# 1inch Exchange - DEX Aggregator

**Published by:** [Meta Discovery](https://paragraph.com/@meta-discovery/)
**Published on:** 2022-02-23
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@meta-discovery/1inch-exchange-dex-aggregator

## Content

1inch is, first and foremost, a DEX aggregator. That means it scrapes a handful of decentralized exchanges for the cheapest prices and reroutes its customers’ trades between them to try and ensure that they're getting the best prices. As of June 2021, 1inch claims to offer users access to over 50 liquidity sources on Ethereum, 20 on Binance Smart Chain, and 8 on Polygon. The list of DEXs it draws on includes the likes of Uniswap, 0x and Balancer, as well as 1inch’s own liquidity protocol, formerly known as Mooniswap. 1inch was founded by Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov in 2019 during ETHNewYork’s hackathon. Since then, 1inch has raised about $15 million in funding from companies such as Binance Labs, Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital. As of June 2021, 1inch’s exchange trades about $250 million a day. How does 1inch work? Say that you want to buy some Wrapped Bitcoin (a synthetic version of Bitcoin) using Ethereum on a decentralized exchange. Look at different DEXes and you’ll find that the prices vary, as do the fees. 1inch’s algorithm finds the cheapest way to place that trade using all the different exchanges and liquidity protocols that can facilitate this trade. The cheapest way to place this trade may involve swapping your Ethereum between several different protocols and for several different currencies before it arrives at Wrapped Bitcoin. The advantage of doing this is that it may mean you can buy Wrapped Bitcoin at a cheaper price. ​How do you use 1inch? In this short guide, Decrypt will show you how to place a trade on 1inch. To start, let’s open up the main exchange page in a web browser and connect our browser-based Ethereum wallet. We opted for MetaMask, although others, such as Ledger, MyEtherWallet and WalletLink are also available. We’d like to trade ETH for Wrapped Bitcoin, so we select ETH in the “pay” box and WBTC in the “receive” box. Note that we will also need some ETH to pay the so-called “gas” fee—the network fee we must pay Ethereum miners for processing our transactions. So, let’s load our wallet up with ETH. To do so, we are transferring some ETH we had previously bought on Binance to our MetaMask wallet. Then we enter some money and hit swap. The price changed: Click confirm, and that’s done! The future The future of 1inch depends on the future of decentralized finance. Decentralized exchanges are still expensive, slow and relatively insignificant compared to mighty centralized exchanges such as Binance. But with centralized exchanges suffering repeated bouts of downtime during periods of crypto price volatility, the appetite for DEXs is growing—and aggregators like 1inch are there to pick up the slack. Some of the 1inch token supply is earmarked for development, which has seen the exchange integrate new liquidity protocols at a rapid clip. So long as the market doesn’t bottom out, there's no reason to suspect that the pace of development will slow any time soon.

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