Pivot Global
Fluid is rapidly emerging as one of the most innovative DeFi protocols, seamlessly integrating lending, trading, and leverage into a single liquidity layer. Built as an evolution of Instadapp, Fluid takes the foundational principles of smart contract accounts, flash loans, and leveraged yield strategies to a new level. By addressing some of the most persistent inefficiencies in DeFi—fragmented liquidity, capital inefficiency, and complex user experience—Fluid has positioned itself at the forefront of the next wave of DeFi innovation.
Unlike many other DeFi projects that focus on incremental improvements, Fluid represents a paradigm shift in the way liquidity is managed and utilized. Instead of treating lending, trading, and collateral management as separate activities, Fluid merges these elements into a seamless, unified layer. This allows for capital to be used more productively, reducing inefficiencies and unlocking entirely new financial strategies for users. With an impressive growth trajectory, groundbreaking technology, and an emphasis on composability, Fluid is not just another protocol—it is redefining the way liquidity functions in DeFi.
Fluid is built by Samyak Jain, Sowmay Jain, and Thrilok Kumar, a highly experienced team with deep roots in DeFi innovation. Fluid is a continuation of their work on Instadapp, a pioneering smart contract account platform that introduced key innovations like flash loans, DeFi Smart Accounts (DSAs), and leveraged yield strategies. With the expanded vision of Fluid, Instadapp was rebranded to Fluid.
Background & Experience
Samyak Jain and Sowmay Jain are brothers from India who dropped out of college to focus on building DeFi applications. Their journey started with developing alternative interfaces for MakerDAO and Kyber Swap, significantly improving usability and efficiency for users.
Their work on Instadapp introduced innovative solutions such as account abstraction, seamless cross-protocol refinancing, and automated lending strategies. These advancements laid the foundation for how modern DeFi applications manage smart contract accounts.
Thrilok Kumar, a key contributor to Fluid, joined forces with the Jain brothers early in their journey. His expertise in smart contract development and DeFi architecture has been instrumental in designing Fluid’s highly efficient liquidity mechanisms.
The Fluid team has a proven track record of delivering high-impact DeFi solutions. Before Fluid, they successfully built multiple billion-dollar TVL protocols with zero security breaches, establishing themselves as one of the most respected teams in the DeFi space. Their unique approach of combining technical excellence with user-centric design has enabled them to consistently turn ambitious ideas into widely adopted financial primitives.
Fluid is a unified liquidity layer that consolidates lending, trading, and leverage into a single, integrated system. Unlike traditional DeFi protocols that silo liquidity across separate pools, Fluid enables users to utilize their assets dynamically across multiple financial functions. By ensuring that collateral and debt are always productive, Fluid maximizes efficiency while minimizing wasted capital. This is a stark contrast to existing models where collateral is typically locked in smart contracts, generating no returns until it is actively borrowed against.
At its core, Fluid answers a fundamental question: What if lending, leveraging, and trading were integrated into one system with optimal security, gas efficiency, and capital productivity? This vision has led to the creation of a highly efficient ecosystem that eliminates the fragmentation seen in protocols like Aave, Compound, and Uniswap.
Fluid’s design is based on three key pillars that set it apart from traditional DeFi platforms:
Integrated Liquidity Layer – Traditional DeFi platforms treat lending, trading, and derivatives separately, requiring users to manually manage their exposure across different platforms. Fluid integrates all these financial functions into a single system, allowing users to optimize their liquidity automatically. For instance, debt on Fluid can be used as trading liquidity which generates trading APR and reduces borrowing costs.
Smart Collateral & Smart Debt – In standard lending protocols, collateral is idle and debt is a liability. Fluid’s unique model turns these elements into revenue-generating assets. Debt positions are used as trading liquidity to trading fees (Smart Debt). This means that instead of simply paying interest on loans, borrowers may actually offset their costs or even generate a net positive return through yield accumulation.
Likewise, Fluid DEX LP positions can be used as collateral on the lending market to simultaneously earn trading and lending fees (Smart Collateral). This creates a dual-yield mechanism, where users benefit from both lending interest and trading fees on the very same assets.
Advanced Liquidation Mechanisms – One of Fluid’s most significant innovations is its slot-based liquidation mechanism, inspired by Uniswap V3.
Traditional DeFi protocols liquidate user positions individually, often leading to excessive gas costs and over-liquidation. Fluid, however, aggregates multiple user positions into a single transaction, allowing multiple liquidations to occur simultaneously with significantly lower gas costs.
This approach has two major benefits:
Gas Efficiency: Instead of executing separate transactions for each liquidation, Fluid bundles them together, reducing overall gas consumption.
Minimized Liquidation Penalties: Because Fluid’s liquidation process is more precise and spread across multiple users, it only liquidates the exact amount of collateral needed to bring a user back to a safe margin. This prevents over-liquidation and unnecessary loss of funds, with penalties as low as 0.1%–1%, compared to the industry standard of 5-10%.
Fluid’s capital efficiency is unparalleled, offering up to 39x liquidity amplification for every $1 of TVL. This is made possible through:
Integrated DEX + Money Market – Every trade within Fluid directly impacts debt positions, adjusting collateral and debt dynamically to optimize efficiency. By embedding DEX functionality within its lending pools, Fluid allows for seamless collateral reallocation, ensuring that capital is always optimally utilized.
High Loan-to-Value (LTV) Ratios – Unlike traditional lending protocols, where LTV ratios are capped conservatively, Fluid offers up to 97% LTV for stable pairs and 92% for volatile pairs due to its superior liquidation mechanism. This means that users can access significantly higher borrowing power without compromising system stability.
