Ex-Banker Reveals: Why Your Bank is Actually Scared of DeFi

Recorded at Solana Breakpoint 2025, day three.

Hodl Up: All right guys, welcome back to another episode of Hodl Up. We're still here on day three of Breakpoint, and today we have Sasha, head of BD at 1inch, with us. Without further ado, let's give her the space to introduce herself: what she did before crypto, why she joined crypto and how everything is going.

Sasha: Thank you, guys. We're surviving the third day! Yes, I'm Sasha, and I lead BD at 1inch. It's been almost four years. My previous experience was in banking, and I found it really boring. Then one of my clients at the bank invited me to lunch and said, "By the way, we're doing an ICO for a blockchain project." I said, "I understood nothing, but I agree with you." That's how it happened. I moved from the very serious OG fintech guys to the wonderful crypto audience, and that's where I learned about the freedom of decentralized finance. I'm not saying one is bad; they're just two different audiences. When I moved into decentralized finance, I felt freer, and talking with the people here opened my mind a lot. I feel this industry is full of people who want to build something for change, to improve quality of life, to grow something really different that brings value not just to themselves but to the whole world. That's why I'm here. Next year it will be 10 years since I joined the crypto industry in 2016, and four years with the beautiful 1inch team.

One thing I want to mention is that 1inch is also a community of builders, people who want to improve and change the world. We created the project at a hackathon, ETHNewYork, and that's how we started. Since then we've become a unicorn, not recently, already six years as a unicorn, and we keep growing by supporting builders all over the globe, including by participating in conferences like Solana Breakpoint. And of course we're big in the Ethereum ecosystem. If you've never heard of 1inch, here's a real-world example of what we do and how we came up with the idea. It's about the user experience of swaps. Back in the day, there were basically no places to exchange crypto. You texted a friend, "Hey, do you want some crypto?" You sent them the crypto and they gave you cash. That's how it worked. Then centralized exchanges came onto the market, or crypto processors like Changelly and ShapeShift, where you had to pay an insane percentage to swap your crypto into fiat or top up your cards. Then Uniswap came along. They created a DEX where you could swap without verifying yourself, at fair rates, or at least market rates, because the price was set by the market. A couple of other DEXs existed too. Then in New York our founders, who are degens and traders, were too lazy to check all the DEXs at once. That's how the solution came out of the problem. They didn't want to spend time checking the best rates on different DEXs, so they created an aggregator: a solution that checks rates across different DEXs and gives you the best swap. It's like buying plane tickets: you'd probably go to a ticket aggregator like Skyscanner and put in one destination and another. In crypto, it's USDC to USDT, or ETH, or SOL, by the way. The aggregator checks and says, "Hey, you can buy the tickets here." That's what 1inch does for users on the B2C side, with better rates.

We then saw a lot of interest from B2B clients like MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Phantom, who also wanted this solution under the hood. So we grew from a purely B2C, community-driven project into 1inch Business, a B2B provider offering APIs for builders who don't want to build from scratch and just want to let their community swap one token for another at better rates. At the same time, we also have a mobile wallet. We're an entry point to DeFi, a DeFi gateway. If you're a B2C user, a degen who wants to store, send or swap crypto at the best rates, you can use the 1inch mobile wallet or the 1inch dApp. If you're a business starting your DeFi journey, you can go to 1inch Business, register and get the best rates with the 1inch Swap API, the Portfolio API and so on. Long story short, that's a very high-level view of what 1inch does.

Hodl Up: So you joined crypto in 2016. You went from a very traditional industry, did a complete 180, and joined the most degenerate industry in the world. You've been here for the ICO boom, the NFT craze, the Web3 gaming phase...

Sasha: GameFi, yes.

Hodl Up: ...the memecoin cycle, prediction markets as well. But I can't help feeling that the theme right now, even with the less serious players, is very institutional on so many levels. What do you think about that?

Sasha: I'd tell you this: we're growing, and to make this industry fruitful and interesting for institutions, we have to go through all these cycles. MemeFi, NFTs, GameFi: I think these are very simple, easy-to-understand ways to at least onboard people to the industry. We saw an amazing move from presidents, actually two of them: the president of Argentina and the president of the US launched their tokens and onboarded... I know, there are pros and cons to that move, but we got millions of users in one move. Yes, you have to do your own research, and some of them aren't happy about that particular episode, but they're already onboarded. Our goal is to do something with that. And that's where institutions start to become very interested, because now they see there's a market, when even leaders like that are moving into this industry. I think it's because the market now has enough community. When I started in crypto, only 1% of people actually knew what crypto was. Now I believe it's about 14%, so we still have a lot to do. I see TradFi moving in because the biggest players are already doing something in this industry, and we're getting ready for that too. Compliance is moving, volumes are changing, infrastructure and legal frameworks are changing. So yes, I'd agree with you.

