDesk, “InstaDapp DeFi Site Raises $2.4 Million From Prominent Crypto Investors,” October 2019
- Inshorts, “Hyderabad-based blockchain startup InstaDApp raises $2.4 mn,” October 2019
- Forbes India, “Sowmay and Samyak Jain: Disrupting the crypto ecosystem with DeFi,” February 2022
- Cointelegraph, “Developer-focused DeFi aggregator Instadapp launches governance token,” April 2021
- The Defiant, “Instadapp Proposes Rebrand and New Tokenomics Following Fluid Launch,” December 2024
- BingX Learn, “What Is Fluid (FLUID)? Instadapp’s Unified DeFi Liquidity Layer Explained,” 2025
- Gate.com Learn, “What is Fluid (FLUID): The Rebranded DeFi Rising Star,” 2025
- CryptoTimes, “Fluid Protocol Loses 125K FLUID & 51.9K GHO in Key Compromise Attack,” May 2026
- DefiLlama, Fluid protocol TVL and fees/revenue data, accessed September 2026
- CoinGecko, FLUID token market data, accessed September 2026
- Instadapp official site (instadapp.io), accessed September 2026
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.