 For sure, a lot of people think there's a scam and so on and so on, there's a copy of Ethereum, whatever. For us, it's important that people need it. Zergay Kuhns is a co-founder and the CEO of one of the fastest-rising DEX aggregators in the DeFi space, one inch. A DEX aggregator is a financial protocol that sources liquidity from multiple decentralized exchanges to offer traders optimal prices via a single dashboard. In the past year, one inch's monthly trading volume rose from under $80 million to nearly $8 billion as of February 2021. That's just one order of magnitude behind the monthly volume of decentralized exchange Uniswap. But the rise of one inch hasn't been without hiccups. DeFi leaderboard DeFi Pulse refused to list one inch until recently due to a falling out between the respective founders. Scott Lewis, the founder of DeFi Pulse, banned Kuhns from his community, citing threats of violence among other grievances. The two have yet to make amends. I gave him my hand and said, like, let's clear all the shit that he had. And they just declined. And that's fine for me. Join Cointelegraph senior editor Alex Cohen and dive into the history, drama, and technological innovation behind the one inch project in this exclusive Cointelegraph interview. So, okay, let me just start off with asking you the first question of how exactly you got into crypto. At what point did it peak your interest and at what stage do you realize that you need to set a dex aggregator such as one inch? Hi Alex. So first of all, it's a pleasure to make this interview with you. And yeah, back to the roots where we started with the one inch. The initial idea was actually from Anton who suggested to build on a hackathon on ETH New York 2019 to build a one gap which would list all the different exchanges. And then you can just select one where you can swap for the best price. But I had also the idea to improve that by just splitting in small pieces the amount which you are going to swap and just exchange it on multiple sources at the same time to reduce the price slippage because price slippage was the biggest problem in the DeFi space in the time. And actually we built it for us. Anton was swapping all the time and needed the best rate. And I was playing around with arbitrage boards before that. And yeah, somehow it was really helpful for other people. We found out after the hackathon. And on the hackathon we didn't win any huge prizes on this small ENS prize, 300 bucks I guess. So I was able to pay for my ticket for the airplane. So yeah, this is actually the story. So how long did it take for you and your co-founder, Anton, to put everything together? You said it was quite quick. But how quick exactly? Because that's one of the worries of people that are using DeFi, the things that just put together, sort of slapped together really quickly and then they get burned. Yeah, look, I and Anton, we count already around 17 years of professional experience in software engineering architecture. Anton had much more experience in cryptocurrencies and algorithms and math. So we actually built it over two nights. And one day we found a new slip. I built most of the part was from my site on the front end, so like the DApp and the interaction, the user interface. And Anton wrote the algorithm and the smart contract. So we put it together and just like without any sleep over two nights and one day we were able to deliver it. Yeah, the hackathon. Yeah, for sure. And so the project really came to light with the token, like people really started talking about it after the distribution of the token on Christmas Eve. So I've read some interviews by you and your colleagues that you don't see the token as an investment. It should be really used as a utility, but obviously, given the hype around DeFi and everything, it doesn't really matter what you would say the token should be used for. People are going to still be speculating on it. And eventually some may get hurt and burn by the losses. So what do you think about this? Like, did you expect some kind of a risk or sort of negative effects from the token when you decided to, well, not just release it, but actually start dropping it to different people? Yeah, we got a lot of negative feedback from the community, from the people who bought at the beginning on the release day, the token. So actually, the Oneinch Foundation issued the token and started the distribution, the idea behind the distribution to make the token more decentralized. Yeah, you don't see any financial value behind the token. So one inch is equal to one inch, nothing else. And sure, actually, we didn't even start with the economics which we planned with the whole team. The idea of Oneinch tokens in the first place right now to participate in the governance. So you have a kind of ticket, with this ticket you get access to change some settings in the protocol. Of course, those people can also participate in discussions on governance forum, for example, make suggestions and so on and so on. So we've seen articles that some users of the platform received absolutely humongous amounts of coins. Others would just get the basic general low amount. So I think one person got 9 million tokens if I'm not mistaken, but it amounted to like 27 billion. And overall, would you, can you sort of explain how much Oneinch holds for themselves? And going forward, are there any other plans to airdrop any more tokens like you did just recently, a few weeks ago? So I have to say that this was not a airdrop, this was talking distribution. So as a user, you got the right to claim this token. Decision was done by the Foundation, already set before to make it more decentralized. We had already two waves. So the first wave was for those people who used before Oneinch token. And the second wave includes also those people who used our experimental liquidity protocol, which we released in the summer last year. I guess one guy got a lot of tokens because they provided a lot of liquidity in our liquidity protocol. This