Anton Bukov, a co-founder of the DeFi aggregator 1inch, announced on July 16, 2026 that he has left the project he helped build in 2019 and started a new venture called Second Tier. The exit is contested. Bukov says 1inch fired him in November 2025 after he pushed for management changes, while 1inch disputes the word "fired" and says he was never a direct employee and had been inactive since December 2025. Both accounts agree on one thing, which is that Bukov says he still holds a 50% stake in the company he is walking away from.
A founder leaving one of the most-used tools in DeFi is the kind of story that reads as personal drama, and there is drama here. The more interesting part sits underneath it. The people who built the first wave of DeFi are now several years in, and departures like this one mark a generational turn in the sector.
Anton Bukov and Second Tier snapshot
- Who: Russian-born developer, co-founded 1inch in 2019 with Sergej Kunz
- The news: left 1inch and launched Second Tier on July 16, 2026
- The dispute: Bukov says he was fired in November 2025, while 1inch says he was not a direct employee and had been inactive since December 2025
- His stake: says he remains a 50% shareholder in 1inch
- New venture: Second Tier is pre-team, pre-funding, with "nothing to disclose at this stage"
- 1INCH price: around $0.073, with BTC at $64,811 and ETH at $1,869
The token attached to all of this, 1INCH, is what a reader can actually trade, so the story is worth understanding before deciding if it changes anything. Here is who Bukov is, what actually happened at 1inch, and why the problem his new project is chasing is one of DeFi's hardest.
Who Is Anton Bukov
Anton Bukov is a Russian-born software developer who co-founded 1inch in 2019 alongside Sergej Kunz. The two built the project into one of the most-used DEX aggregators in decentralized finance, a category of tool that most active DeFi traders have touched without thinking about it.
An aggregator solves a specific problem. When you want to swap one token for another on-chain, the price you get depends on which decentralized exchange you route through and how the trade is split across venues. A DEX aggregator scans many of those venues at once, then finds the best combination of price and routing so a single swap can pull liquidity from several pools instead of one. Doing that well is deep engineering work, and Bukov spent years on the execution side of it. 1inch grew into a protocol that routed billions in on-chain volume and shipped its own governance token, 1INCH, which holders use to vote on protocol decisions.
That background matters for reading what comes next. Bukov is not a marketer who fronted a project. He is an engineer whose entire reputation is built on making on-chain trades fill better, which is exactly the problem his new venture claims to be attacking. Founders who built the aggregators, the automated market makers, and the lending protocols like Aave during the 2019 to 2020 cohort are the ones now writing DeFi's second chapter.
What Happened Between Bukov and 1inch
The two sides do not tell the same story, and it is worth laying both out plainly rather than picking one.
Bukov's version is that 1inch fired him in November 2025 after he pushed internally for management changes. In his telling, the split was a governance disagreement that ended with him being pushed out, and he frames the July 2026 launch of Second Tier as the next step after that break. He also states that he remains a 50% shareholder in 1inch, which is a notable detail because it means he is starting a competitor-adjacent venture while still holding half the company he left.
1inch's version rejects the framing. The company disputes the word "fired," arguing that Bukov was not a direct employee in the first place, so there was no employment to terminate. It also says he had already been inactive since around December 2025, which reframes the November event as the tail end of a relationship that had wound down rather than a dramatic dismissal. Neither side has released documentation that settles the gap between "fired" and "not an employee and already inactive," so the honest read is that this is a contested exit with two accounts that only partly overlap.
What both descriptions share is the shape of the outcome. A senior technical co-founder is no longer building the protocol, still owns a large stake in it, and has now launched something new. Messy founder exits are not rare in crypto, and a public dispute over the exact wording of a departure is not, on its own, a signal about the quality of what comes after it.
What Second Tier Is Trying to Do
Second Tier is very early. Bukov describes it as pre-team and pre-funding, and he has said outright that there is "nothing to disclose at this stage." There is no product, no roadmap with dates, and no token. Anyone treating this as an investable event today is reacting to an announcement, not a launch.
The one substantive thing on the table is the problem statement. Second Tier says its aim is to "close the distance between economic intent and execution." In plain terms, that is the gap between what a user wants to do on-chain and what actually happens when the transaction lands. You decide you want a specific price on a specific swap, but the on-chain result is shaped by slippage, by maximal extractable value where bots reorder or sandwich your trade, by failed transactions that cost gas and deliver nothing, and by routing that is not always as efficient as it looks. The distance between the intent and the fill is where value quietly leaks.
That is a real and unsolved frontier, and it is squarely in the lane Bukov spent years working in. Aggregation is one attempt at narrowing that gap, and so are intent-based systems, solver networks, and the anti-MEV work happening across the sector. Nobody yet knows if Second Tier does anything meaningful about it. The problem is real, the founder has relevant scars, and the project is currently a sentence and an ambition. All three of those things can be true at once.
Why This Matters for a DeFi Trader
The direct tradable link here is the 1INCH token, not Second Tier, which has nothing to trade. 1INCH is a governance token for a protocol that keeps routing volume regardless of who is or is not on its founding team, and a contested co-founder exit is a headline risk to weigh rather than an automatic verdict on the protocol's health.
The larger reason to care is what execution infrastructure does to every DeFi trade you place. The quality of routing, the exposure to MEV, and the reliability of settlement decide how much of your intended price you actually keep. These are the same pressures that make DeFi exploits and failed settlement such expensive recurring problems, and the builders working on execution shape outcomes that never show up as a line item on your screen. Understanding who is chasing that problem is a window into where on-chain trading is heading next.
There is a skeptical case worth holding alongside the optimistic one. A proven engineer taking another swing at DeFi's hardest user-experience problem is a genuinely interesting bet. A venture with no team, no funding, and no product, launched out of a messy public dispute, is also the exact profile of founder second act that often underdelivers. This same generational turn is producing new projects from names like Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan and others from the early Ethereum cohort, and most of those bets will not clear the bar their founders set. The right stance is curiosity about the problem without hype about the man.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Anton Bukov?
Anton Bukov is a Russian-born developer who co-founded the DeFi aggregator 1inch in 2019 with Sergej Kunz. He spent years on the execution and routing side of the protocol, and in July 2026 he left to launch a new venture called Second Tier.
Why did Anton Bukov leave 1inch?
The exit is disputed and the two sides do not agree on the basic facts. Bukov says 1inch fired him in November 2025 after he pushed for management changes, while 1inch says he was never a direct employee and had been inactive since December 2025. Bukov says he still holds a 50% stake in the company.
What is Second Tier in crypto?
Second Tier is Bukov's new DeFi-infrastructure project, announced on July 16, 2026. It is pre-team and pre-funding with no product yet, and its stated aim is to narrow the gap between what a user wants to do on-chain and what actually executes.
Where can you trade the 1INCH token?
1INCH is the governance token of the 1inch protocol and is listed on Phemex as a futures pair. Second Tier itself has no token, so 1INCH is the only asset directly connected to this story that a trader can act on today.
The Bottom Line
Bukov leaving 1inch is less a scandal than a marker. The first wave of DeFi builders is several years in, and disputed exits and second acts are what a maturing sector looks like. The substance to watch is not the argument over his exit. It is the open question of if Second Tier ever ships anything against the intent-versus-execution problem it named, because that gap is real and still largely open. For now, treat the token as the only tradable piece of this. 1INCH sits near $0.073 and moves on the protocol's usage, not on its co-founder's next slide, and Second Tier is an ambition with no product behind it yet. Judge it when there is code to judge.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
