The story of 1inch – Decentralized finance is often presented as a monetary Lego. Thus, some protocols have managed to take advantage of the interoperability of the Ethereum network. Among them, we find 1inch, the DEX aggregator which always allows to obtain the best rates on the market.
What is 1inch?
1inch is an aggregator protocol for decentralized exchanges . To put it simply, 1inch references many decentralized exchanges and other sources of liquidity. When a user wishes to make a trade, 1inch redirects him to the DEX with the best rate , while optimizing gas costs .
Where does 1inch come from?
Since the start of 2019 , decentralized exchange platforms have succeeded in conquering more and more users. Indeed, these have long been neglected by users because of their lack of practicality, their complex use and their disappointing results.
Thus, this growing adoption has mainly been driven by the emergence of numerous Automated Market Maker (AMM) type platforms . Unlike decentralized order book exchanges , AMMs offer new ways of trading cryptocurrency, via liquidity pools .
In practice, it is the proliferation of these platforms that gave the idea of 1inch to its founders Anton Bukov and Sergej Kunz . The project finally materialized during the ETHNewYork hackathon , which took place in May 2019 .
Subsequently, the craze around decentralized exchanges has continued to increase throughout 2020 . As a result, the 1inch protocol has also benefited from this wave of new users and has positioned itself as the number 1 aggregator .
Team, audits and funding
Initially, 1inch was a project led by its two co-founders, Anton Bukov and Sergej Kunz . Subsequently, our two associates were able to federate around them a team of developers, such as Petr Korolev, Mikhail Melnik and “Kirill” .
Since its creation, the 1inch protocol has been audited on numerous occasions, by companies such as Chainsulting or PepperSec . It is notably thanks to these audits that 1inch has been able to gain the trust of the DeFi community .
In August 2020 , the protocol led to a fundraiser of $ 2.8 million , in which big names such as Binance Labs participated. More recently, the platform again raised $ 12 million through a successful second round.
Chi Token and Mooniswap
The 1inch project does not stop at the eponymous protocol. Thus, in May 2020 , the protocol launched the “Chi” token which is part of the “gas tokens” family .
In practice, “gas tokens” are a way of tokenizing gas . This token allows users to buy gas when its price is low. The gas is thus “stored” in the form of the Chi token . The latter can then be used during a transaction at a time when the costs would be higher.
“GasToken is a more liquid form of gas because it can be purchased and stored at times when gas is cheap and released (spent / burned) when gas is expensive.”