Hodl Up: But in your opinion, is that a good thing? What are the trade-offs of this institutional adoption? Because I think decentralization, as an ethos of crypto, is being left behind right now. Many projects just don't prioritize it. How do you, or how does 1inch, approach that?

Sasha: I'd say decentralization and anonymity or privacy are two different things. Things are staying decentralized through stablecoins and so on. It's still decentralization, but maybe not private enough, or anarchic enough. My ideal-world scenario is that when you open any app that will exist on the market soon, you have two options: you choose whether you want full self-custody or a custodial route. We need both. It's not contradictory at all. Some people already rely on custody and compliance and feel very secure that way. That's one step: they start by using the custodial way, and once they're comfortable with things they know, they'll most likely move into our DeFi world.

Hodl Up: We're moving into a compliant world in a way. It's a long curve, but I've seen many companies change their approach in many respects because they know things are changing. It's no longer the Wild West. I wanted to go back to something, because I really loved the previous 1inch logo. Was that the thought process behind the rebrand, to appear more professional to investors, Wall Street and so on? Was that one of the reasons? You have to bring it back. The logo was amazing, come on.

Sasha: We still have a unicorn! Just check. We still have a fancy unicorn. But we want to move from being just a unicorn project to a big corporate company that still delivers the same vision and mission. We all move forward as one, and that's why we're now paying attention to the big institutional players and to the foundation we're still providing. We're trying to speak to them in the same language, with the same visibility. When you talk to institutions, nobody asks you what your TVL is. They ask whether you're compliant, how stable your service is and what your SLAs are, and those are the rules we have to follow. I'm not saying we're moving completely in that direction. I'm saying that to bring in all these users from the institutional world, we have to adjust course and talk to them at their level. We want to keep DeFi moving forward as one, but bring those users to it. Otherwise we'll never reach the first billion users. That's the idea.

Hodl Up: You're playing their game, so you have to play by their rules. There's no other way around it. Now I want to talk about liquidity in crypto and how you're trying to tackle it, because I know you launched 1inch Aqua, and I want to go deeper into that. Personally, I think crypto has a couple of huge issues, and liquidity, and unlocking it, is one of the main ones. Please share.

Sasha: Happy to. Historically, 1inch's goal has been to improve the user experience in every use case. We started with swaps that aggregate DEXs. Then we improved on that with intent-based swaps, which let you swap without paying gas. Then we launched cross-chain intent-based swaps, gathering liquidity from across the market. It used to be just DEX liquidity, but with intent-based swaps, through resolvers, we gather liquidity from centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges and private liquidity pools. But we're still competing in this market with other liquidity providers, and you're right: liquidity is very fragmented. Say I have $100K in my wallet. If I want yield, I have to fragment that liquidity: put it into staking, yield farming, lending and so on, and divide it across certain chains and pairs. And if I want to move it from one liquidity pool to another, I have to take a risk, lose my yield, et cetera. That's why our beautiful dev team came up with this solution. They'd started a project back in, I think, 2018, called Mooniswap, and they brought it back, because now it's finally efficient. Aqua is the second level of improvement to the user experience. We used to play in the DeFi aggregation market, and now we're moving into the shared liquidity market. Aqua is essentially an AMM, a shared liquidity protocol that makes your liquidity more efficient. How does it work? There's the big Aqua protocol, and you have $100K in your wallet. If you want to execute certain strategies, you keep that $100K in your wallet, but you don't need to lock it. In parallel you can put $100K into yield farming, $100K into staking and $100K into other strategies, without locking the liquidity. You just keep it in your wallet, in secure self-custody. Market makers, anyone, even Solana projects, can build their native DEXs on top of the Aqua protocol, and they communicate by calling the Aqua protocol and asking whether the balance is sufficient. That's the high-level architecture. Go to 1inch.com/aqua to see more of the technical details. We just did the developer release. It's not ready for end users yet, but it's available now for devs who want to dive deeper. So you're not losing out; you make your capital efficient by letting the Aqua protocol use your liquidity to execute certain strategies.

Hodl Up: You've been integrated in a lot of places. I think you also have a partnership with Coinbase, right?

Sasha: We just released it.

Hodl Up: Coinbase, to me, is one of these big traditional players. I see them as moguls. At the same time, since we're at a Solana conference, you also have your thing with Solana, and no matter how much Solana says it's the internet capital market, it's still the most degenerate chain in existence. How hard is it to balance your strategies, given that you're working with a lot of players, some more institutional and some still quite degen, even though Solana is trying to become institutional as well?

