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1inch has introduced Aqua, a next-generation liquidity architecture designed to eliminate fragmentation in decentralized finance. According to the team, Aqua enables multiple DeFi strategies to operate using the same pool of capital — without locking tokens or splitting liquidity between separate pools.
Aqua: One Liquidity Source for Every Strategy
Today’s DeFi landscape forces each liquidity pool to compete for total value locked (TVL), requiring individual deposits and creating capital inefficiency. Aqua changes that model entirely. The new protocol turns a user’s wallet into a self-custodial AMM, allowing various strategies to access the same tokens simultaneously under their own execution rules.
Each strategy can perform atomic swaps based on its internal logic, which produces a multiplicative liquidity effect — essentially making one asset work across several strategies at once. The 1inch team says this dramatically increases capital efficiency and expands available liquidity across the ecosystem.
Aqua Simplifies Life for Developers
For builders, Aqua removes the need to design deposit logic, withdrawal mechanisms, or custom fund-management flows. Strategies interact directly with a unified balance, while developers can choose to build from scratch or rely on existing components such as the partner protocol SwapVM.
To boost early participation, 1inch has launched a reward and bug-bounty program worth up to $100,000. Contributors can explore the SDK, libraries, and documentation, all of which are already accessible to developers.
Public Launch Planned for Q1 2026
While Aqua is currently open only for testing via GitHub, the public rollout for everyday users is expected in the first quarter of 2026. The team hopes community involvement will accelerate experimentation and help validate new liquidity models.
The 1inch founders emphasize that Aqua directly targets one of DeFi’s biggest structural weaknesses — fragmented liquidity.
Co-founder Anton Bukov noted that “the only limit to capital efficiency now is the strategy itself,” while Sergey Kunz highlighted that Aqua gives users more control and builds the foundation for a more scalable and flexible DeFi ecosystem.
According to the team, Aqua is one of the most technically significant upgrades in 1inch’s history and may power everything from new AMM strategies to advanced yield-automation tools, opening doors for smaller projects to compete on liquidity.
