1inch launched Aqua on July 28, a self-custodial shared-liquidity layer that lets users keep a single balance across 13 EVM chains. The platform is designed to solve a problem highlighted in a July 2026 DEX capital efficiency study: of roughly $1.84 billion in average weekly concentrated liquidity, only a small portion was actively used, leaving hundreds of millions idle.
What Aqua does
Aqua supports Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain, and nine other EVM chains at launch. Users deposit once and can deploy that capital into multiple strategies — concentrated liquidity provision, market making, or just an idle balance for on-the-fly trades — without moving funds chain by chain. The balance is self-custodial: users hold their keys, and capital is routed through 1inch infrastructure but stays under user control at the smart contract level.
The incentive program
To kickstart the network, the 1inch Foundation put up 10,000,000 1INCH, and the 1inch DAO added 500,000 USDC. Rewards are distributed via Merkl, a system that targets actual useful liquidity rather than purely mercenary TVL. That means the program is designed to pay for capital that's actually being used in trades, not just parked to inflate a number.
The July study made the case that a lot of liquidity in DeFi is sitting dead — posted but rarely touched. Aqua aims to reduce that logistical drag by letting capital rotate faster across chains and strategies. For liquidity providers, it means less time spent rebalancing and bridging. For traders, it could mean deeper pools with less fragmentation. The self-custody piece is a deliberate choice: 1inch is betting that users want the convenience of a unified balance without the counterparty risk of a centralized bridge or custodian.
The launch is live now, and the incentive program is already distributing rewards. Whether Aqua can actually shift the idle-liquidity problem will depend on how quickly LPs and traders adopt the single-balance model — but the infrastructure is in place.
