1inch (1INCH): the DEX aggregator, its Fusion swaps, a shrinking business and the card shutdown

1inch, the DEX aggregator that Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov built at a New York hackathon in May 2019, is shutting its payment card. Its help centre says the 1inch Card programme is being discontinued and asks holders to move their balances out by 18 December 2026 at the latest. The swap business keeps running on the 19 networks that DefiLlama tracks for it, but at a fraction of last year’s size.

Monthly volume averaged about $17.3 billion in 2025. Between July and September 2026 it averaged about $2.8 billion, a fall of roughly 84% by our count of DefiLlama’s daily data. The two co-founders fell out in public in July, and in September Crypto Briefing reported Kunz as saying that 1inch has not turned a profit.

1inch explained: a DEX aggregator that grew into an order network

A decentralized exchange such as Uniswap keeps pools of two tokens and prices each trade with a formula. Prices drift apart from one pool to the next, and a large order pushes a single pool’s price against the trader, the effect our glossary covers under slippage. An aggregator reads many pools at once, computes a route and can split one order across several venues, so the trader gets more tokens out for the same amount in.

That was 1inch’s first product. Its swap contracts, the Aggregation Router, are in their sixth version, and the algorithm that picks the route is called Pathfinder. In a June 2025 post 1inch said an upgrade gave rates up to 6.5% better than the previous version, a figure from its own tests on more than 30,000 trades. Around the router sit other products under the same brand:

• the Limit Order Protocol, where a user signs an order at a chosen price and someone else fills it on-chain later;
• Fusion and Fusion+, intent-based modes in which professional fillers called resolvers compete to execute the order;
• Aqua, a shared liquidity layer built with an execution engine called SwapVM, open to the public since 28 July 2026 on 13 EVM chains;
• a wallet, a portfolio tracker and a business API sold to wallets and apps that want 1inch routing inside their own product;
• the 1inch DAO, where holders who stake 1INCH vote on treasury spending and protocol settings.

The money does not go to the DAO. A token disclosure filing on Blockworks, dated 16 June 2026, says interface fees and swap surplus go to Degensoft Ltd, a British Virgin Islands company that runs the interface and the API. A non-profit 1inch Foundation supports development. The filing withholds the names of its directors, citing security concerns.

How a 1inch swap works: classic mode, Fusion and Fusion+

Classic mode: the router does the work

In classic mode the user signs an ordinary transaction. Pathfinder picks the route, the router pushes the tokens through the chosen pools and the output lands in the wallet in the same transaction. The user pays the gas. Until the transaction is mined it sits in the public mempool, where bots can see it and trade ahead of it.

Fusion: an order, resolvers and a Dutch auction

Fusion, introduced in a 1inch post dated 25 December 2022, changes who sends the transaction. The user signs an off-chain order stating what they give and the least they will accept. Resolvers pick it up. 1inch describes them as professional market makers; to qualify, they stake 1INCH and keep a 1INCH deposit in a “feebank” contract. The rate starts high for the user and steps down, a Dutch auction, until one resolver finds it worth taking. That resolver pays the gas and settles on-chain.

The user pays no gas directly, and no swap transaction waits in the mempool to be copied or sandwiched. The price of that convenience is a dependency: the fill is only as good as the competition between resolvers at that moment.

Fusion+: cross-chain swaps without a bridge

Fusion+, released on 25 November 2024, carries the same idea across chains. There is no cross-chain bridge in the middle. The winning resolver opens an escrow on each chain, and the two are linked by a shared secret: once both are funded the secret is revealed and each side claims its tokens. If the swap is not finished in time, the timelocks send the funds back to their owners. Resolvers pay all the gas, according to the 1inch help centre.

Solana joined on 19 August 2025. Since then Fusion+ has linked it with more than 12 EVM networks, 1inch says.

Limit orders and Aqua

The Limit Order Protocol is the engine under Fusion. A Fusion settlement is a limit order filled by a resolver, which is why DefiLlama counts standalone Limit Order Protocol fills and Fusion settlements together in 1inch’s volume.

Aqua arrived later than planned. Announced on 17 November 2025 for developers only, with a public interface promised for the first quarter of 2026, it opened to everyone on 28 July 2026. Liquidity providers keep tokens in their own wallets and approve a balance instead of depositing it into a pool. One balance can back several strategies at once, and tokens move only when a swap matches a position. The Block reported eight audits at launch and 10 million 1INCH of rewards committed by the 1inch Foundation. A further 500,000 USDC from the DAO passed in a Snapshot vote that closed on 5 August 2026.

