1inch, a leading decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, just announced the launch of it’s new shared liquidity protocol, Aqua. It promises to improve efficiency and unlock liquidity for users across networks.
Sergej Kunz, co-founder and CEO at 1inch, joined TheStreet Roundtable to talk about the launch and describe where those efficiency gains are actually being made.
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RWAs need liquidity
Kunz frames Aqua’s efficiency as a new model of liquidity provisioning built for the tokenized-asset wave.
“RWAs are coming into DeFi, and RWAs need our infrastructure to be able to have proper liquidity in our space,” he said.
A recent study, commissioned by 1inch, found that roughly 80% of liquidity on decentralized exchanges sits idle at any given time. That equates to around $1.6 billion that isn’t earning anything.
For thin and newer markets such as tokenized RWAs, that inefficiency can be fatal.
The killer use-case
Tokenized equities have exploded globally despite not being available to U.S. investors yet. For users outside the U.S., there are already 100s of tokenized stocks available for purchase through Robinhood, Kraken, Ondo, and more.
“You can just buy all the top ten RWAs from Backed’s xStocks, Robinhood or whatever, and make trading positions among them,” Kunz said. “You could, theoretically, set up a trading pair for SpaceX and Apple stock. And then you have SpaceX–Tesla, and then Tesla–Apple, and then Microsoft. It’s a construct that allows you to benefit from the volume that comes from the movement of the RWAs.”
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Traditional brokerages only let you trade each stock against dollars. Kunz is describing direct asset-to-asset markets, a web where one wallet’s holdings back every pair simultaneously, with the LP collecting fees on every crossing.
Why does it require Aqua?
“When these RWAs are isolated in single two-token-pair pools, it’s not possible. So here we have additional efficiency,” Kunz answered.
The RWA boom keeps promising “stocks on-chain” but mostly delivers stocks-vs-dollars with extra steps. Kunz’s pitch is one of the first structurally new things tokenized equities could do: markets between assets, priced continuously, fed by one pool of reusable capital.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Jul 31, 2026, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.