Big Crypto, Bigger Problems: 1inch, Bitcoin, Solana & the Wild West of DeFi

In the dust-choked fields of modern DeFi, liquidity wanders scattered and wild, and the men who set out to tame it look more like cattle drivers on the edge of a gold rush than anything you’d find at a Wall Street luncheon. The user’s hunger roars higher than the Salinas wind, and the folks who build these protocols—let’s call them DeFi wranglers—spend sleepless nights lassoing new solutions that don’t blow up in everyone’s face.

Sergej Kunz, the grizzled co-founder of 1inch, jabbered with BeInCrypto about these big changes: how digital cowboys herd liquidity, what it means when a man wants passive income but ends up with a wallet full of regrets, and yes, how they’re hitching their star to things like Solana and Bitcoin. Because in DeFi, if you sit still, the future leaves you chewing dust.🚜

Evolving DEX Aggregation and the Multi-Chain Future

Picture a bar on Saturday night, and every bartender’s got a different whiskey. That’s liquidity in the crypto world right now—some’s in Ethereum, some’s up on layer 2s like Base, some’s off in curious, rowdy corners like Sui and Solana.

And lord, don’t forget old Bitcoin, stubborn as a mule, refusing to play nice or earn passive income—until now, that is. Someone finally figured out the trick to coaxing yield out of that ornery beast, so everyone’s strategizing harder than a farmer before the first frost.

This isn’t just a DeFi problem; it’s the whole barnyard, from tokenized chickens to traditional finance pigs. Tokenizing the entire farm? That’s the plan, folks.

Bit by bit, chain by chain, 1inch is stitching together a patchwork quilt of networks. They’ve got swaps across 13 chains; by the time you read this, it might be 14, or 144, or they might’ve just run off to start an alpaca farm instead.

The 1inch Approach

First it was just swaps, which sounds easier than it is—especially when every other transaction’s a game of “Will that bot rob me blind?”

Right—MEV. Maximal Extractable Value. Imagine you order a sandwich at the deli, and the guy behind you snatches it because he saw what you ordered, jumped the line, and reversed the mayo. That’s MEV, and it’s left so many wallets empty you’d think they were running a diet clinic.

Kunz and company scratched their chins and said: What if we made swapping less like a bar fight and more like…ordering a pizza? You say what you want, the protocol does the rest. You don’t need to know how the sausage is made.

Turns out it’s a clever Dutch auction under the hood, and it’s so much simpler for folks who just want tokens and don’t want a lesson in quantum finance. Not everyone’s a cowboy who likes to rope liquidity—some just want a sandwich. (Don’t ask where the bots went; they’re in therapy now.)

Even Uniswap noticed, tipping their hat to 1inch by rolling out their own “intent-based” swaps. There’s only one way to say thanks: spend half a million on security audits and hope the auditors aren’t just raccoons in suits.

Bridging Crypto and Fiat: The 1inch Card and Real-World Payments

You know how every great DeFi breakthrough starts? Some guy’s in a coffee shop, can’t pay for his espresso because his money’s still riding through cyberspace. That’s exactly what happened here. Sergej wanted his coffee, and now we’ve got cross-chain swaps and tokenized real estate because that caffeine withdrawal was just too much.

Turns out, he’s not the only one with this problem. In Dubai, tokenized buildings are all the rage, and there’s passive income to be had. But try spending it? Good luck. You’ll bounce through more hoops than at a bank on Opposite Day.

So, why not team up with a card company, slap on a 1inch logo, and say “Now you can buy coffee with crypto”? Next stop: Europe, the UK, the UAE, and probably an intergalactic chain on Mars if Elon gets his way. ☕️🪐

Oh, and now they’re poking around with AI like it’s a shiny tractor. Something new’s about to hatch—nobody’s quite sure what, but expect more acronyms, maybe with a side of machine learning.

Regulatory Adoption, Security Tools, and Maintaining Decentralization

Security’s the name of the game—unless the game’s Whac-A-Mole, which most of DeFi sometimes feels like. 1inch hires entire packs of auditors to tear through their code looking for bugs, scammers, or wallets that look like they’ve been through the ringer—possibly by North Korea. 🕵️

They built an API that watches wallets closer than Old Man Jenkins watching his fence line. If you’re a scammer, you might want to try knitting instead, because the digital bloodhounds are coming.

This all plugs into the 1inch Wallet, which is no-custody (meaning if you lose your keys, even your mother can’t help), and the rest of the dApp shop. No stones unturned. No hackers left unflagged. No cup of coffee left unpaid (we hope).

DAO Governance and Building Community Trust

DAOs are like barn raisings; everyone shows up, nobody has a clue how to use the hammer, but things get built anyway. Projects like Curve and MakerDAO brought in pros to handle the grants and proposals, because sometimes the barn wall needs to stand up to the wind.

1inch’s DAO? They hand out grants, fund the dreamers, and try to keep the network growing faster than weeds after spring rain. Some folks build tools, some get paid for projects, and everyone hopes the herd moves in the same direction.

Solana Integration and the Path to Cross-Chain Liquidity

Now, they’re adding Solana. Why? Because there’s always another chain to brand, tame, and convince users to stop caring about the under-the-hood chaos. The goal: trade what you want, wherever you want, don’t worry which dusty road got you there.

Bitcoin, Sui, Aptos—the whole menagerie’s due for integration, because if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere, and if you’re nowhere, you’re not buying coffee with USDC anytime soon.

Expansion Roadmap: Integrating Bitcoin and More Chains

After Solana? Saddle up, because Bitcoin’s next. With the world’s biggest pile of idle capital, it just sits there, fat and smug. 1inch wants to make it move—let users swap, peer-to-peer, no middlemen, and no reason to trust anyone except the code.

Once they’ve wrangled that, the rest—Sui, Aptos, and whatever trendy coin spun up last week—will follow. Because the dream is always the same: connect everything, let nothing sit idle, and keep moving before the next dust storm rolls in. 🤠

2025-05-12 06:08