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, as well as Galaxy Digital, Greenfield One, Libertus Capital, Dragonfly Capital, FTX, IOSG, LAUNCHub Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Loi Luu, the Founder of Kyber Network, and Illia Polosukhin, the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. The first round of investment follows 1inch’s recent milestone of $1B in overall volume. The investment round marks a critical point in 1inch’s rapid growth.
Launched in May 2019, 1inch aggregates liquidity from various decentralized exchanges to help users execute trades at better prices. This high-powered aggregator uses smart contract technology to split a single trade transaction across multiple DEXs – enabling users to optimize and customize trades. 1inch is the leading DEX aggregator and has already integrated support from top DEXs including Uniswap, Kyber Network, Airswap, Oasis, Bancor, Balancer, Curve, and many more.
“DEX aggregation is a critical building block that co-enabled the most recent DeFi boom. It allows executing large order sizes at low slippage rates. 1inch has become the de facto interface for trade execution in DeFi, with aggregate volumes surpassing $1 billion,” said Binance Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao “CZ”. “It is of great pleasure to support the 1inch team in their relentless quest to drive user adoption in DeFi.”
Sergej Kunz, CEO, and Anton Bukov, CTO, launched 1inch in May 2019 at the ETHGlobal hackathon in New York and in just over a year 1inch has surpassed one billion USD in overall volume. To date, 1inch’s daily active wallets have surged from 115 wallets last year to over 1,200 wallets in July 2020, totalling over 17,700 wallets.
“Our team had first met Sergej and Anton at ETHParis in February 2019 where the two pitched a BNB utility project to us. On a subsequent hackathon, the team launched 1inch and after first traction decided to commercialize it,” said Binance Strategy Officer Gin Chao.
“Throughout a year our team has grown from just two people up to sixteen – mostly award winning developers from various Ethereum hackathons. At 1inch, 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. “The funds raised in the first investment round will be used to further grow the team, to develop our algorithm together with new innovative products and to run marketing activities. We believe that the gold rush in DeFi is in full swing and 1inch has full potential to become the first DeFi unicorn company.”
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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