How Hayden Adams Created Uniswap | Documentary

Welcome back, crypto enthusiasts. In today's  Web3 documentary, we're shining a spotlight on one of the key figures behind the success  of Uniswap. We're talking about Hayden Adams, the brilliant mind behind this revolutionary  platform. Uniswap removes the middleman from the equation, making the process of trade  much easier, smoother, and more affordable. That's what any decentralized exchange, or  DEX for short, aims to do. And that's what Uniswap pioneered and excelled at. This brings us  cl

oser to token based economics. And blockchain, the pillars of Web3 economy. Let's explore how  Uniswap has transformed the crypto landscape, and get to know the mastermind behind it. Early life of Hayden Adams Now, let's shift  our focus to the mastermind behind Uniswap, Hayden Adams. As the founder of Uniswap,  Hayden's vision and technical expertise have been instrumental in the platform's success. Despite  being a relative newcomer to the blockchain space, his innovative thinking and dedicati

on have earned  him a prominent place within the crypto community. Hayden was born on October 21st, 1992 in the  United States. Upon getting his university education, he realized how fascinated he  was with the world of computer science, especially where it intersects with finance.  Hayden's commitment to decentralization and open source principles has inspired a new  generation of developers and entrepreneurs. His emphasis on community involvement and  transparency has set a high standard for f

uture blockchain projects. Hayden Adams  had a background in mechanical engineering. He graduated from Stony Brook University,  indicating a strong academic inclination, particularly in technical fields. He has an  ongoing senior design for a BCI robotic arm that he's been working on since September 2015  in association with Stony Brook University. There's also another one that's a brain  computer interface device. for Cerebral Palsy, which he worked on from September 2015 and up  to May 2016. A

fter completing his education, Adams worked in various engineering  roles, including a position at Simons. The post before that was a medical  engineering intern at Vista Wearable Inc, and before that he was a researcher  at Columbia University Medical Center. At the Columbia University Medical Center,  he was developing an algorithm that retrieved relevant articles to any search query that the  user made from the PubMed database. While it's apparent that he was more involved  in medical tech in

the beginning, his career took a significant turn when he  was introduced to the Ethereum blockchain. and smart contracts, leading to his  deep involvement in the blockchain space. Hayden Adams conceived the idea  of Uniswap. He recognized the limitations and inefficiencies of traditional exchanges and  set out to build a better solution. In college, I studied mechanical engineering. And the  first year after college, I worked at Siemens. Basically doing, uh, it wasn't, wasn't  teleconference a

ctually, computational fluid dynamics. But basically studying heat flow  and doing heat flow simulations. Or car designs, which maybe sounds interesting and exciting,  but it was actually incredibly boring. Working computational fluid dynamics, I'd say  that I was probably not the best employee. I think maybe actually a starting point was I  didn't really enjoy it. It was pretty boring, um, even though it doesn't sound it, and  just like wasn't very excited. With his profound knowledge of Ethere

um  and smart contract development, Hayden Adams created Uniswap. Which now  stands as a pillar of the DeFi ecosystem. He even published research on topics like  smart contracts and decentralized systems. Other projects raised massive amounts of money  and promised a million, like the world and then delivered like, you know, really shitty UIs with  like kind of smart contracts that often had like centralized backdoors and all that and, um,  had been like hyping themselves up for years. And then

I'd say that Uniswap went at the moment  of launch, most people hadn't heard of it yet. I had like, I announced on my Twitter and  I had like 150 followers at the time. And, you know, hadn't done any publicity around it  really, other than like going to conferences and talking to people in person. And, so at the  moment it launched, it has like, had like a complete front end, a complete, you know, like the  smart contracts were done and live and audited. The front end was done and live and you c

ould  use it and you could add it to, and anyone could immediately, so it was like immediately useful and  usable and no one had heard of it before. And it kind of, um. Basically like contrasted really  heavily against the projects at the time. Um, uh, and, and I didn't even like the fact that I  didn't have a token at the time with like very, it was sort of like the anti hype project. We were just like, oh, it works and it's already  exists and I can already use it. And then I think the other p

art where the bear market, but I  think that was exciting to people is like, I think the other exciting part was that  like having something that like was gaining, like people started to use it and the  volume numbers started to like creep up. And it was the early usage was from  projects that were like. Struggling to get listed on centralized exchanges, um,  or struggle to create, find market makers who would create liquidity in them. So they had  very low liquidity on centralized exchanges. An

d so having this ability to like self  serve, uh, to list and create liquidity, um, in the, back then in the early days  was, was really huge for a few projects. And so as I started to get these early  usage and adoption, having like a, a chart that was like going up, uh, even like  the Uniswap usage chart was like the only like up chart at that point in time and everything  else was like, was like down. And so like, it kind of like was like a rallying cry to point  for like the early Ethereum c

ommunity of like, here's something that actually like  is working, people are using it. Um, it didn't overhype itself. And,  and so that was where like a lot of this initial excitement and adoption  and, and, uh, And community, like, support came from. Genesis of Uniswap. It's  interesting to think that Hayden Adams had the capacity to work on his breakthrough  project after having been laid off from Simons in 2017, when he found himself at  the crossroads of his professional life. As any of us

