1inch exec says your wallet is the liquidity pool now

DeFi's next wave of users won't read whitepapers or hunt yield across ten pools. Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, joined TheStreet Roundtable to explain how it's building for them, and why its new Aqua protocol rethinks where liquidity actually lives.

1inch is a DEX aggregator. It routes trades across many decentralized exchanges to find the best price, and is now expanding into a broader DeFi platform.

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The 2028 user: expansion, not replacement

When asked what the typical DeFi user will look like in 2027 or 2028, Atkinson was clear.

“The user base is expanding. It’s not a shift, it’s an expansion,” Atkinson said.

The crypto-native power users who have always driven innovation remain central to 1inch and the broader industry. At the same time, new participants are entering through tokenizedreal-world assets, more accessible on-ramps, and mainstream platforms.

1inch’s strategy is to serve both groups.

“We want to continue to serve our audience, which means delivering best-in-class execution and more advanced capabilities for experienced users, while providing that dramatically simpler experience for those newcomers,” Atkinson explained.

Aqua: three problems

Aqua, 1inch’s shared liquidity protocol that launched in developer form on November 17, 2025, was created to address three issues that still plague DeFi.

The first is liquidity fragmentation. In current DeFi protocols, users deposit tokens into a specific pool to provide liquidity. Once deposited, those tokens are locked to that single pool and can’t be used elsewhere.

The second problem is underutilized capital. Because tokens typically back only one position at a time, a large portion of capital sits idle, earning nothing.

The third is custody. Most liquidity provision requires users to give up control of their assets by depositing them into smart contracts.

“Aqua is solving three core problems in DeFi,” Atkinson said. “We are solving the problem of underutilized capital caused by tokens only backing one position at a time. We are enabling a multiplication of the potential of that capital, and we solve the problem of giving up custody by depositing tokens into liquidity pools, because Aqua is self-custodial.”

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Same token, multiple positions, all from your wallet

The most innovative part of Aqua is how it achieves this without forcing users to surrender custody.

In conventional liquidity pools, providing liquidity means sending tokens into a smart contract. With Aqua, liquidity is provided directly from the user’s own wallet. The same tokens can simultaneously back multiple positions across different pairs, price ranges, and fee tiers.

A user opens a position by selecting a trading pair, setting a price range, and choosing a fee tier. The tokens never leave the wallet until a swap actually executes against one of those positions. When that happens, the required tokens are pulled atomically for the swap and returned immediately afterward if unused.

“One wallet can back many positions, all backed by the same tokens,” Atkinson noted. “And because those tokens can back several positions at the same time, they have more chances to be earning fees. For the user, it’s capital efficiency gains.”

This design turns every wallet into a self-custodial automated market maker (AMM).

Multiple strategies can draw on the same underlying assets without fragmentation or lockups. The result is significantly higher capital efficiency: the same dollar can safely work in several places at once.