1inch Aqua Lets LPs Share Wallet Balances

first fill wins, the rest of the quotes get pulled. A quote is an offer, not an escrow. DeFi inverted that. To advertise depth you had to hand the assets over first, because a pool needs custody in order to promise anything. Everything else follows: capital fragments across pairs and chains, each pool ends up thinner than it should be, and one balance produces exactly one position. The cost is not mainly a yield story. It is a depth story - the market sees less liquidity than actually exists. $542 million doing nothing In a @Dune resrarch commissioned for the launch, 85% of concentrated liquidity on major DEXs was used inefficiently in the first half of 2026 - about $1.6 billion of the $1.84 billion tracked. Roughly $542 million was, on average, entirely out of range for a full week at a time. The estimate for fees never earned is around $150 million a year. Half a billion dollars, in the right protocol on the right pair, unreachable for a week. Not mispriced, not exploited. Just committed somewhere it was not needed, because price moved and the balance could not be in two places. A registry, not a pool Aqua stops moving tokens. You connect a wallet, approve a balance, and create positions that are allowed to reference it. The contracts hold nothing - a swap can only pull what is actually in the wallet at the instant it fills, and revoking the approval stops new fills as soon as it confirms on-chain. Remove custody and the constraint that produced all the fragmentation goes with it. The same balance can stand behind several positions at once, across pairs and across 13 EVM chains, each deployment independent. 1inch's own example: a $100,000 balance backing three positions that together quote $300,000 of depth. Availability, not exposure Nothing is borrowed here. No credit, no interest, no debt position. Three positions quoting $100,000 each cannot pull $300,000 out of a wallet holding $100,000, for the same reason a market maker on five venues cannot sell the same inventory five times. Your worst case is your own balance. If a fill arrives and the balance behind it is already spent, the position pauses instead of liquidating. The failure mode is inaction, not loss. You choose the pair, range and fee, and close whenever you want. The security story is structural before it is procedural. The standard DeFi incident is a contract holding a very large balance; Aqua's hold none. And because every position has a single owner, there is no shared fee moment for JIT bots to snipe. Eight independent audits - Hexens, OpenZeppelin, Bailsec, Nethermind, Hashlock, MixBytes, Theori, Decurity - reduce risk. They do not eliminate it. The category question Products that matter rarely add a feature. They remove a requirement everyone had stopped noticing. Aqua removes pre-funding, and the consequence is an accounting one: quoted liquidity and locked capital stop being the same number. TVL as a proxy for depth, custody as the price of participation, range selection as a single bet on price - all of it assumed those two numbers were identical. There is a Merkl-powered incentive program running for early providers, with terms on the official @1inch blog. But the honest test is not reading about it. Open one position on a pair you already understand, keep your tokens where they are, and watch what one balance does when it is allowed to be in more than one place. Provide Liquidity: