David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Apollo Capital is keeping its eye on a crypto project named after a Bruce Lee move.

1inch Network is an aggregator that aims to find users the best rates on token swaps, a bit like Webjet.com.au or Kayak.com does for airline flights.

The protocol is named after the powerful martial arts technique known as the “one-inch punch” popularised by Lee.

1inch announced in late August it was in the process of raising US$70 million at a US$2.25 billion valuation in a Series B token sale at US$1.50 a token.

On Friday, 1INCH tokens were trading at $2.57, giving the project a market cap of $465 million and making it the No. 125 crypto.

“We’re watching really keenly, we want to get exposure to it, we haven’t yet,” David Angliss says.

This is the third capital raising in 15 months for 1inch, which last August raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round led by Binance Labs, with participation from Alameda Research, Galaxy Digital and Dragonfly Capital.

It followed that up in December with a $12 million Series A funding round led by Pantera Capital, participation from ParaFi Capital, Blockchain Capital, Nima Capital, and Spartan Group.

“So they’ve got seriously good backing,” Angliss said.

The funding will likely be used to expand their product suite, he added.

“That’s what we’re speculating on. They’ve got all these other plans in plans, aside from their standard 1inch token and DEX aggregator products, there’s probably going to be some products released by 1inch.”

Those products might be a money market product for setting up stablecoins, or adding features to a DAO, said Angliss. (The last refers to a decentralised autonomous organisation, a co-op type structure popular in the crypto movement).

The 1inch Foundation also has a grant program that is giving out US$3million in 1INCH tokens to teams and individual developers building on the 1inch Network.

Founded early last year, 1inch has grown from a two-person startup to more than 65 people, and is looking to hire 10 more, growth lead Andra Nicolau told The Block recently. It has 500,000 users, he added.

The project does have competitors including Paraswap, Totle and Cowswap but 1inch is the market leader, Angliss says.

“One thing they’ve done really well is mobilise on all the different layers,” he said. (1inch is multichain, with support for Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum).

“That’s obviously a big part of maintaining their position as the No. 1 DEX aggregator,” he said.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

Follow the author on Twitter, as well as Stockhead’s Coinhead crypto account, Coinhead.