Here's a number worth sitting with: 85% of $1.84 billion in liquidity tracked across major concentrated-liquidity exchanges went underused in the first half of 2026, according to research commissioned by 1inch. On average, $542 million sat completely outside active trading ranges every week -- missing out on an estimated $150 million in fees a year.
1inch's answer is Aqua, a shared liquidity protocol that just went live across 13 EVM-compatible chains, including Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain and Arbitrum.
The idea: instead of splitting capital across separate pools, liquidity providers keep one balance in their own wallet and use it to back multiple positions at once. A $100,000 balance can quote three positions worth a combined $300,000 -- quoted liquidity, not extra capital, and any swap fails if the wallet can't actually cover it.
"Tokens stay in your wallet, under your control, while one balance backs multiple positions across different strategies rather than being split between smart contract deposits," 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz told CoinDesk.
To pull in early liquidity, the 1inch Foundation and DAO are putting up 10 million 1INCH tokens and $500,000 in USDC over three months through Merkl -- a combined incentive worth roughly $1.37 million. The protocol has been through eight independent security audits, though the usual risks (impermanent loss, price movement, smart-contract exposure) still apply.
This is the kind of infrastructure bonuz keeps an eye on: less capital sitting idle, more of it actually working, across more chains at once. That's the direction the whole multi-chain stack needs to move in.
