Coin columns · Ethereum City (Capital)
Fluid (FLUID): DeFi Where Lending and Trading Share One Pool
Token of Instadapp’s rebranded unified-liquidity protocol
Fluid is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol designed so that lending and a decentralized exchange share one pool of liquidity, and FLUID is its governance token. It was known as Instadapp’s INST token before the rename.
1. From Instadapp to Fluid
Instadapp was started in 2018 by Samyak Jain and Sowmay Jain as a tool for managing several DeFi services from one account on Ethereum, bundling steps such as lending, depositing and swapping into a single transaction through its ‘DeFi Smart Accounts’. Its INST governance token arrived in 2021, and the team later built its own lending and exchange protocol, Fluid, as the center of the business. In December 2024 a plan was proposed to unify the brand as Fluid and rename the token from INST to FLUID.
On the Crypto Nation map, FLUID stands in Ethereum City (the capital), because Ethereum is where the coin was first issued. Beyond Ethereum, Fluid has spread to networks such as Arbitrum, Base and Polygon.
2. Lending and a DEX on one liquidity layer
In most DeFi, lending services and exchanges use separate pools of money. Fluid keeps a shared store called the liquidity layer that both draw on, so the same funds do several jobs. It accepts ordinary coins and also exchange liquidity tokens as collateral, and offers vaults with high LTV (loan-to-value, the share of collateral value you can borrow).
‘Smart collateral’ lets liquidity tokens serve as collateral while still earning trading fees, and ‘smart debt’ puts borrowed money to work as exchange liquidity so fee income can offset interest. In 2025 the exchange’s second version (DEX v2) and ‘DEX Lite’, a low-gas router for small trades and lesser-known tokens, were added.
3. Where it is used, and what happened
FLUID is used to vote on Fluid’s rules, and new collateral types and chain expansions go through governance votes. The protocol added exchange features in late 2024, and in 2025 it widened to chains such as Arbitrum, Base and Polygon.
On Solana, Jupiter built a lending service, Jupiter Lend, on Fluid’s design and opened it in beta in 2025, an example of Fluid’s technology being reused by another team. Fluid’s roadmap also listed expansion beyond Ethereum-style chains and buybacks of FLUID using protocol revenue.
4. Things to know
A sophisticated design raises the chance of hidden smart-contract bugs, and high LTV means liquidations (forced sales of collateral to settle a loan) and losses can spread fast when prices swing. Because funds are pooled, a problem in one part can spread to others, and a wrong oracle (price feed) could cause bigger damage, as with other DeFi protocols.
Fluid competes with large rivals such as Aave and Morpho, and growth in usage does not guarantee gains for the token. How plans like buybacks are actually carried out, and how widely governance is distributed after the rename, should be checked in official materials.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.