The 1INCH token: votes and staking, no share of fees

1INCH is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum at 0x111111111117dc0aa78b770fa6a738034120c302, with the same address on BNB Chain. Supply has been capped at 1.5 billion since the mint function was burned in April 2022. CoinGecko’s page showed about 1.406 billion in circulation on 21 October 2026.

The whole supply was minted at genesis on 25 December 2020. About 90 million tokens went out in an airdrop to roughly 55,200 addresses, and a retroactive drop of about 15.06 million followed in early 2021, according to the Blockworks filing. 1inch’s own announcement of 21 August 2020 set the split below, with 16% of the supply circulating at launch and vesting of up to four years.

Bucket (announced August 2020)	Share	Vesting
Network security and functionality	30%	4 years
Core team and future employees	22.5%	4 years
Ecosystem growth	21%	4 years
Investors and shareholders	19.5%	2.5 years
Advisors	5%	4 years
Early Mooniswap liquidity providers	2%	1 year

The 2026 filing sorts the supply into different buckets, and its token sale figures do not add up to them. On vesting it is clear: seed and Series A backers were fully unlocked in June 2023, the team in December 2024.

Locking 1INCH for one month to two years gives Unicorn Power (UP), the DAO’s voting weight. Longer locks give more of it, and it decays as the lock runs down. A Snapshot proposal needs 100,000 UP to be submitted and 10 million UP of votes to pass; standard votes last five days and cost no gas. Approved treasury spending goes through SafeSnap from a Safe that started with 12 signers appointed by the Foundation. UP can also be delegated to resolvers, which pay rewards in 1INCH from their own pools.

What a holder does not get is a claim on revenue. The filing rules out any “dividend, fee-share, revenue-share, buyback, or other passive economic distribution” to holders, and says that “no protocol-level fees currently are enforced” on the network.

A redesign, Staking v2 or the “Unified Power Model”, was posted on the governance forum on 21 October 2025 by a delegate from DAOplomats, with locks of one to 104 weeks and a multiplier of up to six times. On 13 November 2025 the author proposed a gentler curve. A year on, the thread is still a request for comment and has not gone to a Snapshot vote.

The 1inch.eth space on Snapshot counted 108 proposals and 13,749 followers on 21 October 2026. None of the 12 most recent votes drew a single “No”, and turnout ranged from about 10.6 to 28 million UP. The DAO page puts the treasury above $12 million, without a date.

1inch in numbers: volume down about 84% from 2025

For an aggregator, volume is the figure that counts. DefiLlama takes every swap through router versions 1 to 6, standalone limit order fills including Fusion settlements, and Fusion+ swaps, and counts each user swap once. The table uses DefiLlama’s 1inch page as read on 21 October 2026 at 06:30 UTC.

Measure (DefiLlama, 21 Oct 2026, 06:30 UTC)	Value	Rank among 195 aggregators
Volume, last 24 hours (20 October)	$114.5 million
Volume, last 7 days	$537.7 million
Volume, last 30 days	$3.108 billion	9th
Volume, last 12 months	$53.44 billion	7th
Volume, all time	$801.2 billion	2nd, behind Jupiter
Total value locked	$3.22 million	not a size measure

Summing DefiLlama’s daily series gives about $207 billion for calendar 2025, close to the $214 billion that Crypto Briefing reported for the year. The monthly totals have fallen since: $8.4 billion in November 2025, $5.9 billion in January 2026, $2.7 billion in September and $2.3 billion in October up to the 20th. May and June 2025 together brought about $73 billion. None of the sources we read explains that spike, or the 2026 slide.

Over the last 30 days Ethereum carried 71.5% of 1inch’s volume and Base 16.6%. BNB Chain, Polygon and Arbitrum handled about 3% each and Robinhood Chain 1.5%. Solana barely registers. Across all aggregators tracked by DefiLlama, 1inch’s share in the period was about 4.5%.

Revenue is harder to pin down. DefiLlama has no fee entry for the aggregator; only Aqua shows fees, $57,400 over 30 days and $154,500 over a year. Total value locked, $3.22 million on Ethereum and BNB Chain, says little about a router that does not keep users’ trading funds. On 9 September 2026 Crypto Briefing reported that Kunz says 1inch has not turned a profit, although it has routed more than $800 billion since 2019. The outlet gave no revenue figure.

