1inch raises $175 million to facilitate the next $1 trillion in assets entering DeFi

1inch, the decentralised DEX aggregator, has just closed a $175 million Series B funding round led by Hong Kong-based Amber Group. The company is now valued at $2.25 billion.

Many of the world’s premier funds and crypto asset management companies took part in the round. These included the likes of Jane Street, Alameda Research, Gemini Frontier Fund, VanEck, Tribe Capital, Celsius, and Nexo. 

According to a very recent article on Forbes, the 1inch decentralised exchange is looking to provide an on-ramp to bring in traditional financial institutions. According to Sergei Kunz of the 1inch team:

“Our main goal for this fundraising event is to open doors to DeFi for the institutions,” said Sergej Kunz in e-mailed comments. "The next $1 trillion of assets entering DeFi will come from institutions rather than retail users, and 1inch would like to facilitate entry for them."

In order to facilitate its plan, 1inch is building out a specialised service called 1inch Pro, which is expected to be launched at the end of 2022 or Q1 of 2023. The service will integrate a compliance protocol which will allow typical traditional finance entities such as banks, hedge funds, and market makers to access DeFi.

The new 1inch offering will stand on the shoulders of other DeFi platforms that have developed services for institutions. For example, Compound launched its “Compound Treasury”, enabling institutions to access the interest rates in the USDC market on the Compound protocol.

Aave is also looking to offer a similar service to 1inch next month, as it launches “permissioned pools” for KYC’d clients who can then also partake in DeFi.

1inch is continuing its strong growth, and is now the biggest DEX aggregator, passing $100 billion just on the Ethereum network. As well as being on various layer 2 networks, 1inch is also looking at other blockchains. Kunz stated:

“We are looking at some more blockchains, such as Solana, Avalanche, NEAR, xDAI, and also Layer 2 solutions like zkSync to be added, but final decisions are not taken yet,”

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.