No.210
1inch 1INCH
the scout who runs every market stall so you don't have to
🎭 a sharp-eyed pathfinder, born at a 2019 hackathon, now wired into a dozen-odd chains
💬 “Tell me the two tokens you want to swap and give me a second. I'll check every decentralized exchange at once, split your order down whichever paths are cheapest, and hand you back the best price I could find. No stall left unchecked.”
- What it is: a DEX aggregator, it shops many decentralized exchanges for you and routes the swap through the cheapest path.
- 2019: two developers built the prototype at an ETHGlobal hackathon in New York and won it.
- No chain of its own: it's just smart contracts living on Ethereum and other chains.
- 1INCH token: capped at 1.5 billion, and since April 2022 no more can ever be minted.
📖 The Story
May 2019. At an ETHGlobal hackathon in New York, two software developers, Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov, were annoyed by a small but real problem: the same token could cost different amounts on different decentralized exchanges, and checking each one by hand was a chore. Over the weekend they built a tool that did the checking for you and routed your trade to the best price. It won the hackathon. By that August it was live for everyone.
The heart of it is a router they named Pathfinder. When you ask to swap, Pathfinder looks across many DEXs at once and, if it helps, splits your order into pieces that each travel a different route, then stitches the result back together so you end up with more than any single exchange would have given you. It is a bargain hunter that never gets tired.
December 2020. The project handed control to its community by launching the 1INCH token through one of the largest airdrops DeFi had seen, dropping tokens straight into the wallets of people who had already used it. From then on, holders could stake their tokens and steer the protocol through the 1inch DAO.
December 2022. 1inch added Fusion, a different way to trade. Instead of you paying gas and sending the swap yourself, you sign an order off-chain and professional fillers called resolvers compete to fill it for you, with protection built in against traders trying to jump ahead of your order. A later version, Fusion+, stretched the same idea across chains without using a traditional bridge.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Say you want to swap one token for another. A single DEX might give you an okay price, but a better one could be hiding two exchanges over. 1inch's Pathfinder checks them all at once, and when it helps it splits your order across several so each piece travels its cheapest path. You sign one transaction; the router does the shopping.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Genuinely useful: by checking many exchanges and splitting orders, it often lands a better price than any single DEX would
- Capped supply with a real promise behind it, the mint function was burned in April 2022, so 1.5 billion is the hard ceiling forever
- Works almost everywhere in DeFi, spanning roughly 13 networks by 2026 (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Solana and more)
- It owns no chain and runs no consensus, so it leans entirely on the DEXs underneath it, when they're thin on liquidity, 1inch can't conjure a good price out of nothing
- This is a DeFi-native tool, not a one-tap beginner app, you still need a self-custody wallet and you pay network gas in classic mode
- The token's price still rides the wider crypto market, governance utility doesn't shield it from sharp swings
🧬 Evolution lineage
1inch has no fork ancestry and no sibling chain, because it has no chain of its own. It's an application-layer tool that sits on top of decentralized exchanges. Its closest relatives are other DEX/DeFi tokens like Uniswap (UNI), which 1inch aggregates across rather than descends from.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is 1inch?
- It's a DeFi 'DEX aggregator'. When you want to swap one token for another, it checks the prices on many decentralized exchanges at once and routes your trade through whatever path gives the best rate, so you don't have to compare each exchange by hand.
- Is 1inch its own blockchain?
- No. 1inch has no chain of its own. It is a set of smart contracts that run on existing networks, mainly Ethereum and other EVM chains, and now Solana too. By 2026 it works across roughly 13 networks.
- What is the 1INCH token for?
- 1INCH is the network's utility and governance token. Holders can stake it and vote in the 1inch DAO on how the protocol is run. Supply is capped at 1.5 billion, and in April 2022 the mint function was burned, so no more can ever be created.
- Where can I buy it?
- The 1INCH token is listed on most crypto exchanges, including major ones like Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance. (This is general information, not a recommendation of any exchange or an invitation to invest.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.