Coverage on 1inch, Cow Swap, and Barter

📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest. This week we're covering aggregators, a space which has been relatively stable this year with a daily median of roughly $3.6B in trading volume.

The year's major spike of over $28B in aggregator volume came on Jan. 19, within a day of U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration. At $23.8B, Jupiter, a leading aggregator on Solana, contributed the majority of volume on that day.

Early January was also a local high for crypto's market capitalization, which was over $3.7 trillion at the time. Crypto has since eclipsed those highs, but aggregator volume has yet to return to its January peak.

Shout out to Pavel, Katerina, and Alex for covering some of the leading aggregators below.

– ON Editorial Team

1inch | Cow Swap | Barter

• 1inch cross-chain swaps were first introduced a year ago, on Sept. 18, 2024. Since then, the feature has gained strong adoption, with over 42,000 wallets executing over 128,000 transactions and generating $617M in total volume. The most popular directions include BNB-to-Ethereum ($137.3M), Ethereum-to-Arbitrum ($59.4M), Arbitrum-to-Ethereum ($47.2M), Ethereum-to-BNB ($44.1M) and Base-to-Ethereum ($23.9M).

• In Q2 and Q3 of this year, a record share of swaps executed via external integrations (89.6% and 83.3%, respectively) — highlighting that 1inch functions as an infrastructure layer in DeFi, with many projects relying on it as their swap provider.
• 1inch leads RWA trading via Ondo, surpassing Uniswap, CowSwap, MetaMask, and Binance. Since launch in September, 1inch processed $16.8M volume with 53,000+ transactions, and more than 21,000 users, proving its dominance as the key onchain gateway to tokenized real-world assets.

• Cow Swap hits $12.47B in volume last month. That's 3x 2024's monthly average. The volume is driven by transactions on Ethereum (89.7% in September), followed by Arbitrum (5.2%) and Base (4.3%). The number of transactions is also growing, jumping from 85.1k in August to 100.5k in September. Here, Base is responsible for the growth with 49.3% of trades happening there. This growth reflects continued trust in CoW Swap’s unique batch auction model protecting users from MEV and securing better prices.

• User retention has increased from ~41% in 2024 to 50.7%. At the protocol level, new users are turning to Ethereum for their first transaction (31.8%) with Base leading closely (29.6%). Avalanche and Polygon saw the highest number of returning users (68% and 69%). Numbers on Lens are still trivial.

• Looking at market share in the EVM space for 2025, Cow Swap holds its position with filling between 60% to 90% of all intent-based swaps. There are no strong signals that this position in the EVM space will change in the short-run.

• Barter is an intent-based swap aggregator across EVM chains. Users submit trade intents, and Barter’s routing engine executes through the most efficient path across multiple DEXs, RFQs, and market makers. This design minimizes slippage and execution costs while aggregating deep, fragmented liquidity. Cumulative volume has surpassed $25B, with weekly peaks near $2B, reflecting strong growth driven by rapid integrations and expanding liquidity coverage.

• Barter’s share of PMM volume surged through 2025, climbing from 1–2% early in the year to ~17% by September. This sharp rise followed the acquisition of Copium’s codebase, which improved RFQ routing and solver efficiency, solidifying Barter’s position among leading onchain routers.

• Barter keeps expanding its liquidity coverage by integrating new protocols and layers. Since early 2023, the number of active sources has grown steadily to 39 venues by late 2025, reinforcing routing efficiency and access to deeper, more diverse liquidity.