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About Second Tier
Second Tier is a DeFi framework focused on building open protocol-level infrastructure. It argues that frictions in current financial systems—intermediaries, settlement delays, approval layers, opaque terms—are not intrinsic to value transfer but are results of deliberate design. Rather than optimizing within these constraints, it aims to redesign them from the root, enabling economic intentions to be directly converted into execution without value-draining intermediaries or added latency. Its core narrative is "root-cause architecture": solving problems at the source instead of patching symptoms, guided by user sovereignty, full transparency on fees and interfaces, and long-term integrity. Everything built is meant to be open and extensible by others.
In the past six months, the project remained extremely early-stage: the tier.xyz domain was acquired in June 2026, and the official Twitter account was created and the project publicly announced in July 2026. As of now, no technical details, token mechanism, or concrete products have been disclosed. Public information mostly comes from the project's own statements and website overview. There is no verified record of actual implementation, and the project carries notable uncertainty due to its early stage.
On July 16, 2026, 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov announced his departure from the company and launched a new project, Second Tier (tier.xyz). The project's website currently only features a manifesto, positioning itself as infrastructure that 'shortens the distance between economic intent and on-chain execution,' explicitly not a DEX or aggregator. The manifesto argues that frictions in the existing financial system (intermediaries, settlement delays, permission barriers) are deliberately designed, and Second Tier will redesign constraints at a higher level, creating previously nonexistent categories and entering the market in an open manner. Currently, there is no public funding, team members, or product details. Anton retains his co-founder status and 50% stake in 1inch but no longer participates in operations. Future focus is to build open protocol-level architecture based on four principles—user sovereignty, root-cause resolution, transparency, and integrity—to make economic intent flow directly to on-chain execution.
Founder: Anton Bukov, co-founder of 1inch and founder of Second Tier. Software engineer with 20+ years of experience; previously contributed to NEAR, Synthetix, and other crypto projects. He co-created 1inch with Sergej Kunz at the 2019 ETHGlobal hackathon. He left 1inch in November 2025 and launched Second Tier in July 2026. The project is at an early stage; no other co-founders or core executives have been publicly disclosed.