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What sets the best DeFi protocols apart? From their roots as Instadapp in 2018 to becoming one of the largest DEXs and lending protocols in DeFi today, we explore Fluid's journey to success.
Instadapp has a “great founding story,” says the company’s COO, DMH, known on X as @DeFi_Made_Here. The origins, he told Coinshift, go all the way back to 2018, when brothers and co-founders Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain showed up at a hackathon in Bengaluru, India – and walked away with a winning idea: a way to make DeFi simpler and more rewarding by connecting users to multiple lending and borrowing protocols. By fall 2019, Instadapp had raised $2.4 million in funding – and there was more to come.
Instadapp has since grown from DeFi dashboard into a comprehensive management platform serving users and institutions across multiple blockchain networks with enhanced features from security to automation to UX. After years of building on Aave, Compound, Uniswap, Maker, and Curve, in 2023, the startup announced Fluid: a brand new protocol designed to provide the ultimate liquidity layer – and solve the problem of liquidity fragmentation. Three weeks after going live, Fluid had already processed $1 billion, making it the third largest DEX on Ethereum. In fact, the new product gained such traction last year that, in December 2024, Instadapp announced a full rebrand as Fluid, complete with the migration of INST tokens into FLUID assets.
Coinshift caught up with DMH for the scoop – and his predictions for 2025 – just after ringing in the new year.
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Coinshift: Looking back at 2024, is there anything you’d do differently?
DMH: I mean, there’s always room for improvement. Sometimes the timelines we estimated were very, very wrong – like, expecting to launch some products in May and ending up launching in November! But overall, we're really happy with what we achieved with Fluid.
CS: You should be – the launch was a resounding success. What problems were you responding to when you decided to build it?
DMH: Instadapp was built on top of other projects, essentially as middleware. It's harder to grow and monetize that type of product. And when you’re building on top of other projects, you start to notice inefficiencies – ways to do it better, to innovate. So we saw an opportunity to create something, to change the way spread costs work. We took that experience and combined our ideas to build Fluid, which is something totally new to the market. Of course, lending and borrowing markets existed before; DEXs existed before, but we introduced novel concepts that make it more efficient. We changed the way spread costs work, for one.
CS: Once you decide to start from scratch, what do you do? What's the process?
DMH: The process is about two years of coding! You have an idea about how everything should work, you finalize the concept – but then you still have to write the algorithms.
"We were thinking, 'if we build the best product, we'll get the users very fast.' It didn't work like that."
CS: Then, after the launch, you’ve still got to communicate the product. And, in Instadapp’s case, to rebrand.
DMH: Yes, we're shifting our branding. People already knew Instadapp, and the market trusted us thanks to our track record. So when we launched, it was “Fluid by Instadapp” – which helped with recognition, but also created confusion. People were like, “is there a second token?” “Is Instadapp still a thing?” Fluid is our main product now – that’s what we spend 99% of our time on. Our other products are in maintenance mode. So it made sense to shift our brand toward Fluid and give more clarity to the community. We will be renaming other products that are still under the Instadapp name, too. It’s taken a few third parties some time to rename the token on their listings, but, slowly, people start to get it. I mean, no one is confused when you say “X” instead of Twitter.
CS: Any surprises in getting the product to market?
DMH: One thing we expected to evolve a bit differently than it did was onboarding. We were thinking, “if we build the best product, we'll get the users very fast.” It didn't work like that. Despite offering better conditions, better terms to users, we found that they still preferred to use lending markets that had been in the space a long time. People stick with what they know, even if the conditions are worse, because that’s what feels safe. Instadapp had a good track record – we never lost users’ money – but Fluid is still a new product. It’s not a fork; it's completely new code. We realized that when people don’t know what will happen, they need time. It took us 90 days to reach $800 million in market size. In 10 months, we reached $1.4 billion.
CS: That’s not a small amount.
DMH: And it's totally organic. We don't do private deals, we don't have points, campaigns, or anything like that.
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CS: What’s the strategy behind eschewing points?
DMH: We thought about having them, of course. In January/February 2024, we saw protocols like Eigen Layer and Ethena launching really successful products with points, so it seemed like a good idea. But we were on a different timeline. Eventually it felt like everybody in DeFi was doing points. And with farming, some projects began exploiting engagement strategies and acting in bad faith. That undermined trust, and user sentiment changed.
CS: It happened fast, too.
DMH: Within three months or something. By the time our launch was in sight, points seemed like the worst launch strategy. They add a lot of complexity on the technical side, without any guarantee that they will work. Like, what even happens to all those points? We had to stay far away from them, and that meant doing what we’re doing now: growing organically, whatever happens.
CS: You've mentioned being on your own timeline a couple of times – is taking more time maybe a strategic advantage here, something that sets Fluid apart? In a space where the pace is so fast, you see products launch before they’re ready.
DMH: Take Ethena: it’s a great product, but one of the best things they’ve done is to launch in the right time, right place. That of course helps accelerate growth. But for us, it was just a normal place, in a normal time. We bet on the product above all else. And that has worked for us. If the product is very good, – and I think ours really is – users can see that. That's why we have them. It takes time to code and audit everything, and that is what it is. Focusing on marketing or points is putting time into things that don't really make users' lives better, even if they allow you to grow in the short term. We want to grow by making users' lives better.
CS: And good code will outlast any DeFi trend. So what are the core qualities of a “good” product in the space?
DMH: With Fluid, we’ve created a liquidity layer that sits on top of existing liquidity. So every protocol that we build leverages the same liquidity, contributing to and enhancing that shared pool. That means that every time we launch something new, we grow vertically and horizontally at the same time. Our ecosystem gets broader and deeper with each new protocol.
We have an internal philosophy: only launch something if it is at least ten times better than what was on the market before. We cannot launch a new product which is 5% better than anything that’s already on the market. Nobody will use it. With all the battle-tested products out there, where you already have money, why would you? You don’t have to launch something revolutionary every time, but you have to make a big difference, one that people will actually feel when they switch to your product. We launched in a very competitive lending and borrowing market on ETH where you already had Compound, Spark, Morpho, and everyone else a hundred times bigger than us. You can only attract users if you offer something better.
"It took us 90 days to reach $800 million in market size. In 10 months, we reached $1.4 billion. ... And it's totally organic."
CS: What do you see for DEXes and lending protocols in 2025?
DMH: We’re definitely going to keep launching products and growing. Fluid DEX v2 will launch this year and it will be 10 times better than Uniswap v4. Uniswap hasn’t launched their new DEX yet either, but we’re already saying that. It should be an interesting battle of the DEXes!
CS: DEX Wars! There are a number of predictions out there for 2025, but one take is that, alongside things like better UX and product choices, stablecoins will play a critical role in bringing stability and greater adoption to decentralized exchanges.
DMH: We're not thinking too much about them. USDC and USDT dominate the market; people – even people who hold stablecoins – don’t know anything else. No one can compete. I know that Ethena is working towards making USG an competitive store of value, and I think they have a good chance of achieving that given their track record and execution so far.
In terms of other predictions, on the chain side, I see Base doing very well this year. They have everything they need to invest in growth. But on the market sectors, I’m betting on DEXs – both spot DEXs and perp DEXs. There’s just so much space to grow.
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