History of 1inch: from a 2019 hackathon to Aqua

Kunz met Bukov when Bukov joined one of Kunz’s YouTube live streams of smart contract audits. The pair went on to enter 17 hackathons, according to Kunz’s Paris Blockchain Week biography, and built the aggregator prototype at one in New York in May 2019. The main dates since:

• 10 August 2020: Mooniswap launches, an AMM that delayed price updates by about five minutes to cut what liquidity providers lose to arbitrage. The same month, a $2.8 million round led by Binance Labs.
• December 2020: a $12 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, then the 1INCH token on 25 December.
• 1 December 2021: a $175 million Series B led by Amber Group, at a $2.25 billion valuation according to DefiLlama.
• 15 September 2022: 1inch publishes its research on the Profanity address generator.
• December 2022: Fusion mode goes live.
• 8 April 2024: the 1inch Card launches with Mastercard and Crypto Life.
• 25 November 2024: Fusion+ cross-chain swaps are released.
• 29 April 2025: 1inch launches on Solana; Solana to EVM swaps follow on 19 August 2025.
• 10 June 2025: an upgraded Pathfinder routing algorithm.
• 28 July 2026: Aqua opens to the public on 13 EVM chains.
• 20 October 2026: Ondo tokenized stocks and ETFs, already offered through 1inch on EVM chains, reach Solana, filled by the independent resolver Tokka Labs and closed to US users.

The 1inch Card is closing: what holders should do before 18 December 2026

Launched on 8 April 2024, the 1inch Card was a physical or virtual Mastercard that drew on crypto held in a 1inch Wallet and converted it to fiat at the moment of purchase. It also worked at Mastercard cash machines. Kunz called it, in 1inch’s launch post, “another major step towards onboarding mass users to DeFi”.

Two and a half years later the card FAQ on 1inch’s help centre reads: “The 1inch Card programme is being discontinued.” New sign-ups are closed and existing accounts remain accessible for now. Holders are told not to wait. Balances should be withdrawn or spent as soon as they reasonably can be, and at the latest by 18 December 2026, which 1inch calls as far ahead as it can currently foresee.

That date is guidance, not a contractual cut-off. “Exact card functionality timelines are set by the issuer and provider, not 1inch, so we can’t guarantee a specific end date,” the FAQ says. It gives no reason for the wind-down, no number of cardholders and no total for the balances still on cards.

1inch never held the money. The card account is run by the provider, Crypto Life (CL), which handles closures, card status and identity checks. Funds sit with Baanx in the UK (the FAQ calls it Baanx.com Ltd in one answer and Baanx Group Ltd in another) and with Frozen Time UNIPESSOAL LDA in the European Union. DeFiprime, a DeFi news site, identifies the e-wallet issuer as Monavate; on the FAQ page that name appears only in the file name of the linked issuer terms.

Missing the date does not mean losing the balance. Under Section 16 of the issuer’s card terms, the FAQ says, remaining e-wallet funds can be redeemed for up to six years after an account closes. DeFiprime adds, from the same terms, that withdrawals may carry fees and that a maintenance fee may apply to money left 12 months after the agreement ends. For a holder, the practical order is:

• withdraw or spend the balance well before 18 December 2026;
• send account and closure requests to Crypto Life, the provider, not to 1inch;
• write to 1inch support only if Crypto Life does not answer: it says it will log the case and escalate it, but it cannot act on accounts itself;
• keep screenshots of the final balance and of every message exchanged with the provider.

Security record: 160 audit reports and three resolver incidents

On 21 October 2026 1inch’s public audit repository on GitHub held 160 report files in 22 folders, one per protocol or version, from the early routers to Aqua and SwapVM, which eight firms reviewed. Swaps are non-custodial: tokens move from the user’s wallet through the contracts, and 1inch never takes custody of them.

The incidents of the past two years hit the resolvers that fill Fusion orders, not users’ wallets, according to 1inch.

• On 9 December 2024 1inch found that an attacker had obtained the private key of the owner of its own 1inch Labs resolver contract, changed its settings and moved funds out. Its post two days later said user funds, apps and infrastructure were not affected. It revoked the keys, moved to multisig wallets where possible and offered two rewards of $250,000. It did not say how much was lost.
• Around 18:00 UTC on 5 March 2025, 1inch found a flaw in older resolver contracts that still used the obsolete Fusion v1 settlement contract. About $5 million was taken from resolver funds, Rekt reported. 1inch’s post of 7 March says “no end users were affected, and their funds remained safe throughout the event”. Rekt, citing a postmortem by Decurity, reported that the attacker sent back 2.4 million USDC and 1,076 ETH and kept about $450,000 as a bounty. The 1inch post does not mention the return.
• On 6 and 7 May 2026, TrustedVolumes, a market maker that acts as a 1inch resolver and that Rekt had named as the main victim in March 2025, was drained on Ethereum. Blockaid first counted $5.87 million; TrustedVolumes later put its loss at about $6.7 million. Blockaid tied the attacker to the March 2025 exploit but traced the loss to a different bug, in a swap proxy controlled by TrustedVolumes. 1inch said its systems, infrastructure and user funds were not affected and that TrustedVolumes operates independently.