Gas Optimization – Gas fees are a major concern for DeFi users. Fluid’s smart batching and aggregation mechanisms significantly reduce the number of on-chain transactions needed to execute complex strategies, cutting gas costs by up to 75% compared to traditional DeFi operations. This makes high-frequency trading, rebalancing, and arbitrage strategies more viable and cost-effective.
The net result of these innovations is that Fluid’s leveraged LP positions can provide deep liquidity and capital efficiency for every $1 of TVL. This translates into better swap prices and lower slippage for traders and higher yields for LPs.
Fluid isn’t just a new lending protocol or a new DEX. Rather, it represents a net new innovation in efficient liquidity usage — laying the groundwork for a new standard in capital-efficient, integrated DeFi. As adoption grows, Fluid has the potential to reshape the market, challenging incumbents like Uniswap, Aave, and Curve while unlocking new possibilities for liquidity providers, borrowers, and traders alike.
Fluid’s market size has quickly grown to $1.5B. Fluid uses the term market size which includes collateral deposited as well as debt outstanding as both sides are able to generate trading fees. They reportedly were able to achieve this without any TVL deals or liquidity incentives.
Fluid DEX’s volumes have grown steadily since the beginning of 2025 before being impacted by the general market downturn. 7D average daily volumes reached a high of $660M and currently sits at $347M across Ethereum and Arbitrum. Volumes recently tailed off due to the downturn in the markets.
Impressively, in a short period of time, Fluid has become the 2nd largest DEX on Ethereum by trading volume. Notice Fluid’s (light blue below) steady increase in market share since the beginning of 2025.
Across all EVM chains, Fluid is already the 4th largest by volume at 7% market share.
The interesting thing is that the growth has been achieved without even having a user facing DEX front-end. Volume is flowing into Fluid’s pools via DEX aggregators such as 1inch and Paraswap as well as from arbitrage and MEV bots. Fluid will eventually integrate with additional aggregators to drive more volume.
The FLUID token is the governance token of the Fluid ecosystem, allowing token holders to participate in decision-making processes.
In terms of value accrual, Fluid only imposes a take rate on its lending business. Fluid currently does not take a share of trading fees, though its official docs have a specific section that states that revenue shares can be turned on through governance voting.
Tokenterminal currently only captures Fluid’s existing revenue stream from lending of $2M YTD, or $8M annualized.
However, Fluid plans to pass a governance proposal to direct 10% of trading fees to protocol revenue. Fluid estimates this to equate to roughly 3bps of all trading volume. Assuming $500M of daily volume, Fluid could potentially add another $55M in protocol revenue. Assuming no growth, Fluid could be generating $63M in annual revenue on its existing activity.
FLUID has a circulating market cap of $176M and a fully-diluted market cap of $447M. With fee switch activated, FLUID’s current trades at a proforma CMC/Revenue multiple of 2.8x and FDV/Revenue multiple of 7.1x.
FLUID’s total supply is 100 million tokens, of which 40% is in circulation. The remainder is held by the team and investors (15%) and the DAO’s treasury (45%). Team and investor tokens are expected to be fully vested by June 2025. DAO treasury tokens are fully vested. In the December governance proposal which convert INST (Instadapp) tokens to FLUID, the following uses for treasury tokens were ear-marked
Growth Incentives: To accelerate Fluid’s growth to a market size of $10 billion by late 2025:
Up to 0.25% of the total supply to incentivize Stable Lending every month.
Up to 0.25% of the total supply to incentivize DEX activities every month.
Strategic Allocations (12% of supply)
2% for exchange listings
2% for market making
5% for fundraising initiatives
3% for team growth and initiatives
A governance proposal is being considered to institute a buyback mechanism directly linked to protocol revenue.
Once Fluid generates $10 million annually, up to 100% of earnings go toward buybacks to support the token price.
Buyback intensity is dynamically adjusted:
Higher token valuation → Lower buybacks
Lower token valuation → Increased buybacks to stabilize value.
Governance determines whether the repurchased tokens are burned, redistributed, or reinvested.
Any of the following catalysts can spark a re-rating of Fluid.
Further growth: A number of growth levers can be pulled to continue to capture DEX market share.
Additional chain launches: Fluid recently expanded to Arbitrum and is seeing growth on that chain as well. A governance vote has just been completed in favor of expanding to Polygon. Further gain chain launches will undoubtedly boost volumes given Fluid’s superior capital efficiency and yield generating abilities.
Additional trading pairs: Fluid currently only supports swapping of stablecoins and various flavors of BTC and ETH. As Fluid’s risk model and liquidation mechanism becomes more time-tested, the team will likely expand the universe of tokens supported.
Fluid DEX v2: The team is planning to release v2 of Fluid DEX which will enable custom range liquidity a-la Uniswap V3. In addition, users will be able to hedge their positions directly on Fluid. Fluid DEX will also become permissionless in v2 which should help Fluid expand support for more trading pairs.
Fee Switch: Once Fluid’s fee switch is enabled, the protocol will monetize its growing DEX volume.
Additional use-cases built on top of the shared liquidity layer, including a perp dex as well as cross-exchange bridging.
Greater investor awareness: Despite Fluid’s success, not many investors are familiar with the name, most likely due to the recent rebrand and lack of user swap interface. Messari’s and Coingecko’s DEX leaderboard don’t even have Fluid listed as a competitor.
