AppWorks discloses strategic investment into Fluid lending protocol’s native token

AppWorks has taken a token position in Fluid, a DeFi lending protocol founded by Instadapp co-founder Samyak Jain, the firm said in a post on X. Deal size, valuation and specific terms of the Fluid token investment were not disclosed.

Fluid aims to address capital fragmentation in DeFi by allowing the same collateral that backs a loan to simultaneously provide trading liquidity, rather than isolating assets in separate lending and AMM silos. According to AppWorks, Fluid's model targets higher revenue per dollar of TVL compared with incumbent lending protocols such as Aave and Compound.

Jain previously co-founded Instadapp, a DeFi middleware platform that at one point reached around $12 billion in TVL and was backed by investors including Pantera Capital and Naval Ravikant. AppWorks said lessons from the 2022 LUNA and stETH market stress led Jain to pause further Iteration on Instadapp and rebuild a lending stack from first principles.

Fluid already underpins several front-end products. On Solana, it powers Jupiter Lend via a roughly 50/50 economics split with Jupiter Exchange, while on BNB Chain, Venus Flux — an evolution of Venus Protocol, the chain's largest lending platform — runs on Fluid. AppWorks also cited Bitwise's use of a Fluid-powered market on Jupiter Lend for Ethena exposure as an early sign of institutional participation.

AppWorks framed Fluid as a shared liquidity engine that partners can integrate rather than a stand-alone retail-facing lending app competing directly for users. The firm argued that the operational burden of running a lending book — including risk parameter tuning, liquidations and cross-collateral management — creates stickiness once Fluid is integrated, providing a distribution-led moat instead of relying on heavy token incentives.

Longer term, AppWorks said it backs Fluid's ambition to act as a single liquidity layer for spot, perps, FX and credit, and eventually to serve as an engine for banks, neobanks and RWA issuers bringing assets on-chain. The investment extends AppWorks' thesis around founders rebuilding core financial primitives on-chain rather than incrementally iterating on existing protocols.