1inch’s Anton Bukov: “On-chain and off-chain will complement each other”

During his talk The Future of Flow: from DeFi Primitives to RWAs at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov suggested that off-chain and on-chain finance are likely to complement each other.

Anton began by outlining DeFi’s potential role in offering financial services to roughly 1.4 bln people worldwide who are currently unbanked.

“Onboarding them to a bank would cost around 100 bucks per user,” he explained. “For online banks, it’s roughly 10 bucks per user. But banks would not invest that money into onboarding [those unbanked people]. And those users can onboard themselves into DeFi by just having a mobile phone with an Internet connection.”

He went on to describe the original idea behind launching 1inch as a DEX aggregator.

“When we started in 2019, there were three or four DEXs,” he recalled. “And whenever you wanted to swap, say, a few hundred bucks, you could open three websites and check prices on all three of them. And it was different everywhere. You could get one, two, three, four or five bucks more by just picking the best exchange. There was a low arbitrage between them. And that was our initial idea: we could aggregate [DEXes], we could split user volume among different exchanges to improve exchange rates.”

DeFi has come a long way since then, and now it provides attractive opportunities to traditional finance institutions by operating as a vast liquidity market and offering various earning options, such as real-world assets (RWAs), Anton noted.

“Bringing real-world assets on-chain creates options that didn’t exist before,” he said. “For example, you could split your yield from nominal using the Pendle protocol. And it was pretty hard to achieve without blockchain protocols.”

Looking to the future, Anton said he expects on-chain and off-chain finance to complement each other.

“I don't see any future where on-chain liquidity would stay and off-chain would die or off-chain would survive and on-chain would die,” he said. “No way. They will be complementary to each other.”

In conclusion, he underscored the role of hackathons for 1inch and for the DeFi space in general.

“Hackathons are probably the best part of DeFi,” he said. “That's how I came into crypto. I started my blockchain career at a hackathon. If you want to dig into a new topic, you would probably spend weeks or months. But within just one hackathon, you could dive deep and get a lot of experience you would never get anywhere else.”

Stay tuned for more insights from 1inch!