PANews Original｜1inch Launches Aqua to Unlock Dormant DeFi Capital—What’s Under the Hood? Liquidity fragmentation and idle capital have long plagued DeFi. On November 17, DEX aggregator @1inch introduced Aqua, a shared liquidity protocol designed to activate stagnant capital and usher in a new era of capital-efficient DeFi. Aqua is built on a self-custodial AMM model that allows users to allocate the same assets across multiple DeFi strategies—such as market making, lending, and governance—without locking them. Funds remain in users’ wallets and are only accessed upon execution, governed by a permissioned registry. It also introduces a new metric: Total Value Unlocked (TVU) to track capital availability. Key features include virtual balance sharing and fine-grained access controls. Still, Aqua adds complexity, potentially causing latency, path-dependent losses, and requiring full audits before deployment. The 1INCH token currently lacks a built-in value capture mechanism. Aqua marks 1inch’s move from aggregator to core DeFi infrastructure, with real-world impact to be tested after its 2026 front-end launch. #DeFiInnovation #1INCH #DEX