An older episode was of another kind. On 15 September 2022 1inch published research showing that Profanity, a vanity-address generator, seeded its 256-bit private keys from a 32-bit value, so the keys could be recovered by brute force. 1inch was not hacked. Attackers used the flaw within days: ZachXBT estimated $3.3 million stolen from Profanity addresses, The Block reported. When Wintermute lost $160 million on 20 September 2022, Polygon’s security chief Mudit Gupta and the firm SlowMist pointed to a Profanity address; Wintermute did not confirm the cause.

The audits did not prevent the 2025 and 2026 losses, and could not have: each report covers a given version of given contracts. The March 2025 attack went through a retired v1 contract that some resolvers had kept in use, the May 2026 one through TrustedVolumes’ own swap proxy. Since then the DAO has adopted the SEAL Safe Harbor agreement, in a vote that closed on 3 August 2026, and approved a Security Council with a rotation of the treasury signers on 19 September 2026.

Kunz and Bukov: two accounts of a co-founder’s exit

On 16 July 2026 Anton Bukov said on X that he had been dismissed in late November 2025, AMBCrypto reported. He said he remains a co-founder with a 50% stake, and he announced a new project, Second Tier. Cointelegraph quoted him: “I have no role in its product architecture or its security, and no oversight of either.”

1inch’s answer, as reported by AMBCrypto, was that Bukov had not been actively involved with the project since December 2025, that the protocol and its “roadmap remain unchanged” and that Kunz and the current executive team lead strategy and development. Kunz wrote on X that the departure “is not disrupting, will not disrupt, 1inch Network’s infrastructure or systems”, according to Cointelegraph.

We found no document that settles which account is right. 1inch has not addressed Bukov’s claim that he was fired, and the 50% figure comes from him alone.

Risks of using 1inch and holding 1INCH

The business is smaller than it was. Volume is down about 84% from the 2025 monthly average, DefiLlama shows no fee data for the aggregator, and Kunz, according to Crypto Briefing, says the company has not turned a profit. The token gives votes and resolver rewards but no fee share and no buyback, so holders depend on that business only indirectly.

The resolver layer has been the weak spot, with the three incidents above between December 2024 and May 2026. For an ordinary user the more frequent risk is their own approvals: a classic swap lets the router spend a token, and an unlimited approval stays open until it is revoked.

Governance is quiet rather than contested. Recent votes passed with no opposition on turnout of 10 to 28 million UP, one co-founder disputes how he left, and the Foundation’s directors are not named. Access is limited too: 1inch says it is unavailable in sanctioned regions and that some products may not be offered in every US state.

1inch vs Uniswap and Jupiter

Uniswap is a different kind of product. It runs its own pools, and 1inch routes trades through them along with many others. Uniswap now has an aggregator of its own, which DefiLlama ranked seventh over the last 30 days with $3.63 billion, ahead of 1inch’s $3.11 billion in ninth place. A 1inch trade can end up in Uniswap pools anyway; going through the aggregator pays off when a split route or an auction fill beats the best single pool.

Jupiter is the closest peer, on Solana. It led DefiLlama’s aggregator table with $12.60 billion over 30 days and $1.30 trillion all time, against 1inch’s $801.2 billion in second place. 1inch arrived on Solana in April 2025, yet Solana is still a sliver of its volume.

Is 1inch legit? Who it suits and what to check first

On its record, yes. 1inch has run since 2019, publishes its audits and never takes custody of swapped tokens, and our research turned up no loss of end-user funds in its protocol. It fits someone who already holds tokens in their own wallet on Ethereum or another EVM chain and wants a better price than a single pool gives, or a gasless Fusion order. Beginners will find it harder: the interface assumes the user knows what an approval, a slippage limit and a network are, the basics covered in our guide to how DeFi works.

Before a swap, check:

• the address bar: type 1inch.com by hand or use a bookmark, never a link from an advert or a message;
• the network selected in your wallet, and the token’s contract address rather than its ticker;
• the slippage limit and the minimum amount you will receive, shown before you sign;
• whether the approval is for the exact amount or unlimited, and revoke old approvals you no longer need;
• for a Fusion+ cross-chain order, the time window after which funds are refunded if the swap is not completed.

The next dates on the calendar are the DAO’s coming Snapshot votes, any vote on Staking v2 and, for cardholders, 18 December 2026.