InstaDApp, a decentralized finance (DeFi) startup, has secured $2.4 million in a seed funding round, the company announced on Tuesday.

The participating investors include venture capital firm Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab, Robot Ventures, along with angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Naval Ravikant, and Kyber Network’s Loi Luu.

The India-based startup is developing a DeFi portal to aggregate the major protocols using a smart wallet layer and  Bridge  Bridge The bridge or liquidity bridge is an essential component for brokers that are enabling their clients to trade at interbank rates directly via a Prime Broker or a Prime-of-Prime (PoP). While market makers do not require a bridge in order to service its clients, brokers which are sending through orders to a liquidity provider or an electronic execution venue need a bridge to connect their trading platform to the interbank market.Bridges are used extensively in forex trading, specifically for Metatrader, the world’s most popular trading platform. Bridges can be connecting a broker to a prime of prime or to a prime broker. Connectivity providers are delivering solutions mostly oriented towards the most popular platforms in the market – MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MT5. The component is another crucial part of proper risk mitigation for the brokerage. The Need for Bridges in Retail TradingGiven the rise of the MT4 and MT5 platforms, there has since arose a need for bridge technology. This is due to the fact that Metaquotes, the company behind MT4, only envisaged their platform being used as a purely an interface client broker trading.This means the broker set the quotes, set the spread, and traded against the client. However, the trader actually had no direct access to the wholesale forex market, yet many brokers were unwilling to let go of MT4 in favor of other platforms which already inherently supported access to the market via Electronic Communications Networks (ECN) due to MT4’s huge popularity and thus potential loss of clients. MetaTrader was not designed to communicate with banks or liquidity providers because Metaquotes didn’t implement the FIX protocol (Financial Information Exchange). The FIX protocol is an electronic communications protocol setup in the early 1990’s to provide worldwide exchange of information in real time with respect to the transactions of financial markets and instruments. As a result, software was developed by third parties to enable MetaTrader to connect traders to the interbank. The bridge or liquidity bridge is an essential component for brokers that are enabling their clients to trade at interbank rates directly via a Prime Broker or a Prime-of-Prime (PoP). While market makers do not require a bridge in order to service its clients, brokers which are sending through orders to a liquidity provider or an electronic execution venue need a bridge to connect their trading platform to the interbank market.Bridges are used extensively in forex trading, specifically for Metatrader, the world’s most popular trading platform. Bridges can be connecting a broker to a prime of prime or to a prime broker. Connectivity providers are delivering solutions mostly oriented towards the most popular platforms in the market – MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MT5. The component is another crucial part of proper risk mitigation for the brokerage. The Need for Bridges in Retail TradingGiven the rise of the MT4 and MT5 platforms, there has since arose a need for bridge technology. This is due to the fact that Metaquotes, the company behind MT4, only envisaged their platform being used as a purely an interface client broker trading.This means the broker set the quotes, set the spread, and traded against the client. However, the trader actually had no direct access to the wholesale forex market, yet many brokers were unwilling to let go of MT4 in favor of other platforms which already inherently supported access to the market via Electronic Communications Networks (ECN) due to MT4’s huge popularity and thus potential loss of clients. MetaTrader was not designed to communicate with banks or liquidity providers because Metaquotes didn’t implement the FIX protocol (Financial Information Exchange). The FIX protocol is an electronic communications protocol setup in the early 1990’s to provide worldwide exchange of information in real time with respect to the transactions of financial markets and instruments. As a result, software was developed by third parties to enable MetaTrader to connect traders to the interbank. Read this Term contracts, simplifying the decision making the process for digital asset financing.

“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,” Paul Veradittakit, a partner at Pantera Capital, said.

“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.”

