1inch announces a partnership with the Bruce Lee Foundation

The DeFi app 1inch, perhaps most famous primarily as a crypto wallet, announced today a partnership with the Bruce Lee Foundation, from which it takes its name (the 1inch punch).

During this first day of the ninth edition of the Hong Kong Fintech Week, the co-founder of the crypto wallet 1inch, Sergej Kunz, took the stage dedicated to blockchain.

His speech focuses on the topic of financial institutions and how they can benefit from DeFi, which is decentralized finance and therefore all those applications based on blockchain.

Eliminating the need for intermediaries, these are systems in which financial transactions are automated through smart contracts that are non custodial, trustless, always accessible, and composable (see lego defi).

As Sergej explains, the numbers are small compared to the traditional financial market: 90 billion in total value locked (TvL) in DeFi dApps, 2.3 trillion in market capitalization, and 40 billion dollars circulating daily on centralized exchanges. Numbers that seem huge but are actually very small compared, for example, to the 300 billion dollars in trading volumes on the Nasdaq every day.

Challenges and opportunities of DeFi apps

The co-founder of 1inch explains to us how, thanks to DeFi, institutions could save costs on operations, access new markets, and thus acquire users.

There are certainly also challenges regarding regulation, compliance, and therefore KYC, AML, and complexity in terms of code.

But there is a solution which is 1inch Pro, a company based in Switzerland that next year will be able to start helping institutions with a platform that provides access to all crypto markets and assisting, among other things, in being compliant thanks to KYC and AML systems.

The main feature of 1inch certainly remains the non-custodial wallet platform, but now the company has expanded and also has, for example, a cross chain swap with zero gas fee.

Tokenization and oracles

Furthermore, during the press conference, the co-founders announced that 1inch Pro will include a marketplace to buy tokenized assets (RWA). 

“We have been working for two years on an oracle connected to the Nasdaq and maybe next year we will launch it to easily buy tokenized shares through 1inch in self-custody mode. It is not easy because there is still no specific regulation for this,”

explains Sergej.

1inch and Bruce Lee

1inch, Sergej explains to us during our interview conducted with him after his speech, is here in Hong Kong to announce a partnership with the Bruce Lee Foundation.

1inch has always been inspired, starting from its name, by Bruce Lee and his philosophy of excelling and dedicating oneself body and soul to a goal.

The motto for this marketing campaign is “take crypto seriouslee,” playing with the actor’s last name (seriously = seriamente).

This is why, for the next marketing campaign, the crypto wallet of 1inch has decided to form a collaboration with the Bruce Lee Foundation.

A partnership whose negotiation lasted, for reasons we are not given to know, a full 3 years. It is indeed since 2021 that Sergej has been working to be able to announce this collaboration with the Bruce Lee foundation.

The actor is particularly famous in Hong Kong, which is why 1inch decided to make this announcement during this fintech week.

“We share the vision, the philosophy of Bruce Lee. He was not just an actor but also a philosopher. He studied philosophy at the University of Seattle. He is a much deeper person than most people might think,” explains Sergej to Cryptonomist. “He used to say that one must be like water and adapt, be efficient, remove the superfluous. And this is what we do at 1inch, applying his philosophy.”

“The more the world becomes complex, it becomes increasingly important to find its simplicity and cut the superfluous, the noise but understand what is fundamental for us in relationships as in business. This philosophy is what we should adopt in the future. Finding that simplicity is important for us as people to make us feel more focused”,

explains Bruce’s daughter, Shannon Lee during the press conference.

The video clips feature actors fighting like the famous martial artist. A little curiosity: the co-founder of 1inch has been practicing martial arts for practically his entire life.

Why the Hong Kong Fintech week

Hong Kong has formed a partnership with the Swiss Crypto Valley, with which it wants to associate to have an efficient and clear crypto hub from a regulatory standpoint.

According to Sergej:

“Hong Kong is an interesting place where regulators are open to new technologies. From our point of view, we are the next evolution of traditional finance because we have a more efficient environment for financial products. We are launching 1inch Pro here for institutional clients and I believe we will succeed in a couple of years. It takes some time to scale. Next year we plan to raise capital to gather 5 million dollars and bring in new stakeholders to support us.”

The next technological innovations beyond 1inch x Bruce Lee

Also during the Hong Kong Fintech Week, a panel was held with the other founder of 1inch, Anton Bukov, who shared his thoughts on which technologies will emerge next.

“The tokenization of shares of liquidity protocols or even more traditional ones like in the real estate sector, but also decentralized exchanges, trading protocols, and yield farming”,

explains Anton.

“AI is becoming increasingly important and AI agents will need access to payment services and therefore there will need to be payment solutions like ours, without intermediaries”, 

adds instead Sergej.