1inch, the leading decentralized exchange aggregator, has processed $814 billion in cumulative trades since launching in 2019, yet remains unprofitable. Co-founder Sergej Kunz attributed this paradox to the DeFi sector's inability to generate sustainable revenue at current market scale.
According to Dune Analytics data, 1inch processed $214 billion in trades during 2025 alone, representing a 39% year-over-year increase across approximately 114 million transactions. Despite this growth, the protocol's business model faces structural constraints.
The Profitability Challenge
DEX aggregators like 1inch route trades to whichever decentralized exchange offers users the best price. The protocol has differentiated itself through gasless trading and MEV protection features, but these user-focused features limit revenue generation. Charging meaningful fees would incentivize users to trade directly on underlying DEXs rather than through the aggregator.
The 1INCH token currently trades between $0.07 and $0.09, representing approximately a 99% decline from its all-time high during the 2021 DeFi bull run. The protocol's market capitalization ranges from $100 million to $130 million.
Evolution and Expansion
1inch began as a hackathon project in New York in May 2019, created by Kunz and co-founder Anton Bukov. The original concept scanned multiple DEXs simultaneously to route trades to the best price available.
The protocol has expanded to support more than 13 blockchains from its Ethereum-only origins. Its Fusion technology introduced intent-based execution, where professional market makers called resolvers compete to fill user trade requests. Fusion+ extended this capability across chains, enabling cross-chain swaps without manual token bridging.
1inch has also entered tokenized real-world asset trading through a partnership with Ondo Finance, which generated over $3 billion in cumulative tokenized volume by March 2026. An upcoming product called the Aqua protocol aims to create shared liquidity pools to address fragmented liquidity across chains and venues.
Market Outlook
The 39% volume growth in 2025 indicates rising user demand. The launch of the Aqua protocol and expansion of real-world asset integration represent potential pathways toward greater profitability, with tokenized treasuries and other RWA segments representing one of the fastest-growing areas in DeFi.
