1inch co-founder says he was fired, and the DeFi industry's governance problem just got a face

At 18:46 UTC on 16 July 2026, Anton Bukov, the co-founder of the decentralised exchange aggregator 1inch, told a Cointelegraph audience that he had not simply stepped back from the protocol he helped build. He had been fired, in November 2025, after pressing for changes to the company's management and operations. He is now preparing a new project called Second Tier, framed as a continuation of the work he says 1inch would not let him finish.

The story matters less for the personality involved than for what it makes visible. A founder of one of crypto's most-used trading venues, a router sitting in front of dozens of liquidity sources across Ethereum, BNB Chain and a long tail of L2s, is publicly stating that he could not change the place he had built. The friction is not new. What is new is the candour.

The version Bukov is telling

Bukov's account, as carried by Cointelegraph, runs in a familiar register. A technical founder reaches the limits of his authority inside a project he helped create. He pushes for reforms, the reforms are resisted, and eventually he is removed. The reporting does not yet specify the precise mechanism: whether a board, a token-holder vote, an investor cohort, or a management layer aligned with later-stage capital took the decision. Cointelegraph describes him as having "no longer taken an active role" and as having been "fired" in 2025 after advocating for changes to management and operations. The distinction between quiet exit and formal termination is exactly the distinction Bukov is choosing to make public.

That choice is the news. Founders leave protocols all the time, usually with the polite language of "stepping back to focus on new ventures" and a non-disparagement clause sitting underneath. Bukov has refused that script. The transparency is itself an act of governance, in a sector that markets itself on transparency and rarely practises it at the human level.

The company Bukov left

1inch is not a fringe protocol. It is a router that sits between a user and the best available swap across a stack of competing venues, slicing orders to minimise slippage and gas. It raised at venture scale, issued a token, and shipped across most major chains. By the standards of decentralised finance in 2025 and 2026, it is infrastructure.

The governance structure that produced that infrastructure is also the structure Bukov is now publicly distancing himself from. Protocols of 1inch's vintage tend to combine three centres of authority: a foundation, a corporate entity in a favourable jurisdiction, and a token-weighted voting layer. The foundation and the corporate entity write code and sign cheques. The token layer ratifies. The founder's leverage, once the protocol is live, depends on which of the three still answers to him.

What Cointelegraph's reporting suggests, without yet specifying, is that Bukov's leverage had narrowed to something smaller than his name on the masthead. A co-founder who is publicly using the word "fired" is a co-founder who has run out of internal channels to escalate.

The pattern across DeFi

Bukov is not the first founder of a major protocol to find himself on the wrong side of the institution he built, and the same outline shows up often enough to be a pattern. The pattern has three stages. A founder ships a working product and issues a token, with token-holder voting framed as the project's permanent check on insider power. Capital arrives from funds that require conventional corporate structures to deploy at scale. The corporate structure slowly absorbs the governance authority that the token was supposed to hold.

When the founder and the corporate structure disagree about direction, the resolution tends to favour whoever controls the corporate entity and its investor stack. The token holders, who were told the protocol was theirs, are rarely in the room for the consequential decisions. The promise of decentralised governance becomes, in practice, a brand asset and a community-management layer around decisions made elsewhere.

Bukov's account fits that template. A founder pushing for "changes to the company's management and operations" is, in plain terms, a founder pushing back against the drift from on-chain governance toward investor-aligned corporate governance. The fact that the pushback ended in termination rather than reform tells the reader where the actual centre of gravity now sits inside 1inch.

What Second Tier is, and what it is signalling

The new project, Second Tier, will be read by the market as both a competitor and a corrective. The name itself is doing work. In DeFi, a "second tier" of liquidity, routing, or governance is the layer underneath the marquee venues, the routing paths and incentive structures that don't make the front page of the analytics dashboards. The branding suggests a project that intends to build for the unglamorous middle, not the headline volume.

For now, the reporting specifies only that the project exists and that Bukov is launching it. There is no token, no audited contracts, no published whitepaper to verify in the source material. That itself is a constraint a long-read should respect. The news is the firing and the new venture's existence, not the technical specifications of contracts that may not yet be public.

What can be read is the implicit pitch. Second Tier is being introduced by a co-founder of 1inch who says he was removed for trying to change how the original project was run. The audience for that pitch is the part of the market that has come to distrust protocol governance theatre, the funds and DAO delegates who have watched similar sequences play out across the cycle. Whether Second Tier itself becomes durable infrastructure or becomes a cautionary tale will depend on whether Bukov writes the governance layer first this time, or treats it as a marketing surface and ships the contracts first.

What remains contested, and what the sources do not yet say

A long-read on a story this fresh has to mark its own limits. The Cointelegraph reporting, at the timestamp this article is built from, gives Bukov's account and announces Second Tier. It does not give the other side. 1inch has not, on the record available to this desk, responded to the firing characterisation. The mechanism of removal, board decision, shareholder vote, founder lockup expiry, is not specified. The dollar value of any severance, vesting cliff, or continued token allocation is not in the source material, and this article will not invent it.

The reasonable reading of the available reporting is straightforward: a co-founder has publicly described an involuntary departure after a dispute about management direction, and has announced a successor project that markets itself, implicitly, against the constraints that ended his tenure at the first one. The reasonable reader will wait for the institution 1inch has become to put its own version on the record. Until then, the working hypothesis is that this is a governance story wearing a personnel costume, and that the costume is the part the market will actually be able to evaluate first.

How Monexus framed this: the wire line is a personality story about a fired founder. This desk is reading it as a governance story about where authority actually sits inside a mature DeFi protocol once investor capital has arrived.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/cointelegraph
• https://t.me/cointelegraph
• https://t.me/cointelegraph
• https://t.me/s/cointelegraph
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1inch_Network
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance