1inch co-founder Anton Bukov fired, launches new DeFi infrastructure startup Second Tier

One of the two people who built 1inch over a weekend at a 2019 hackathon has been pushed out of the company he co-founded. Anton Bukov, who shaped 1inch’s protocol architecture and security from the beginning, confirmed he was fired from his operational role in late November 2025. He retains his co-founder title and a 50% ownership stake in the company, but has zero involvement in the day-to-day running of the protocol.

The news broke publicly on July 16, 2026, and it lands at an awkward moment for 1inch. Monthly trading volume has collapsed from roughly $14 billion in mid-2025 to approximately $2.7 billion in the past 30 days.

What Bukov is building next

Bukov has already begun work on a new infrastructure startup called Second Tier, operating out of tier.xyz. The stated mission is to build secure, efficient systems that close the gap between economic intent and execution. He has been clear that Second Tier is not a 1inch competitor. The project is still early, with no public funding announcements or product releases yet.

The strategic split behind the firing

Under Kunz, 1inch has leaned hard into institutional adoption and traditional finance integration. The company has pursued partnerships with major centralized players, including a collaboration with Coinbase for in-app swap routing, and has broadly rebranded to appeal to a wider financial audience beyond the core DeFi crowd.

Bukov’s focus, by contrast, remains on removing intermediaries in financial transactions and minimizing third-party interference — the same instinct that produced 1inch in the first place, when Bukov and CEO Sergej Kunz built a DEX aggregator to route trades across multiple liquidity sources and find users the best price available.

The 1INCH token took the news relatively quietly. It was trading around $0.07 at the time of the announcement, with a market cap of roughly $105 million, and slipped about 1% in the 24 hours following the news.

What this means for 1inch investors and the broader DEX landscape

Going from $14 billion monthly to $2.7 billion is not a seasonal dip. Bukov was responsible for the routing efficiency and security architecture underpinning the protocol. His departure does not automatically break the protocol, but it removes the person who built the security architecture underpinning it.

For investors holding 1INCH, the key variables to watch are whether trading volume stabilizes or continues declining, how the protocol’s institutional partnerships translate into actual revenue, and whether Bukov’s Second Tier eventually attracts DeFi-native users who might otherwise have routed through 1inch. A 50% shareholder with no operational role is also a governance question worth tracking. Bukov has not indicated any intent to sell his stake or initiate any shareholder action.

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