1inch Launches Aqua With 10M Token Incentives for Shared Liquidity

1inch Aqua Opens Shared Liquidity Across 13 Chains

1inch describes Aqua as a registry rather than a conventional pool. A provider approves a wallet balance and sets one or more positions. When a swap matches a position’s terms, the protocol pulls the needed tokens from the wallet and returns the received asset and fee in the same atomic transaction, according to the company’s technical launch explanation.

If no swap fills, the assets remain in the wallet. That is the central distinction from an automated-market-maker pool, where a provider typically transfers assets to a smart contract before they can quote a trade.

1inch said Aqua is available on 13 EVM chains, naming Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain among them. It has not published a chain-by-chain breakdown of live positions, liquidity or resolver activity, so the scope of real use on each network was not immediately clear.

The protocol’s design also differs from simply placing the same funds in several pools. A position’s exposure is capped by the tokens actually in the wallet, 1inch says. If several positions collectively quote more than that balance, a fill cannot take assets that are not available when the transaction executes.

That structure still requires providers to manage risk. A position can fail to fill, prices can move against a provider and an onchain system can contain smart-contract or operational risk. 1inch says Aqua is intended for experienced users and does not present its incentives or fee potential as guaranteed returns.

Wallet Balances Back Multiple Aqua Positions

The product targets a persistent liquidity problem: capital often must be divided across trading pairs, ranges and networks before it can earn fees. In a concentrated-liquidity model, a provider can also lose fee eligibility when the market moves outside a chosen price range.

In the Dune research, prepared for 1inch, 85% of the v3-family liquidity measured was underutilized under the study’s broader definition, while $542 million was fully out of range in an average week. The measurement is not a forecast for Aqua, but it gives the launch a concrete market problem to address.

With Aqua, the same balance can support several positions at once. A user could quote a stablecoin pair and a token pair from one relevant balance, for example, although a completed swap still consumes the assets it needs and affects what remains available to other positions.

1inch also says each Aqua position has a single owner, a design it says prevents just-in-time liquidity bots from adding a shared pool position immediately before a large trade to claim fees. That is a product claim about the architecture, not evidence of realized fee performance at launch.

The live release arrives as other protocols refine how liquidity meets specialized assets. Uniswap’s new Permissioned Pools focus on wallet eligibility for regulated tokens, while Aqua focuses on how an eligible provider’s wallet balance can be used across its own quotes. The systems address different points in the market structure and neither replaces the other’s controls.

10M 1INCH Incentives Put Volume Before TVL

Alongside Aqua, 1inch announced a Merkl-administered campaign with 10 million 1INCH allocated across direct volume rewards and partner co-incentives. Its incentive announcement says 5 million 1INCH is earmarked for direct rewards and 5 million for partner campaigns, with rewards based on the swap volume a maker’s position actually handles rather than the size of capital displayed.

The campaign covers more than 80 markets pairing 1INCH with other assets, 1inch said. The schedule is three months, with 50% of rewards assigned to the first month, 30% to the second and 20% to the third. Participants do not need to register, but positions must be in an eligible market and actually fill swaps.

A separate DAO proposal seeks up to $500,000 in USDC on top of the Foundation-funded token stream. It says the boost would be paid over three months and includes volume-based allocation, wallet caps, wash-trading filters and checkpoints. The proposal had not completed its governance process in the materials reviewed, so the USDC amount should not be treated as distributed funding.

The use of processed volume rather than parked value aims to reward usable liquidity, but it can also concentrate payments among providers whose quotes win flow. 1inch has not published expected reward rates, required liquidity depth or a target volume threshold for the broader product, and it says fills and rewards are not guaranteed.

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index stood at 29, or Fear, on July 28, providing broad market context rather than a measure of Aqua demand.

The next evidence points are visible: the amount of liquidity providers quote, executed volume, fill quality, concentration among makers and whether the DAO approves and executes its USDC component. Those data will show whether Aqua develops beyond a new self-custodial interface into a meaningful source of tradable DeFi liquidity.