Sasha: Thanks a lot for the question. First of all, thanks to my beautiful BD team for executing the Coinbase partnership. We made it, and I'm really glad about that. And yes, the reason we deployed on Solana is that there's a market here. Again, Trump used Solana to launch in this market, and Solana showed us that when you have enough speed, low transaction costs and much improved finality, you can still get the users. But those users are in and out. So the next step for Solana is improving capital efficiency, because the people coming in are mostly degens. How do I say this in a correct, polite way? It's not real DeFi happening on Solana right now. That's why we deployed on Solana: we want to bring the advanced DeFi community to Solana. That's why we have a native implementation for Solana and cross-chain swaps for Solana, and our next move is Aqua, which will hopefully make the chain's liquidity and TVL deeper. That's our goal. What I also wanted to say is that from recent news, Solana is right now the most obvious and super-efficient chain for payments, and that's what they're releasing everything for. Once they onboard those communities through very easy payment solutions like Solana Pay, 1inch Aqua on top of that will finally make DeFi summer happen again.

Hodl Up: In the past I used to see a lot of cultural clash between EVM and non-EVM. I don't know if people care about that anymore, but do you encounter people debating it, given that you partner with so many ecosystems?

Sasha: I'd say most DeFi and capital efficiency is still happening on EVM chains, and we still see that a lot. People ask us, and projects specifically, like the Phantom wallet, Trust Wallet and Binance Web3 Wallet, need more new chains to keep growing their communities. But we're not moving into all of them. You see how it works: a chain launches, then all the yield farmers come and take their yield, and then the chain's activity drops. The coolest ones are Base, Solana, BNB Chain and Ethereum itself. We still see demand for new deployments, but we don't follow it in every case, because for us DeFi activity is crucial. If a new chain launches and there are no real DeFi projects deployed on it, we won't follow until that happens.

Hodl Up: 1inch has been building for years, and you're still building and rolling out new things.

Sasha: We have so many plans.

Hodl Up: That's what I want to get into. What plans can you share with us right now? We want the alpha, and the viewers will want it too.

Sasha: The Aqua protocol. I mentioned it, but it's only deployed on EVM chains so far. The next step for us is definitely to make the Aqua protocol available on Solana, so keep an eye out next year. Apart from Aqua, we also released SwapVM, and more improvements to SwapVM will come next year. I don't want to say more, because the rule at 1inch is deliver first, then communicate. We're also planning to keep participating in hackathons. If you're a builder, keep an eye on the biggest hackathon organizers, like Solana Colosseum and ETHGlobal, find us, and join the 1inch dev community, which is growing, to ask questions. As builders and a hackathon project ourselves, we're happy to share. So the plan is to keep growing builders. We grew into a unicorn, and we want more projects like us to grow. That's the plan: support, keep building, and hopefully make DeFi summer happen again in the next two years.

Hodl Up: We're hoping for a DeFi summer and some altcoin seasons, because we're dying. We need more activity.

Sasha: I believe DeFi summer means altcoin season, means everything.

Hodl Up: True. And you guys throw some killer events. What's the secret?

Sasha: We work hard. Even though I mentioned we're a hackathon project, we still ship new features like hackathon builders. Our co-founders bring everyone to one place. Fusion, for example, was created over Christmas in one month: everyone was in one place, and we worked together 24 hours a day, every day. That's one part. But we also rest hard. The idea behind these events is to create an experience, not just to drink and listen to music. We want the community to feel something, to have a memory and want to come back. So every event is, first of all, about giving back to the community and creating an experience so we grow together. That's what the 1inch events team is about, and thanks again to the events team for that.

Hodl Up: We like you guys. We've been to plenty of 1inch events, and they're nothing short of fantastic. There's a lot going on, you can't get bored, and you can meet builders.

Sasha: A lot of builders.

Hodl Up: And that's the most important thing at the end of the day. I don't want to sound like a Web3 recruiter, and we know five years is a long time in crypto, but where do you think 1inch will be in five years? I want to hear your take from the BD side.

Sasha: It's just my ideal scenario. I'd like it if, in any bank, and I don't even want to name one, you walk in and see a custodial option and a self-custody option, and all the self-custody and DeFi options are provided by 1inch. That's the ideal scenario we're all working toward. And all the real-world assets that keep being released on the market will be tradable on 1inch.com through our partners. That's the goal. Web3 wallets are a big part of the industry, but the next stage is all the neobanks.

Hodl Up: All right, to wrap this up: are you bullish or bearish?

Sasha: Oh, bullish!

Hodl Up: Good. That's what I wanted to hear, and that's what we need: bullish people. All right, thank you very much for joining us, Sasha. We look forward to 1inch delivering even more, probably having you on an episode again in the future, and seeing the next events.

Sasha: Yeah, we're going to party.

Hodl Up: You have to have more parties, at least once a month.

Sasha: When we're even more bullish, we're going to do even more.

Hodl Up: 2025 was hard.

Sasha: Yeah, 2025 was quite hard.

Hodl Up: Okay, thank you very much again.

Sasha: Thank you guys for hosting us. I appreciate it. Good luck, follow the community, and let's keep growing together. Let's go!