Five things you might not know about the 1inch Network

In this post, we’ll look at some features of the 1inch Network that not all users might be aware of.

1. 1inch charges no fees

Users swapping crypto on 1inch pay no swapping fees. In addition, in accordance with the 1inch DAO’s decision, 1inch no longer collects swap surplus, which occurs due to “positive slippage” - when the rate for a token swap changes in the user’s favor between the time the transaction is submitted and the time it is confirmed. As a result, the user could receive more tokens than they initially expected.

2. Liquidity is sourced from the entire crypto market

Earlier, the 1inch Aggregation Protocol aggregated liquidity only from liquidity pools and professional market makers (PMMs). However, thanks to the Fusion upgrade in late 2022, 1inch obtained access to basically unlimited liquidity across the crypto space, as resolvers - professional traders executing Fusion mode swaps - source liquidity from the entire market. As they hedge their trades in various ways, including options and liquidity from centralized exchanges (CEXes), price impact for users is likely to be lower.

This is a real example of how a user was able to get a better rate than the market. They swapped 3,700 WETH for USDT and received an average rate of 1,606.04 USDT for 1 ETH as opposed to the market rate of 1,605.46 USDT at the time of the swap.

3. 1inch smart contracts are immutable

1inch has been dedicated to immutability, which means all 1inch smart contracts are unupgradable: they cannot be altered. This is one of the positive virtues of 1inch, as the inability for anyone to make any alterations to the smart contracts increases their security. As all 1inch smart contracts are immutable, no one can make changes to the smart contracts’ code. Another benefit of the 1inch Network’s smart contracts is their composability, which facilitates building other solutions on top of them.

For instance, Summer.fi (formerly Oasis.app) uses 1inch for lending position liquidation and Furucombo for transaction building.

4. 1inch is integrated into the main crypto wallets

When you make a swap using one of the most popular crypto wallets, such as MetaMask, Ledger Live or Trust Wallet, it’s quite likely that your swap will be done via 1inch, which is integrated into all of these wallets as a swap option. For instance, in MetaMask, the largest self-custodial crypto wallet, 1inch accounted for 83.3% of all swap transactions and for 64.9% of swap volumes on the Ethereum network in May 2023, according to 1inch analytical data. 1inch always strives to offer users the best swap execution in the market, and it’s quite natural that major wallets’ users choose the swap option offered by 1inch.

5. 1inch protects you against compromised DEXes

As mentioned above, 1inch aggregates liquidity from the entire crypto space, and some DEXes may have vulnerabilities in their routers, as recent cases with Hashflow, SushiSwap and UniSwap showed. However, users shouldn’t worry about a possible scenario where a swap on a compromised DEX could lead to the loss of their funds. 1inch can protect users from possible vulnerabilities that a DEX might be facing.

When a user makes a swap directly on a DEX, they would have to approve the tokens in several of that DEX’ smart contracts, relying on their security. And, in case of vulnerabilities or malicious attacks, tokens could be theoretically stolen directly from the user’s wallet.

Conversely, when the user makes the same swap on the same DEX via 1inch, token approvals for swap deals are done in the 1inch smart contract, which, as explained above, is immutable and heavily audited. Therefore, the possibility of losing funds due to the DEX’ vulnerability is ruled out at max.

Stay tuned for more exciting information about the 1inch Network!