would do, Hayden talked  to a trusted friend, Carl Flourish, who was working for the Ethereum Foundation  at the time. Carl talked to Hayden about the untapped industry that had amazing potential,  which seemed like an amazing opportunity, compared to the dying field. With that in  mind, Hayden dedicated the next two months learning the basics of JavaScript,  Solidity, and of course, Ethereum. He focused on showcasing his skills in  terms of implementing a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange p

latform, which  would utilize automated market makers under the supervision of trustless smart contracts,  rather than people. Alan Liu of Gnosis coined the idea. And Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co  founder, started publicly talking about it, hoping that DeFi enthusiasts and  supporters would take an interest in it. Vitalik was right, and Hayden's one page  single liquidity provider had a better UX and proof of concept than even EtherDelta,  the only DEX at the time with any traction. Before we de

lve into Uniswap, let's first  understand the concept of decentralized exchanges. Unlike traditional exchanges that  rely on intermediaries, Decentralized exchanges leverage blockchain technology to facilitate  peer to peer transactions directly between users. One of the most prominent DEXs is Uniswap. Uniswap  launched in 2018 and quickly became a game changer in the world of decentralized finance. DeFi. It  introduced an innovative automated market maker, AMM, model that eliminated the need fo

r books  and centralized intermediaries. Instead, Uniswap relies on liquidity pools, allowing  users to trade directly from their wallets. The entire project began as a pet project  for Adams to hone his coding skills. However, with his intellect and involvement Ethereum, he  was able to build something that established him as a multi millionaire and a tech  hero. For anyone who's interested in crypto vision for Uniswap, what's  it's Uniswap apart from other DEXs. Firstly, it operates on the Eth

ereum blockchain, making it compatible with a wide range of ERC  20 tokens. Uniswap utilizes an automated pricing mechanism that calculates token prices  based on the ratio of available tokens in the liquidity pool. This approach ensures  continuous liquidity and reduces slippage. Uniswap also introduced a revolutionary  concept called Governance Tokens. These tokens, known as UNI, grant holders the power to  influence platform decisions and share in its success. Uniswap's commitment to  decentr

alization is further exemplified by the community driven nature of its  development and decision making processes. Uniswap's impact on the DeFi space.  Cannot be overstated with its user friendly interface and open source nature  Uniswap has empowered millions of users to participate in decentralized finance. It  has democratized access to financial services Allowing anyone with an internet connection to  trade, provide liquidity and earn passive income. Unis WAPs success has also sparked a wave

of  innovation in the defi sector. Numerous projects have been built on top of unis, swp, creating new  trading strategies, yield farming opportunities, and decentralized applications that leverage its  liquidity pools. After learning like the basics of smart contracts, I really just felt like I was  like stalling in my ability to learn more and. Again, had like another call with Carl  and he was again, kind of like, well, the thing you need to do if you  need to take on a side project, you nee

d to actually try to build something  you can't really learn just like, you know, watching YouTube videos and, and experimenting  on your own. And so really, you know, uh, was looking for a project to start on and had a  bunch of different ideas, but ultimately settled on, on this blog post that Vitalik had written  about like a new way to do exchange on Ethereum. And I thought it was really interesting to  me, Ethereum was really cool and interesting because. You know, this idea of you could  b

uild applications that no one controlled that anyone could use that you didn't need  to trust anyone because all you needed to do was trust the code. And so that the earliest  idea of being a swap was just, can you make a, you know, a smart contract on Ethereum that  lets you trade between cryptocurrencies in a way that it really embodies those properties  of Ethereum, um, like true decentralization. And so we decided to build a side project. Um,  so we'll, we'll accelerate how quickly there, bu

t, uh. Really just from there,  spent the next year building out from like an early proof of concept, got  a grant, you know, once I got the grant, it felt more real and I just like took  that proof of concept, kept building on it. Um, during that time, I started going to a  lot of Ethereum conferences. So while building Uniswap sort of as a side project, just went  to all the crypto Ethereum conferences I could, just made like a lot of friends in space.  The early Ethereum community was really

cool and interesting. And everyone who  was building at the time, this was. You know, post 2017 bull market, this is  like crazy bear market vibes. And it was just like the people who are still working on  Ethereum really cared about it and were really interested in it. Um, it was like a really good  community and, uh, you know, spent all the grant money on smart contract security auditors  and on contractors to write designs for the, for the web app and then launched it as a  solo, you know, pr

oject in November, 2018. Uh, Uniswap Labs actually did not form until  spring 2019 when, uh, so, you know, after people started to use V1 in the early days, they got that  initial excitement and attraction, uh, and then basically formed the company. Creation of Uniswap.  Although at the time he was working on smart contracts and creating his protocol along with its  UI, Hayden had been unemployed for five months. He was living off the crypto holdings  he had acquired earlier that year. His geniu

s move in showcasing his work in a perfectly  appealing way has gained him plenty of attention, particularly from Pascal Van Henck, a  smart contract engineer. Pascal offered Adams mentorship and told him he'd fund  his next month of building the project. With that step, Adams was able to work  on Uniswap at a much larger scale than a pet project. So Uniswap V2 came out,  um, and became this much bigger money Lego, uh, had much more adoption than V1. Um,  and an entire ecosystem formed around it

