1inch has introduced a new liquidity protocol called Aqua, a project the team believes could reshape how capital flows across decentralized finance. The announcement came during Devconnect in Argentina, where developers and researchers gather each year to showcase technical progress across the Ethereum ecosystem.
Aqua is now available in early access, offering developers an SDK, libraries, and documentation they can use to test and integrate the system. According to 1inch, Aqua is the first shared liquidity engine in DeFi and is designed to address long-standing issues around fragmented liquidity.
Today, many protocols compete for the same user deposits, forcing liquidity providers to pick one strategy or lock their assets in pools that may restrict future opportunities. Aqua flips that approach. Instead of siloed pools, it introduces shared liquidity that remains in user wallets. This gives developers a way to tap into a broader liquidity base without taking custody of funds, while users keep the flexibility and self-custody they value.
Co founder Anton Bukov said Aqua boosts effective liquidity by allowing the same capital to be used across multiple strategies in real time. Fellow co founder Sergej Kunz described Aqua as a foundational step toward more capital efficient DeFi, similar to how 1inch’s aggregation work advanced the space in 2019. By turning each wallet into a self custodial Automated Market Maker, Aqua lets strategies pull and return liquidity under preset rules. The result, the team said, is a multiplier effect that can double or even triple usable liquidity depending on the setup.
For developers, Aqua removes the need to manage deposits or withdrawals. Applications can simply read balances and focus on building strategy logic. They can also use 1inch’s SwapVM instruction library to create new channels or assemble strategies from scratch. To encourage experimentation, 1inch is offering bounties of up to $100,000 for contributions, bug discoveries, or performance improvements.
Aqua arrives at a time when 1inch is expanding its infrastructure across the wider DeFi landscape. The project already supports more than 26 million users and handles over $500 million in daily trading volume through its DEX aggregation engine. It has recently rolled out new features such as native cross chain swaps between Solana and EVM networks and saw Coinbase integrate its API to improve trade execution for retail users. Earlier upgrades to its Pathfinder routing algorithm also helped strengthen its position as the second largest DEX aggregator on Ethereum by market share.
