Sergej Kunz

Sergej Kunz is a software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded 1inch Network alongside Anton Bukov — building the protocol in less than 24 hours during the ETHNew York hackathon in May 2019, then spending the following years developing it into the dominant DEX aggregator in the decentralised finance ecosystem. Kunz grew up in Russia and later moved to Germany, where he worked as a developer before becoming deeply engaged in Ethereum's developer community and eventually dedicating himself full-time to 1inch.

The idea for 1inch emerged directly from the practical frustrations of DeFi trading. Kunz and Bukov recognised that because DeFi liquidity was fragmented across many protocols — Uniswap, Kyber Network, Bancor, and others — a trader executing a large swap on any single platform would incur significant slippage, moving the pool price against themselves. Routing the trade across multiple protocols simultaneously could reduce this slippage dramatically, but doing so manually required checking prices across platforms and executing multiple transactions — both impractical and expensive.

The hackathon prototype that Kunz and Bukov built was a working proof of concept: a smart contract that queried multiple DEXes, identified the optimal split, and executed the trade across several protocols in a single transaction. The project won awards at the hackathon and attracted immediate interest from DeFi users who recognised the utility of the approach.

Over the following months, Kunz and Bukov developed the prototype into a production-grade protocol with the Pathfinder algorithm — a sophisticated routing engine that evaluates thousands of possible trade routes across all major DEXes on a given chain, including multi-hop routes (trading through intermediate tokens) and partial fills. Pathfinder updates its routing graph continuously as liquidity conditions change, ensuring that each quoted route reflects real-time pool states rather than stale data.

1inch V2, launched in late 2020, introduced gas optimisations that made complex multi-protocol routes practical even during periods of high Ethereum gas prices. The protocol's smart contract architecture was redesigned to minimise gas consumption while maintaining flexibility in routing logic — a difficult optimisation problem that Kunz and his team worked through systematically.

In December 2020, 1inch launched the 1INCH governance token with a retroactive airdrop to all addresses that had used the protocol — one of the largest and most generous DeFi airdrops of the period. Addresses that had made even a single trade on 1inch received thousands of dollars worth of 1INCH, reflecting the team's commitment to rewarding early users who had helped validate the protocol.

The 1inch DAO governs the protocol's fee structure and treasury, with 1INCH holders voting on protocol parameters including the spread surplus — the margin captured by 1inch on certain routed trades above the best available market price. The Fusion mode, introduced in 2022, allows users to place orders that are filled by professional 'resolvers' who compete to offer the best execution price, eliminating gas costs for users and creating a competitive market for trade execution.

1inch has deployed across more than a dozen blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and others — tracking DeFi's multi-chain expansion and ensuring that users on every major network have access to aggregated liquidity.

Kunz has been an active and accessible public figure in the DeFi space, presenting at conferences and engaging substantively with the community on protocol development and industry trends. His journey from a hackathon project built in a day to infrastructure that routes tens of billions of dollars in annual trading volume is one of the clearest examples in DeFi of a well-executed idea developed with technical discipline — and of the productivity that can emerge from a 24-hour focused sprint by two motivated engineers.