Announcing $2.4 Million Seed Round
InstaDApp is a DeFi portal that aggregates the major protocols using a smart wallet layer and bridge contracts, making it easy for users to make the best decisions about assets and execute previously complex transactions seamlessly.
As a testament to the deep need to simplify DeFi, the launch of our protocol bridge saw explosive growth, growing the value locked in our smart contracts by 9 times, from $4M to over $35M. We are now #3 in total value locked after MakerDAO and Compound.
While other DApps are just interfaces for DeFi protocols, we have created a mediator smart wallet layer between the user interface and protocols, which greatly simplifies the effort and cost of performing complex financial transactions, including lend/borrow, leverage and switch debt positions.
Investors And Advisors
To help us continue our quest to make DeFi accessible to the masses, we have raised a seed round of $2.4M from a network of strategic investors, including Pantera Capital, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab, Robot Ventures (Robert Leshner of Compound Finance), Loi Luu (Kyber Network), amongst many others.
"We are impressed by InstaDapp’s laser focus on aggregating and simplifying DeFi and their growth has been a testament to their ability to execute successfully. InstaDapp stands out from everything else we have seen in the space so far. We believe they’re the right team to push the future of DeFi forward and help the next wave of users to onboard to the open financial ecosystem. — Paul Veradittakit, Pantera."
In addition, we are delighted to welcome Edward Moncada, CEO of Blockfolio and Ming Ng, who collaborates closely with prominent projects including Handshake, Kyber, and Blockfolio, to our advisory board.
Our Journey To Instadapp
"InstaDapp is a very talented team out of India looking to make decentralized finance more accessible. — Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase"
This raise marks a key milestone in our journey in building and evangelizing fintech. Ever since we were in our teenage years, we have started participating in the Indian stock market and discussing finance on blogs and forums like Quora, generating millions of hits to date. We then went on to building software to simplify stock market investing and investing in crypto.
Eventually, we dropped out of school to become full-on “native defi”. A big reason was we realized that the traditional finance systems we were studying in school were slow to innovate, extremely restrictive, tightly controlled by financial giants, and bound by geographical constraints.
"With DeFi though, we realized that we can not only participate, but also able to innovate globally from day one."
Ever since these realizations, we began shifting our efforts from traditional fintech and markets into the open world of decentralized finance. After participating and winning EthIndia one year ago, we received a grant from Kyber Network to start work on what will become Instadapp today.
Now 21 (Sowmay) and 19 (Samyak), we have been living and breathing crypto and DeFi for almost our entire formative lives, including accepting grants, doing payrolls and financing our expenses from ETH backed collateralized loans. We are grateful for the opportunity to build more innovative technology and evangelizing DeFi to bring the same benefits we experienced to the wider world.
Simplifying Complex DeFi Transactions
"Instadapp is focused on becoming the portal to open finance, and is innovating in an area where most teams are stagnant — delivering an exceptional user experience.— Robert Leshner, Compound"
Prior to Instadapp, most of these actions would have needed multiple transactions across different protocols, requiring users to understand the deeper financial and technical workings of each of them. With our smart wallet layer and bridge contracts, these complex operations become one single, simple transaction.
The best example is our protocol bridge between Compound and Maker, which allows users to switch debt positions between the two protocols in a single step, without the need to tediously monitor interest rates across these markets, perform expensive capital redeployments, and perform multiple complex transactions.
As the number of protocols, assets, and derivatives explode in number, the need for key innovations like these to optimize and make the full use of DeFi becomes crucial.
Bringing DeFi to the masses.
"The Instadapp team is the best demonstration of how open and innovative this public blockchain space can be. We were fortunate to be able to work and support the team in the early days. It’s been a pure joy to see how they keep inventing and releasing new products, which is very rare in this space. I look forward to more interesting initiatives from them. — Loi Luu, Kyber Network"
DeFi is extremely promising and could potentially bring on a sea change in how the masses manage their financial assets. However, the infrastructure today is lacking, ranging from unscalable blockchains and a lack of common standards. The open nature of DeFi also means that anyone can create new and improved systems.
On top of needing to understanding finance, one will also need to be very familiar with the deep technical workings, as well as keep track of all the evolving protocols and their different markets. This makes accessibility to DeFi limited to only a very small % of people, even those relatively familiar with crypto.
So far, we have been successful at abstracting away a number of these hurdles with our combination of intuitive user interfaces, smart wallet layer and bridge contracts, but we are very, very early in this journey. Along with our investors and community, we look forward to building the next generation of systems that will allow the masses to make the most of their decentralized assets.