1inch Processes Over $800 Billion in Trades, Co-Founder Says DeFi Still Too Small to Be Profitable

Article by Boaz Sobrado, Forbes

Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Processing $814 billion in transactions sounds like it should be enough to sustain a company. For the leading DEX aggregator, 1inch, it’s not enough.

Co-founder Sergej Kunz’s assessment is straightforward: since its launch in 2019, 1inch has facilitated over $800 billion in trading volume but has yet to turn a profit. The reason isn’t lack of product adoption—it’s that the overall DeFi market is still too small to support sustainable revenue.

This statement lays bare an unspoken truth in the industry: on-chain trading volume can be massive, while profits on the ledger can be minimal.

The numbers themselves are not bad. According to Dune Analytics data, by mid-2026, 1inch's cumulative trading volume will reach approximately $8.14 trillion. In 2025 alone, it processed $2.14 trillion, a 39% year-over-year increase, totaling approximately 114 million transactions.

What 1inch does sounds like a "on-chain price comparison site": it simultaneously scans multiple decentralized exchanges, splits user trades, and routes them along the most profitable paths. Later, it added gas-free settlements, MEV protection, and intent-based routing—users simply state “I want to swap to this,” and professional market makers bid to execute the trade.

These features benefit users but are difficult to directly turn into revenue engines. The value of aggregators lies in helping users spend less; if they start adding their own fees, users will immediately bypass them and go directly to Uniswap, Curve, or native DEXs on various chains.

The token market clearly reflects this misalignment. 1INCH is currently trading between $0.07 and $0.09, down approximately 99% from its peak during the 2021 DeFi bull market, with a market cap of around $100 million to $130 million. Despite facilitating over $800 billion in cumulative trading volume, the token remains at this valuation level, indicating that the market does not price infrastructure based on trading volume, but rather on its ability to generate sustained profits.

1inch originated from a hackathon in New York in May 2019, created by Kunz and co-founder Anton Bukov. The initial idea was simple: scan multiple DEXs simultaneously and route a single trade to the one offering the best price.

Seven years later, it’s no longer just a “swap tool.” The protocol supports over 13 chains and aggregates liquidity from over 400 DEXs, according to official figures; Fusion transformed trading into an intent-based model, and Fusion+ extended this framework to cross-chain, eliminating the need for users to bridge assets themselves. Platforms like Coinbase and Ledger also treat it as an execution layer.

Real-world assets represent another growth avenue. After partnering with Ondo Finance, the cumulative trading volume of tokenized assets routed through 1inch exceeded $3 billion by March 2026. Tokenized assets such as government bonds and stocks typically involve larger, more stable single transactions that more closely resemble institutional orders. For aggregators, this is a more “fee-retaining” business compared to typical altcoin swaps.

Aqua, which is set to launch and will be gradually rolled out, shifts the focus from “helping buyers find their way” to “helping sellers put their money to work.” Kunz has publicly stated multiple times that 83% to 95% of liquidity in top AMM pools remains idle most of the time; in concentrated liquidity, approximately 85% of funds are typically outside the effective price range. Money is locked in pools but earns no fees. Aqua aims to create a shared liquidity layer: assets can remain in wallets while simultaneously serving multiple strategies, rather than being fragmented into millions of isolated pools.

The expanding product line clearly shows that relying solely on spot aggregation is hard to sustain.

The aggregator's business model is inherently awkward. It must be cheaper than the exchanges it aggregates, otherwise users have no reason to go through it; but it can't remain free indefinitely, or it will only burn through its treasury and early funding.

Charge fees, and users will switch to direct DEX connections; don’t charge fees, and wait for the market to grow on its own. 1inch is currently stuck in the middle.

Uniswap has demonstrated this already. As the largest DEX, it took years of debate before it turned on its fee switch. If a protocol with liquidity right in its own pool is this cautious, aggregators that rely on “sending traffic to others” have even less room to maneuver.

There are certainly on-chain trading platforms in the industry that have made money. Perpetual futures DEXs can generate steady cash flow from liquidations, funding rates, and bid-ask spreads; spot aggregators, on the other hand, function more like public pipelines—used by many, but extracting very little in fees. The fact that 1inch has processed $800 billion in cumulative volume is less a sign that the pipeline is now charging fees, and more a demonstration that the pipeline has been widened enough to handle massive traffic.

Trading volume increased by 39% in 2025, which at least indicates that demand is still present. However, growth in demand is not the same as growth in profits. If fees remain close to zero, doubling trading volume won’t automatically turn the profit and loss statement green.

For 1inch, what truly matters is whether three things have turned into revenue, not another report of "another billion matched."

First, can Aqua turn idle liquidity into fee-generating shared capital? If LP efficiency truly differs, 1inch will no longer be just a routing layer but a liquidity layer, and its fee logic will change accordingly.

Second, can RWA routing evolve from being "volume-driven" to being "fee-driven"? Tokenized government bonds and stocks involve larger individual transactions, have stronger institutional characteristics, and are more willing to pay for execution quality and compliant pathways. Building a routing layer for these assets may be more profitable than facilitating standard token exchanges.

Third, can B-end APIs replace C-end fee-free transactions? 1inch itself lists its API and infrastructure services as a primary revenue source—wallets, brokers, and institutions embed swapping functionality into their own products and pay per call or execution. Retail users continue to be acquired at low cost, while the enterprise segment funds the company; this is the most realistic path for aggregators.

Kunz’s assessment can be read on two levels. One is a complaint: after doing so much, he’s still losing money. The other is an industry judgment: the number of DeFi users, institutions, and real-world assets has not yet reached the critical mass needed to sustain a cohort of infrastructure companies. The pipes are laid, but the water isn’t full yet.

The $800 billion demonstrates that decentralized exchange is no longer a small experiment. What it does not yet prove is that this sector can generate profits by traditional financial standards.