He nearly hit a trillion dollars in trades and never turned a profit on purpose.
Sergej Kunz built 1inch out of a hackathon where he won just $300, enough to buy a plane ticket home to Germany. Two weeks later the site had real volume, and today 1inch has settled over $809 billion in trades across DeFi, powering partners like Coinbase along the way.
In this episode, Sergej and Ivan Patriki dig into why he still refuses to "extract value" from users, how a self-taught teenager (no degree, learning to code at a library computer) ended up running a 140-person network, and why he thinks the goal was never the money.
We cover:
The $300 hackathon prize that became an $809B protocol.
Why 1inch is named after Bruce Lee's one inch punch.
Sleeping on an airbag in an office with no shower while building 1inch.
Working at Porsche by day, flying to hackathons on weekends.
17 hackathons in 13 months, and only one idea got adoption.
Aqua: a brand new liquidity protocol that lives on your own wallet.
100+ trading pairs sharing the same liquidity (SpaceX to NVIDIA to Apple).
Why 85% of liquidity in traditional AMMs sits idle.
Cross-chain swaps with no bridge you have to trust.
How to actually pick a co-founder (and the "70/30" trap).
"We were never profitable, I would say" and why that's the point.
Why tokenized stocks (RWAs) move differently than crypto.
Robinhood, RWAs, and institutions arriving as DeFi's gatekeepers.
Kidnappings, cut-off fingers, and why crypto still needs privacy.
Can you rebuild 1inch's Python in two weeks with AI now?
The one piece of advice: experiment 50 times, expect to fail 49.
RESOURCES & LINKS:
1inch: https://1inch.io
MORE OF SERGEJ KUNZ:
Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deacix0/
LinkedIn: https://x.com/deacix
MORE OF ON THE MARGIN:
Website: https://www.themargin.tv
Spotify:
Main Site: https://www.on-the-margin.com
MORE OF BOAZ SOBRADO:
Twitter: https://x.com/sobradob
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sobradob
Website: https://themargin.tv/boaz-sobrado
MORE OF IVAN PATRIKI:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artizt
Substack: https://substack.com/@artizt
Twitter: https://x.com/Ivan_patriki
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artizt/?hl=en
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ascended
Telegram: https://t.me/ivanpatriki
Timestamps:
00:00 - The $300 hackathon that became 1inch.
02:46 - Cross-chain swaps with no bridge to trust.
04:00 - Launching Aqua: liquidity that lives on your wallet.
07:33 - Almost a trillion dollars settled through 1inch.
09:01 - Why the protocol is named after Bruce Lee.
10:27 - From an airbag in an office to VC backing.
13:19 - No ChatGPT in 2019: learning to code at a library.
16:36 - How to actually find a co-founder (the 70/30 trap).
21:16 - "We were never profitable" and why that's on purpose.
26:00 - Robinhood, RWAs, and institutions entering DeFi.
29:15 - How the average person can get in on this.
30:55 - Kidnappings, privacy, and why crypto still needs it.
32:26 - How much of 1inch is now AI.
37:37 - Move fast or "halt and catch fire."
39:56 - The advice: experiment 50 times, fail 49.
42:49 - Why the only thing that stays is yourself.
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