Key Highlights
- 1INCH fell roughly 20% after a single wallet sold its full remaining allocation.
- The address received 15M tokens through early team/investor vesting.
- 1inch said no team or treasury wallets were involved in the sale.
The 1inch Network token (1INCH) dropped nearly 20% this week after on-chain data showed an investor’s wallet liquidating its remaining vested tokens in a single $14M transaction. The sale hit thin liquidity on Ethereum markets, sparking panic selling that erased close to $40 million in market value.
The move came despite a public statement from 1inch denying that any tokens were sold by the team, treasury, or wallets under its control.
Vesting wallet exit, not random volatility
Blockchain data shows the selling address had previously received around 15 million 1INCH tokens through early team or investor vesting. Over time, portions of that allocation had already been distributed. This week’s transaction marked a full exit of the remaining balance.
While the wallet is not controlled by the 1inch team, its history ties it directly to early allocations, making the sell-off look less like market noise and more like a delayed vesting unwind finally hitting thin liquidity.
Thin liquidity meant one large exit quickly snowballed into fear-driven selling, pushing the price down far more than the initial sale alone would suggest.
1inch denies team involvement
In response to speculation, 1inch stated that the sell-off did not come from team wallets, treasury multisigs, or any entities it controls. The project stressed that third-party holders trade independently and are outside its reach.
The team also said nothing has changed internally. The roadmap is intact, operations are ongoing, and the team plans to revisit parts of its tokenomics later this year to make the system more resilient when liquidity thins out.
Market reaction overshadows fundamentals
At the time of writing, 1INCH was hovering around $0.116, down around 20% from recent highs, even though nothing broke. The decline occurred without any exploit, outage, or partnership fallout.
Throughout 2025, 1INCH steadily slid, ending the year down nearly 64%. The decline reflected ongoing vesting pressure and fading demand for DeFi governance tokens, with the latest sell-off accelerating an already established trend.
The weakness in price has persisted even as 1inch continued shipping new integrations. In mid-2025, the protocol added support for Uniswap’s Unichain, expanding swap routing and MEV protection and extending its developer tooling.
While 1inch framed the incident as unrelated to internal activity, the on-chain evidence tells a narrower story. In this case, the sell-off was driven by an early investor having a large amount of tokens vested in the project, which raised concerns for the community and traders.
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