DEX aggregator 1inch raises $2.8 million in seed funding led by Binance Labs

Quick Take

  • Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch.exchange has raised $2.8 million in seed funding.
  • The round was led by Binance Labs, with participation from FTX, Galaxy Digital and others.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch.exchange has raised $2.8 million in its first-ever external funding round.

The investment was led by Binance Labs, with participation from FTX, Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly Capital, and several others. Kyber Network founder Loi Luu and NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin also backed the round.

Launched in May 2019, 1inch aggregates liquidity from various decentralized exchanges to help users execute trades at better prices. In other words, 1inch helps reduce slippage rates or the differences between the expected price and the execution price of a trade.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said DEX aggregation allows executing “large order sizes at low slippage rates” and is a “critical building block” that co-enabled the recent decentralized finance (DeFi) boom.

Indeed, the DeFi market has crossed $4.6 billion in total value locked, and 1inch recently surpassed $1 billion in overall volume. The aggregator has more than 17,700 wallets, and 1,200 wallets were active daily in July.

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Source: Dune Analytics, 1inch, The Block Research

“We aim to unite traders and liquidity providers, facilitating transactions that are profitable for both sides,” said Sergej Kunz, co-founder and CEO of 1inch. He added that 1inch was founded with just two people, himself and CTO Anton Bukov, and has grown its team to a current size of 16 people.

“We plan to hire around 30-50 more people, spread across four teams for the development of our upcoming products,” Kunz told The Block.

1inch is working on several products, including what the startup called a “game-changing” algorithm that would utilize 1inch APl to respond in “less than a second” to find the best trading paths. It would be free for B2B integrations, said 1inch, and is set to release later this month.

1inch said it also plans to release its own token “soon,” as well as introduce liquidity mining or yield farming on specific Mooniswap pools. Mooniswap is a newly-launched automated market maker (AMM) protocol by 1inch.


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