Attracting a wide user base

According to its website, it has more than 4,400 contract wallets along with a collateral of over $31.3 million. The company is also boasting its third rank among DeFi platforms in terms of total asset value, only following 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  Leverage In financial trading, leverage is a loan supplied by a broker, which facilitates a trader in being able to control a relatively large amount of money with a significantly lesser initial investment. Leverage therefore allows traders to make a much greater return on investment compared to trading without any leverage. Traders seek to make a profit from movements in financial markets, such as stocks and currencies.Trading without any leverage would greatly diminish the potential rewards, so traders need to rely on leverage to make financial trading viable. Generally, the higher the fluctuation of an instrument, the larger the potential leverage offered by brokers. The market which offers the most leverage is undoubtedly the foreign exchange market, since currency fluctuations are relatively tiny. Of course, traders can select their account leverage, which usually varies from 1:50 to 1:200 on most forex brokers, although many brokers now offer up to 1:500 leverage, meaning for every 1 unit of currency deposited by the trader, they can control up to 500 units of that same currency. For example, if a trader was to deposit $1000 into a forex broker offering 500:1 leverage, it would mean the trader could control up to five hundred times their initial outlay, i.e. half a million dollars. Likewise, if an investor using a 1:200 leveraged account, was trading with $2000, it means they would be actually controlling $400,000, i.e. borrowing an additional $398,000 from the broker. Assuming this investment rises to $402,000 and the trader closes their trade, it means they would have achieved a 100% ROI by pocketing $2000. With leverage, the potential for profit is clear to see. Likewise, it also gives rise to the possibility of losing a much greater amount of their capital, because, had the value of the asset turned against the trader, they could have lost their entire investment.FX Regulators Clamp Down on Leverage Offered by BrokersBack in multiple regulators including the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took material measures to protect retail clients trading rolling spot forex and contracts for difference (CFDs). The measures followed after years of discussion and the result of a study which showed the vast majority of retail brokerage clients were losing money. The regulations stipulated a leverage cap of 1:50 with newer clients being limited to 1:25 leverage. In financial trading, leverage is a loan supplied by a broker, which facilitates a trader in being able to control a relatively large amount of money with a significantly lesser initial investment. Leverage therefore allows traders to make a much greater return on investment compared to trading without any leverage. Traders seek to make a profit from movements in financial markets, such as stocks and currencies.Trading without any leverage would greatly diminish the potential rewards, so traders need to rely on leverage to make financial trading viable. Generally, the higher the fluctuation of an instrument, the larger the potential leverage offered by brokers. The market which offers the most leverage is undoubtedly the foreign exchange market, since currency fluctuations are relatively tiny. Of course, traders can select their account leverage, which usually varies from 1:50 to 1:200 on most forex brokers, although many brokers now offer up to 1:500 leverage, meaning for every 1 unit of currency deposited by the trader, they can control up to 500 units of that same currency. For example, if a trader was to deposit $1000 into a forex broker offering 500:1 leverage, it would mean the trader could control up to five hundred times their initial outlay, i.e. half a million dollars. Likewise, if an investor using a 1:200 leveraged account, was trading with $2000, it means they would be actually controlling $400,000, i.e. borrowing an additional $398,000 from the broker. Assuming this investment rises to $402,000 and the trader closes their trade, it means they would have achieved a 100% ROI by pocketing $2000. With leverage, the potential for profit is clear to see. Likewise, it also gives rise to the possibility of losing a much greater amount of their capital, because, had the value of the asset turned against the trader, they could have lost their entire investment.FX Regulators Clamp Down on Leverage Offered by BrokersBack in multiple regulators including the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took material measures to protect retail clients trading rolling spot forex and contracts for difference (CFDs). The measures followed after years of discussion and the result of a study which showed the vast majority of retail brokerage clients were losing money. The regulations stipulated a leverage cap of 1:50 with newer clients being limited to 1:25 leverage. Read this Term and switch debt positions,” Sowmay Jain, the founder of the company, explained in the announcement.

In addition to the funding, the startup also added Blockfolio’s CEO Edward Moncada and Ming Ng, an associate with prominent projects like Handshake, Kyber, and Blockfolio, to its advisory board.

“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, founder of Compound, added.

Recently, Finance Magnates reported that another DeFi startup, Band Capital, launched a decentralized application (DApp), allowing Bitcoin binary options trading.