1inch Launches Aqua: Shared Liquidity Across 13 Chains

1inch has opened public access to Aqua, its shared liquidity protocol, across 13 EVM-compatible chains at once. Liquidity providers can now back several trading positions with a single wallet balance instead of locking capital into separate pools for every strategy.

What exactly did 1inch launch?

1inch is a decentralized exchange aggregator that searches for the best swap route across dozens of DEXs at once, and it has long ranked among the largest players in that corner of DeFi. Aqua is the company's second major product, and this one targets liquidity providers rather than traders.

The protocol first appeared last year as an SDK for developers, complete with libraries and documentation but no public interface. That interface has only just gone live for regular users, spanning 13 chains including Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain.

The new interface supports three position types: full-range, concentrated around the current price and pegged to a fixed rate. A provider's tokens stay in their own wallet, such as MetaMask, until a matching trade actually executes, rather than moving under a smart contract's control right away as they would in a classic AMM pool.

How does the shared balance work?

Previously, a provider who wanted to earn on several pairs at once had to split capital across separate pools, locking part of the funds behind ETH/USDC and another part behind ETH/USDT, one strategy at a time, even though only one trade would actually execute at any given moment. Aqua removes that requirement.

1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz told CoinDesk that tokens stay under the owner's full control, while one balance backs multiple positions across different strategies instead of being split between smart-contract deposits. For example, the same wallet could quote liquidity across ETH/USDC, ETH/USDT and WBTC/ETH at once, without holding a separate deposit for each pair. According to the team's math, a $100,000 balance can support three positions quoting a combined $300,000.

This is quoted liquidity, not extra capital out of nowhere: a swap only executes once the wallet actually holds enough funds, otherwise the trade simply fails. For a provider, that means fewer locked-up funds and more flexibility to move between strategies.

Why is the liquidity market this inefficient?

The Aqua launch leans on research 1inch commissioned ahead of the release. Analysts checked $1.84 billion in liquidity across the largest concentrated-liquidity exchanges over the first half of 2026 and found that 85% of that sum sat idle.

Roughly $542 million sat fully outside the active trading range every week, earning no fees at all. The reason is simple: the asset's price keeps moving while a concentrated position's boundaries stay fixed until the provider manually resets them. Managing dozens of such positions by hand is close to impossible, so most providers simply leave the boundaries as they are and give up potential income. The team estimates the resulting lost income at $150 million a year.

That figure, according to the developers, became the main argument for the shared-balance model. One wallet is easier to monitor and quicker to rebalance than a dozen scattered deposits.

What security guarantees and incentives do providers get?

Aqua went through eight independent security audits before its public launch. The usual DeFi risks have not disappeared. Sharp price swings, impermanent loss (the gap between holding assets in a pool versus just keeping them in a wallet) and smart-contract vulnerabilities remain, only the capital allocation mechanics have changed.

To speed up the migration of liquidity to the new protocol, 1inch launched an incentive program through the Merkl service.

• Key point: the 1inch Foundation allocated 10 million 1INCH tokens as rewards for program participants.
• The 1inch DAO added another $500,000 in USDC over three months of the program.
• At current prices, the token portion is worth roughly $870,000.
• The combined incentive budget totals around $1.37 million.

What does this mean for crypto users?

For holders of crypto on EVM chains, the practical change is straightforward. The same pool of coins can now serve several positions at once instead of sitting idle in a single pool. Less locked-up capital means a provider can react faster to price moves and shift liquidity between strategies without extra transactions.

For the wider market, it is another step toward liquidity that moves between chains and strategies automatically rather than staying scattered across dozens of isolated contracts. The coming months will show whether other DeFi protocols adopt a similar model or whether Aqua remains a niche tool for experienced liquidity providers.