India-based InstaDApp announced Tuesday that it raised $2.4 million to build out its smart wallet. The goal is to help users easily execute advanced transactions through the company's decentralized finance (DeFi) portal.
In the early days of the internet, some of the most valuable properties were portals – websites that gathered information in one place. Now, in the early days of the decentralized web, InstaDApp wants to be a window into multiple DeFi services – one that makes it easy to move assets between them.
The round was led by Pantera Capital, with a slew of prominent investors including Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab, Robot Ventures and Kyber Network's Loi Luu.
In an email to CoinDesk, InstaDApp co-founder Sowmay Jain said his company's decentralized app (dapp) is an interface to multiple protocols.
"For InstaDApp, we focused on building up a layer that acts as the mediator between the user interface and underlying protocols," Jain said. "This layer, consisting of our smart wallet, bridges contracts and reserve pools, [and] abstracts away lots of complexities."
InstaDapp currently provides interfaces for Compound, Uniswap and MakerDAO. As of this writing, InstaDApp is the fourth-largest dapp in DeFi, according to DeFi Pulse, with $30.8 million worth of assets locked in its smart contracts (up from only $4.2 million in early July).
“InstaDApp is a very talented team out of India looking to make decentralized finance more accessible," Balaji Srinivasan, formerly of Coinbase and Earn.com, wrote in a blog post shared with CoinDesk prior to publication.
"India is actually our second-biggest source traffic after America," despite the fact that the central bank has restricted financial institutions from facilitating crypto transactions, Sowmay wrote. "The movement might be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped."
Notably, InstaDApp's Jain is 21 years old; fellow co-founder Samyak Jain is 19. Nevertheless, they have pivoted their lives to crypto, writing in a blog post shared with CoinDesk that they have dropped out of school to "become full-on 'native DeFi.'"
They wrote:
InstaDApp co-founders Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain image via InstaDApp