The Launch of 1inch at Zebpay

 

21 April 2021 | ZebPay Trade-Desk

1inch was launched in 2019 with a goal of helping users find the best prices on assets across decentralized exchanges. Within 2 years, it became one of the widely used decentralized exchanges with over $290 million locked in their liquidity pool. Today, the 1inch network is a collection of decentralized protocols with a DeFi aggregator and an Automated Market Making protocol or AMM. 1inch went live on ZebPay’s platform last week, and you can read more about its launch here.

1inch Snapshot (at the time of writing):

1inch came into existence in August 2020 after it raised $2.8 million in funding from the likes of Binance Labs, Galaxy Digital, Greenfield One, Libertus Capital, Dragonfly Capital, FTX, IOSG, LAUNCHub Ventures, and Divergence Ventures. Soon in December 2020, 1inch raised another $12 million through a Series A funding round, pioneered by Pantera Capital, in partnership with ParaFi Capital, Blockchain Capital, Nima Capital, and Spartan Group. The funding round is administered through a SAFT sale (simple agreement for future tokens). Last year, 1inch also launched Mooniswap, which is its native automated market maker (AMM).

In December last year, 1inch introduced its 1inch governance token, and the 1inch Network was to be governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). This asset is unique as it provides instant governance for its users. It allows 1inch users to vote for specific protocol settings, which engages the users, but also gives users a say in the development of the asset, using the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model. An issue that this protocol was able to swiftly solve was the high gas fees that are incurred on the network during spikes in demand.

1inch introduced Chi Gastokens, in an attempt to bypass this issue. Chi Gastokens are backed by the Ethereum gas fee price and make use of Ethereum’s storage refund to provide lower fees for 1inch users. Hence, 1inch brings with it the ability to securely transact efficiently and more cheaply, backed by strong governance protocols, and a permissionless interactive mechanism between its users and developers to ensure full transparency and trust in the protocol.

Investment Analysis:

On its release date, Dec. 25, 2020, the circulating supply was ~6 percent of the total issuance and around 1 percent for the first week of the liquidity mining program. Today, the total supply of 1inch is 1.5 billion tokens, 30% is allocated to community incentives, and will be rolled out over the next 4 years or so, with the aim to create an incentive for community members to participate in the protocol’s governance. In these 4 years, ~14.5% of the total supply will form the protocol growth and development fund, which will be used to issue grants, attract developers and repay any users due to unforeseen circumstances.

In the table below, we will be looking at how the price of the asset has developed MoM since its launch in December 2020, and also look at its MoM volume growth.

 As seen in the table the asset, in terms of price, has grown almost 5x, to an average of $5.4, in April, in just a few months of its launch. This is reflected in its ROI figure, showing more than a 300% appreciation in just 5 months, showcasing the asset’s true potential. On the volume front, things seem to be pretty stable, though February 2021 saw a major spike, This can be attributed to the rally that was seen between February and March 2021, which spiked larger investor interest in the asset. Post this, the asset has started to show signs of some maturity, despite being rather nascent and new. Prices haven’t shown a great deal of volatility, and volumes have also held up, especially in the month of April 2021.

From a technical point of view, as we can see from an hourly chart above, post making the all-time high of $6.663, 1inch has corrected almost 33% making the low of $4.429. The asset has made a bullish harami pattern at this level and has started moving upwards. At current levels, $5.5 will act as a crucial resistance, once it trades and sustains above this level we may see further upside on the asset.

1inch is an interesting offering, and it specializes in being different in the sense that it’s permissionless and has a good governance mechanism. The fundamentals of the asset are strong, and it has shown good growth since launch, and we expect this to continue. With that in mind, though 1inch is still a fairly new token, it has proved its merit and benefited immensely from the growing interest among the crypto community. We believe that 1inch is likely to become a key player in the marketplace over the next few years.