1inch launched its Aqua liquidity protocol to the public on July 28, backing the release with a rewards program funded with 10 million 1INCH from the 1inch Foundation and 500,000 USDC from the 1inch DAO, the company said.
The program, called 1inch Network Incentives, is delivered through incentive platform Merkl and led by Degensoft Ltd, a British Virgin Islands entity. It is designed to drive liquidity and swap activity across supported pairs on Aqua, which went live on 13 EVM chains including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain, following a developer-only launch in November 2025.
Aqua is a self-custodial shared liquidity layer: instead of depositing tokens into pools, a liquidity provider approves a wallet balance that multiple positions can quote against. When a swap order matches a position, the protocol pulls the tokens from the wallet and pushes back the received tokens and fees in one atomic transaction. Until that moment, the tokens stay in the provider's wallet.
The design lets the same balance back several quotes at once — $100,000 in a wallet can support three positions collectively quoting $300,000, with execution capped by what the wallet actually holds. Positions can be full range, concentrated or pegged, with no lock-ups.
