The ultimate battlefield: 1inch cofounder Sergej Kunz is coming for centralized exchanges

Welcome to Slate Sunday, CryptoSlate’s weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.

Ask 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz about where DeFi is headed, and you’ll get more than just your standard answer about financial inclusion or a hedge against fiat collapse.

Kunz isn’t one to mince his words, and he dives into the future of the sector like a hunter tracking his prey; focused, relentless, and entirely undaunted. For Kunz, DeFi’s future is seamless and, ultimately, peer-to-peer, delivering a UX so smooth it makes centralized exchanges obsolete.

As the leading DEX aggregator and DeFi ecosystem, complete with a sleek new rebrand, 1inch recently integrated with Solana and launched native, decentralized swaps spanning over 12 EVM networks. Smiling broadly, Kunz lays it out:

“We recognized that we need to grow; the whole DeFi space is not just on Ethereum anymore.”

It’s a sign of the times. From its early days in 2019, 1inch was strictly an Ethereum story, riding the first wave of DeFi innovation. Kunz recalls:

“We started on Ethereum. It was only Ethereum. And we added more EVM-compatible chains like Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, all the layers.”

Now, 14 chains later (with Solana joining the pack in April of this year), one thing is clear: DeFi’s borders get blurrier by the week, and his vision of seamless interoperability between ecosystems is no longer a distant dream.

“We started to combine the DeFi space, all the chains together, and now growing to non-EVM compatible chains. We will also add Bitcoin and all other blockchains that we can integrate for the cross-chain swaps, so we can unite all the liquidity in one single place.”

If it sounds ambitious, that’s probably because it is. Kunz isn’t the type of person to settle for second best. And why stick with fragmented liquidity when one platform can unite it all?

1inch: trustless swaps and seamless execution

Kunz’s relentless cross-chain focus comes paired with a laser eye on both security and price. He’s emphatic about user autonomy and respecting the core pillars of decentralized finance (like removing the middleman).

“Our value proposition is non-custodial swaps, which means no one needs to trust anyone. And the second value proposition is the best execution on the most liquidity that is available out there.”

But uniting liquidity means more than just technical gymnastics. There’s a longer-term goal, and it’s about rendering centralized exchanges to a footnote in crypto history. He affirms:

“Theoretically, no one needs centralized exchanges by using 1inch.”

Kunz insists that the magic of 1inch lies in user experience, unifying the UX across multiple ecosystems and chains.

But how close is DeFi to that mythical single-click, chain-agnostic flow that web2 users want?

“We are almost there,” he says. “Right now, when you do a cross-chain swap, you just connect your wallet, you click, and you confirm. You don’t do any transaction by yourself.”

Intent-based protocols, or ‘solving your own problem’

Behind the scenes, it’s taken innovation. The 1inch protocol was invented in 2022 as a means of making DeFi fairer and combating “sandwich attacks,” the particular brand of front-running that haunts liquidity providers and traders alike. He explains:

“We call it an intent-based protocol for swaps.”

That phrase, ‘intent-based protocol’, has been cropping up everywhere lately. Uniswap X has written about it, and, in fact, Kunz points out that Uniswap X is based on 1inch’s idea; it is even cited in their whitepaper.

“We can create a protocol that sells user orders to market makers, arbitrage traders, and let the market makers compete between each other.”

Kunz compares 1inch’s approach to traditional exchanges like the Nasdaq, in that people create orders and market makers fill them. What’s different here is giving the order directly to an open, competitive ecosystem of professional traders who come first, settle first, and also partially fill. The numbers prove the point:

“We have use cases where someone exchanged 12 million USDT to Ethereum and got $135,000 more. If they did it by themselves using a DEX directly, they would get less.”

He recounts his own experience with sandwich attacks, saying:

“I was sandwiched… front-run by a malicious exchange. And I recognized, okay, we need to fix this.”

The intent-based protocol was, therefore, born from necessity, he says with a grin:

“I solved my own problem. No one can sandwich you or manipulate the liquidity.”

From DeFi to the broader crypto space

The conversation turns to stablecoins and the user experience gaps between chains. I point out that, despite the improvements, DeFi is still fiendishly tricky for normies to navigate, switching between networks and setting up wallets. He shrugs and says the ultimate goal is for users to never need to worry about networks or bridges.

“It should be that users should not care about the chain… they should just care what they have in USDC.”

As the roadmap stretches forward, growth is the only certainty for Kunz.

“We unite DeFi liquidity… and then we go to the crypto space. We integrate Bitcoin. You can buy any sh*t coin, memecoin, whatever coin. You can buy real Bitcoin, you get it in your wallet, and you can also sell Bitcoin. Same for Litecoin, same for Ripple.”

1inch’s vision is clear: to grow from the “small DeFi space” to the broader web3 world, and eventually touch traditional finance as well. He elaborates:

“A lot of companies right now, all the banks, do tokenization of real-world assets, but there’s no secondary trading place where you can trade them in one place. You need to go to every issuer, maybe to a bank, to a single bank, for example, to buy tokenized wine. You cannot just offer it like that. You need proper regulation for that… Our plan is to offer our protocols and our software service APIs for institutions to exchange such assets in a highly safe, non-custodial manner.”

The showdown with centralized exchanges

And what’s on the immediate horizon for 1inch? Kunz explains that the one-to-three-year plan is to “push forward,” integrate more chains, go more cross-chain, and provide a more seamless experience. Finally, he says with a glint in his eye:

“To battle, test, and compete with centralized exchanges.”

Did I mention that Kunz was ambitious?

While most at the helm of CEXs envision a world where DeFi and CeFi coexist, the juggernauts of decentralized finance don’t easily forget being front-run.

And, with centralized exchange spot volume dropping nearly 28% in Q2 2025, CEXs should be sleeping with one eye open. DeFi is coming for their lunch.

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