1. What is the 1inch Groundwork forum?
1inch, the decentralized finance (DeFi) project known for its exchange aggregator, will co-host Groundwork on October 16, 2026, a one-day forum at the National Union Building in Washington, DC. Organized with the Blockchain Association during DC Fintech Week, the 1inch Groundwork event gathers students, policymakers, professors and DeFi builders to discuss policy and education.
The setting is deliberate. Washington is where the rules that govern financial technology are drafted, debated and enforced, and DC Fintech Week draws an audience that includes people working on exactly those questions. By placing the forum there, the organizers are putting a sector that often describes itself as operating beyond traditional regulation directly in front of those who write the rules.
The framing question behind the event is a pointed one: in a field built on open protocols and code, who should write the rulebook, and how well do the people doing so understand what they are regulating? Groundwork is presented as a place to start answering that with the participants in the same room.
2. Who is taking part
The forum is meant to bring together four groups: students, policymakers, professors and people who build DeFi protocols. Students are expected to play an active part, with some sessions moderated by them rather than simply attended by them, which reflects the stated aim of connecting younger participants with current policymakers.
Among the scheduled speakers is Orest Gavryliak, the Chief Legal Officer of 1inch. Representatives from Uniswap and Robinhood are also expected to appear, which means the lineup includes both a leading decentralized exchange and a large retail brokerage that offers digital asset trading. The speaker list leans toward industry and academia, and the Blockchain Association, as co-organizer, adds a trade-group perspective on policy.
The mix is notable because these groups rarely share a stage on equal terms. Builders understand how protocols work but may find regulatory language opaque. Policymakers understand the legal frameworks but often have limited hands-on exposure to decentralized systems. Academics can bridge the two through research and teaching, and students represent the next generation who will work in or oversee the field.
3. The 1inch Forward backstory
Groundwork follows an earlier initiative called 1inch Forward, which 1inch launched in 2026 to push business schools and law schools in the United States to teach digital assets and blockchain. That effort included an open letter signed by more than 20 organizations urging universities to update their curricula to cover digital assets and on-chain finance.
The reasoning behind the campaign is that graduates entering finance, law and government will increasingly encounter tokenized assets, stablecoins and decentralized protocols, yet many programs still treat them as peripheral. If future regulators, lawyers and executives have never studied how these systems operate, the argument goes, policy will be made on incomplete knowledge.
Groundwork can be read as the next step: moving from a letter and a curriculum appeal to a live meeting where academics, practitioners and officials can talk through what teaching and rulemaking should look like.
4. Who is 1inch and what does a DEX aggregator do?
1inch is a DeFi ecosystem best known for its decentralized exchange aggregator. An aggregator works somewhat like a flight search engine. Instead of sending a trade to a single venue, it scans many decentralized exchanges and routes the order to obtain the best available price, sometimes splitting it across several venues.
Decentralized exchanges let users trade tokens directly from their own wallets through smart contracts, without handing assets to a company that takes custody. That design is central to the industry's pitch about openness and self-custody, and it is also the feature that creates difficult questions for regulators, because no single operator controls the activity in the way a traditional broker or bank does.
A firm with 1inch's profile is well placed to host a policy conversation. It runs infrastructure that many traders use, it has a legal function led by a Chief Legal Officer who is scheduled to speak, and it has shown interest in shaping how the industry is understood by those outside it.
5. Why DeFi poses distinct questions for regulators
Traditional financial regulation is built around identifiable intermediaries: a bank, a broker, an exchange operator. Each can be licensed, examined and held responsible. DeFi protocols often distribute functions across smart contracts, open-source code and communities of token holders, so it is less clear who the responsible party is when something goes wrong or when a rule needs to be applied.
That difference is at the root of the policy discussion Groundwork is designed to host. Lawmakers and agencies must decide whether existing categories can stretch to cover these systems, or whether new approaches are needed. Builders, for their part, have an incentive to explain how the technology works so that any rules reflect its actual design.
Smart contract security is a related concern. Code that holds user funds can be exploited if it contains flaws, and the consequences are borne directly by users. Regulators interested in consumer protection therefore want to understand how protocols are tested and audited, and the builders in the room are best placed to describe those practices.
6. Why Washington, and why now?
Hosting the event in the capital during a week that attracts a policy audience signals that the organizers want the conversation to happen close to the people who draft and enforce financial rules. Digital asset and DeFi regulation remains an active subject of debate, and the relevance of that debate to ordinary financial products keeps growing.
The involvement of the Blockchain Association matters for the same reason. It is one of the established advocacy voices for the industry in Washington, and its partnership with 1inch pairs lobbying capacity with the credibility of a project that builds products. Together they can invite policymakers who might not attend a purely industry-run gathering.
The timing also reflects a broader recognition within the sector that technical innovation alone does not settle how a market is treated. Clarity on legal status shapes which products can be offered, who can use them and how companies invest, so builders have an interest in explaining their work early.
7. A balance question for industry-led education
The initiative also raises a fair question about balance. When an industry funds or organizes education for people who may later oversee it, critics are likely to ask whether the material will present the full picture, including risks, failures and consumer-protection concerns, or mainly the sector's own case.
Involving university faculty and students in the program can help address that concern, since academics bring independent judgment and student moderation changes the dynamic of the discussion. Even so, the curriculum push remains industry-led, and its credibility will depend on how openly the discussions at Groundwork engage with criticism and unresolved problems.
For readers, the sensible approach is to treat the forum as one input into a wider debate. It is a legitimate attempt to build understanding between groups that have often talked past each other, and it is also an effort by an interested party to influence how those groups think.
8. How does the event fit the wider push for DeFi education?
The event fits a pattern in which parts of the crypto industry have turned from product launches toward public engagement. Education is an obvious area of focus because it is a lower-friction way to build relationships with institutions that will influence the sector for years, and because the shortage of people trained in both finance and blockchain technology is a recognized obstacle.
For students, a forum like this offers access that is hard to get through coursework alone: the chance to hear directly from legal officers, protocol developers and policymakers, and to moderate discussions rather than only listen to them. For professors, it offers exposure to practitioners whose experience may inform teaching and research.
For policymakers, the benefit is a structured setting in which to ask questions of people who build and operate these systems. A one-day meeting cannot settle contested issues, but it can improve the quality of the questions, which often determines how useful later rulemaking turns out to be.
9. What to watch after October 16
The forum itself is a single day, so its lasting significance will depend on what follows. One indicator is whether universities announce new digital asset courses or programs after the event, which would suggest the education push is translating into changes in teaching.
A second is whether the organizations that signed the open letter expand their own commitments to education, whether through further events, curriculum materials or partnerships with schools. A third is whether policymakers who attend carry specific points from the discussions into their own work on DeFi rules.
None of these outcomes is guaranteed, and the organizers have not announced specific commitments tied to the event. But Groundwork places the question of who understands decentralized finance, and who is qualified to write rules for it, squarely on the agenda in Washington.
Readers tracking the sector should also note what the organizers have not said. No formal outcomes, joint statements or policy proposals have been announced as goals of the day. That restraint is consistent with its description as a discussion forum, and it means the measure of success will be the quality of the conversations and the follow-up actions that participants choose to take afterward, not a headline announcement on October 16.