Insrt Labs Raises $2.2 Million in Pre-Seed Round for Scaling NFT…

Insrt Labs Raises $2.2 Million in Pre-Seed Round for Scaling NFT Finance Infrastructure

March 2nd, 2023

We are happy to announce that Insrt Labs has raised $2.2m in our pre-seed round from Hashkey Capital and Infinite Capital as our co-lead investors, with additional participation from Apollo Capital, Three Sigma, Caballeros Capital, Parc Capital, Sky9 Capital, County Cap, WWVentures and a fantastic cohort of native DeFi angel investors.

We are excited to have an advisory base who have previously contributed to well-known DeFi protocols such as Yearn Finance and MakerDAO, as well as a amazing group of angel investors who have helped out immensely in getting us from the starting point to our first deployment.

Insrt Finance

Insrt Finance is a permissionless access layer providing retail users, treasuries, and institutions with a seamless experience in getting exposure and speculating with non-fungible assets.

The protocol is developing an architecture that integrates with infrastructure across the NFT finance landscape to provide users with tools that allow them to execute strategies from one dApp — a one-stop solution for non-fungible asset exposures. Our initial MVP mechanism, the ShardVault V1, has generated more than half a million $ in TVL in 2 months after launch.

Non-fungible assets as the bedrock of the on-chain economy

Over the next five years, more property rights and claims will be found on-chain. While most discussions regarding on-chain assets have revolved around financial instruments for the past decade, the unique combination of ownership, community, and culture enabled the emergence of NFT PFPs and other digital art forms.

Most relationships and claims in the world are non-fungible. However, further development of the on-chain economy and its mass adoption requires a sense of ownership - representing how human beings and institutions have interacted and transacted with one another for millennia. Non-fungible smart contract standards provide a better conduit for facilitating this evolution. To put it bluntly, non-fungible tokens will flip fungible tokens sooner or later. NFT art is just the beginning.

NFT finance

Owners and market participants want to engage in financial transactions. More than $11bn in value is currently locked up in illiquid NFT PFP and digital art assets. Many solutions have been deployed and built to facilitate lending, appraisals, and instant liquidity for these assets.

Insrt Labs believes this base layer of infrastructure will scale beyond digital art and PFPs to cover a variety of new asset classes - financial NFTs connected with RWA cash flows, GameFi assets, financialized social graphs, and other assets that can only be created through on-chain activity.

The problem

The NFT finance space has tremendous potential but is already experiencing scaling issues due to a significant degree of fragmentation. With close to a dozen lending primitives and multiple instant liquidity protocols, users are overwhelmed with choices. In addition, most infrastructure and primitives are complex in terms of their UX.

While lending volumes are increasing and lending liquidity aggregators are being built, NFT finance primitives have still not sufficiently tackled the initial beachhead market - how to get the users interacting with NFT trading platforms to interact with NFT financial markets. In addition, the demand side needs to be unlocked for NFT finance to act as a base layer for the future on-chain economy.

The protocol

The Insrt Finance protocol aims to make NFT finance accessible to retail users, treasuries, and institutional capital. By making NFT finance accessible to a broader market, we can provide the liquidity that the underlying infrastructure needs for NFT finance to scale and encompass more asset classes.

Our products will integrate with several primitives across the space and eliminate information ambiguity through a crystal-clear user experience combined with world-class analytics while providing all of our users the ability to calibrate their exposures according to their risk-return profile. It's a one-stop solution for NFT finance.

ShardVaults

Our initial MVP mechanism combines spot exposure to an underlying NFT PFP asset with yield-farming strategies. Users fund a vault to acquire an asset on the secondary market. The asset is collateralized, and the borrowed funds generate yield for users. Users can hold onto their position to generate yields, while all position holders can vote to liquidate the underlying asset via a simple majority governance vote to acquire proceeds from price appreciation.

The goal of the ShardVault is to provide an NFT finance experience that is more familiar to casual and hardcore NFT traders and speculators while reducing the entry price for speculators to have exposure to blue-chip assets.

In 2 months of being live, with four vaults launched, we have generated more than $500k in Total Value Locked. Over time, more integrations and strategies will be implemented within the mechanism to provide increased user choices.