is the point. If you participate a lot in the protocol, you can get more tokens, which can increase your voting power, for example. And later, you get more options to do something with that. And this is actually not bad because yeah, this guy got five millions. I'm not sure how much it was, maybe five, maybe less. But this guy communicated with us. He suggests a lot. He supports us. He introduces us to other projects and so on and so on. There's a lot of value of such people who are fighting for us from the beginning. How are the gas prices affecting you currently as a platform? So we see that people are still swapping because they have to swap. Some people have loans somewhere and they have to repay. We have seen a lot of liquidations in last days. So yeah, huge gas prices, as I would say, is bad for the whole space. We need a solution for that. We try to get in touch with the miners and suggest that they should increase the block size, but they somehow are really passive. And we hope to see the Ethereum 2.0. If we stick with this sort of scaling and Ethereum 2.0, do you intend to stick to Ethereum or maybe we'll be looking to fix the issues that are plaguing the whole industry right now? There was an announcement about near integration quite recently. But overall, what are your thoughts on this? Are you just going to stick it out and wait for Ethereum to come through? So first of all, I have to say something better compared to Ethereum can be only Ethereum. So and we are waiting for Ethereum 2.0. But for sure, we have to scale. I would say it's horizontally. We announced already a collaboration with NIR protocol because we are like friends with them and Anton was working for them. I had also like a month or two working, helping a little bit them in 2019. So Anton wrote the rainbow bridge which allows us to move funds from Ethereum to NIR protocol. And as soon as NIR protocol supports Ethereum smart contracts and they are almost done with that, how I know, we will for sure deploy there and we will give you an option to switch in our user interface really easy to this protocol. We announced also a collaboration with Tron. For sure, a lot of people think there's a scam and so on and so on. There's a copy of Ethereum, whatever. For us, it's important that the people need it. There are people who use it and we see also dexers there on the platform. So and if you have dexers there, we can aggregate. I also wanted to ask you about your relationships with other dexers and dex aggregators and just DeFi projects out there. So for example, Uniswap, would you say there was a rivalry between you and that platform even though you kind of use it to root the volume through it? And likewise, there were also stories about DeFi pulse not too long ago. Any updates on that from your side? Yeah, first of all, about the DeFi pools. So yeah, we had conflict. We have still conflict with the founder of DeFi Pulse and Dex IG because they just use our smart contracts without asking for that because it was on the computer right on the beginning when we started with Uniswap aggregation protocol. And we wanted just that they mention us in the source code when they publish our pieces of codes. And yeah, and there were some miscommunications with them and some bad jokes also from my side. But we tried to keep to stay friends with most of the projects or with all the projects with DeFi Pulse. I gave him my hand, you know, like to the founder of DeFi Pulse on EDH Denver last year. I gave him my hand and said, like, let's clear all the shit that he had. And they just declined. And that's fine for me. If they feel like that, it's okay. With other projects, maybe first of all, DeFi Pulse, they actually merged our pull request to get us listed, at least on the test platform and maybe already on the main net. So yeah, that's great, but we needed a pressure, social pressure from. So that's why we published this tweet because we tried first with emails and only social pressure helps. So about other projects like Uniswap, I would say we are friends, friends, but we are talking like once a year. For sure they have, from my point of view, a little bit fear because we introduce our own liquidity protocol. It's much more efficient than Uniswap because we charge fixed also amount of fees. And just zoom in now onto the DeFi space in general. What do you think will happen to DeFi in 2021? And what do you think about the negatives and the positives that the industry has developed up to this point? Will some of those get resolved or will some things get improved on? So what are your general thoughts on this? So I see a huge pain point right now is the gas price. It's not possible to onboard new people right now on Ethereum because they have to pay a lot of money, like 50 bucks for transaction, 100 bucks for staking in the contract. It's a huge amount. We will see solving these problems with Layer 2 solutions or improving this problem, improving this issue by seeing people moving to other chains like Buone's Munchin, for example. We will see 2021 people moving to Layer 2 solutions to scale a little bit. Optimistic roll up is going to release soon what I understood in the mainnet. And for sure we will participate in this movement. And we are waiting for Ethereum 2.0. However, it's said better than Ethereum can be only Ethereum. So we need to move fast. The main pain point is the gas price. It should be better with additional side chains or better for sure Layer 2 with Optimism, for example, or ZK Snarks. So do you think adoption will come to DeFi once the gas fee issue is taken care of? Not only gas fees problem, also the amount of transaction which can be covered by the miners or by the nodes. And when we have great throughput and lower gas costs, then we can build much better products with better user experience. Well, I guess that's all I wanted to cover. So yeah, thank you very much for your time. It was a great pleasure to talk to you. Great, thank you also. It was a pleasure also to give this interview.