59 - Uniswap | Hayden Adams
Bankless
Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2021
⏱️ 146 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hayden Adams is the inventor of Uniswap, the decentralized trading protocol.
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Bankless Podcast #59 - Uniswap
Guest: Hayden Adams
Hayden Adams is the creator of Uniswap, the decentralized trading protocol and DAO. Before inventing DeFi's largest asset exchange, he was laid off from his mechanical engineering job in the summer of 2017. Excited by Ethereum and Vitalik's blog post on automated market making, he learned to code smart contracts using Solidity.
Uniswap's V1 Mainnet launch came in the middle of the crypto bear market in November 2018. Since then, it has experienced exponential growth and traction, with liquidity providers like MakerDAO bolstering Uniswap's early ecosystem. Uniswap V2 brought pivotal upgrades to the user experience, bug fixes, and improvements to the Oracle architecture.
From its genesis, Uniswap has emphasized the decentralized, permissionless properties of Ethereum. Uniswap's tools enable anyone to create a liquidity pool to exchange on, and it has become the de facto hub of DeFi as a sandbox for the 'long tail' of endless decentralized assets. Uniswap's openness, functionality, and legitimacy have allowed it to rise to its current position as a DeFi staple.
On September 16th, 2020, Uniswap launched its UNI token with a widely distributed airdrop to each Ethereum address that had interacted on the Uniswap platform – over 500,000 accounts. This drop exemplifies DeFi's promises of wealth distribution, communal equity, and decentralized governance.
On March 23rd, 2021, Uniswap announced V3 to go live on Ethereum mainnet in May of 2021. The most significant change in this upgrade is concentrated liquidity, which allows individual liquidity providers to control where their liquidity is allocated along the price curve for a given asset pair. This allows freedom for infinite liquidity providing strategies and presents a flexibility that incentivizes an optimized trading curve.
In this 2.5 hour episode, Hayden walks us through the entirety of Uniswap, from its genesis to its present state and beyond.
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Resources:
Uniswap
https://uniswap.org/
Hayden on Twitter
https://twitter.com/haydenzadams?s=20
V0 Birthday Blog:
https://medium.com/uniswap/uniswap-birthday-blog-v0-7a91f3f6a1ba
V3 Announcement post:
https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/
Vitalik's Market Maker Blog Post:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/06/22/marketmakers.html
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. |
| 0:19.4 | This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. |
| 0:23.6 | I'm Ryan Sean Adams, I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help and become |
| 0:28.2 | more bankless. David, we finally got him Hayden Adams on the podcast. |
| 0:33.4 | Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap, we go through |
| 0:39.4 | the entire history of Uniswap, starting when it was just a blog post from Vitalik on |
| 0:44.8 | Reddit, I think going into Hayden getting laid off and being convinced by his good friend |
| 0:50.0 | Karl Florsch that he's going to all of a sudden become an expert on Ethereum building |
| 0:55.8 | and DeFi, and turns out that's exactly what happened. |
| 0:59.5 | And so Hayden takes us through the story of Uniswap from inception to where we are today |
| 1:03.5 | with Uniswap V3 to where we are going tomorrow, which is Uniswap being the largest asset |
| 1:09.1 | exchange platform in the world. It's been a fantastic story, and there's so many different |
| 1:13.8 | detours and turns that we take because it's interesting every step of the way, and there's |
| 1:18.4 | so much value to be derived from this conversation because not only is it the story of Uniswap, |
| 1:23.1 | and it's the story of Ethereum at large as well, because it's such an emblematic of |
| 1:27.9 | what it means to build something on Ethereum. I had a fantastic time talking with Hayden |
| 1:32.3 | today. |
| 1:33.3 | I feel like this is going to be one of those legendary stories that the world hasn't |
| 1:36.9 | yet discovered. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage in Menlo Park, that area, |
| 1:44.3 | and we're like Bill Gates, the story Bill Gates, we're like Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, |
| 1:48.5 | all of these things. |
| 1:49.5 | This has bad connotations these days, but it's that important, and it still hasn't escaped |
... |
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