. Um, uh, which we see, you know, what  that looked like back in the day. Um, uh, but it actually, funny enough,  the new features that we introduced with Uniswap v2 actually did not get used. The  main new feature was 20 pairs. And, uh, because it wasn't in a very efficient curve  for stablecoins, uh, people didn't really use it for stablecoins. And everyone else just  wanted to pair their tokens against ETH. The other features were like oracles,  which were mostly used very poorly. Um, uh, and

it actually did not fix V1's biggest  problem. Uh, which were like around flexibility and expressiveness and efficiency.  He embarked on a journey of turning Uniswap into a full fledged decentralized  exchange, embracing all Ethereum principles. Hayden wrote on his Uniswap Labs blog, I  began thinking about Uniswap not just as a learning tool for myself, But one for others. I  couldn't imagine a world where it competed with real projects. You know, the ones that raised  between 20 million and 1

50 million in the summer of 2017. But maybe it could serve as an example  of an application that truly embodied Ethereum. However, by April 2018, Uniswap's  crypto holdings were down 75%, which posed a significant setback. Yet, after  the Ethos conference at Hong Kong in 2018, Vitalik Buterin saved the project with  another grant after a brief exchange between Buterin and Atoms. It was at this time  that Atoms realized it was his chance to make something big out of his project, and that's  why h

e worked with his team on the following. Reviewing the code thoroughly, modifying the  smart contracts to favor liquidity providers over traders, auditing the protocol security,  implementing new front end designs that were easier for users to navigate. Then, after a year's  development efforts, Uniswap launched on the 2nd of November in 2018, which coincided with the  last day of the DEVCON4 conference in Prague. Originally, Hayden Adams named the project Unipeg, a combination of a unicorn and

a pegasus.  However, Vitalik Buterin suggested Uniswap, and that's what they all went with eventually.  The process of getting a new Uniswap is going to look a little bit different this time around. I  think that, you know, a really important starting point is that we see Uniswap as very similar to  Ethereum itself, uh, where Ethereum, where it's, you know, a core piece of infrastructure,  public infrastructure on which You know, thousands of teams are building, you know,  hundreds of thousands

of liquidity providers. And it's really just this like public infra for  the entire space, right? It has about, you know, at times it has over 90 percent market share for  on chain trading on, on Ethereum at least. And so, uh, you know, similar to how Ethereum has this  like public process for it being rolled out. Uh, there's a lot of time for people to respond  and react and give feedback and input. There's time for all the different projects  building on top of it to, you know, begin preparing

, uh, their infrastructure  and, you know, build on top of it. You know, with this version of Uniswap, uh, we really  wanted to build it in public. And so what we're, uh, rolling out today is basically  A, you know, vision for Uniswap v4, uh, as well as a, you know, white paper  and a, you know, a draft of the code. So the code is, you know, we have an initial  code base and it works and it proves that it can work. Uh, but it's not final, and we don't  expect it to be final for many months. Sett

ing the platform apart. Although Uniswap rose to the  top of the popularity ladder of DeFi platforms, it still had no active tokens of its own, even  by September 2020, two years after its launch. At the time, several Ethereum projects  operated with having tokens. Although, there wasn't an actual need for them. Atoms  didn't want this to happen for Uniswap as well. That's why he focused on creating  a self sustainable and shared ownership community over Dex, which means that  he had to introduc

e token governance. Governance tokens give anyone holding tokens  a voting right in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, DAO. In other words, this pushes  the protocol's direction toward a dynamic where more power lies in the hands of those holding  more tokens. For Hayden, this was the ideal way to implement the pillars of neutrality and  trust minimization, and it was embodied in UNI. With UNI, tokens were airdropped to anyone that  had used the exchange before. On the 17th of September

2020, 400 UNI tokens were distributed  to more than 250, 000 accounts. And that was the equivalent of more than 1, 400 at the time. The  early adopters of the protocol were naturally extremely pleased with this, and it caused a  ripple of talk and attention in the community. Within a month, 91 percent of the available assets  had been claimed by eligible addresses. However, Even after three years have passed,  there are still 30, 000 wallets that haven't claimed their Unibags yet,  leaving 84 mi

llion worth of tokens unclaimed. That original 1, 400 that was  airdropped is now worth more than millions. The platform has seen a ton of growth, and  many long term investors have been excited about the opportunity to hold Uniswap in a  crypto IRA. For U. S. investors, they can open a crypto IRA at iTrust Capital. And buy,  sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, like Uniswap, with tax benefits. If you want to learn more about  iTrust Capital and crypto retirement accounts, be sure to check out our

Web3 Learning Resources  section in the description of this video. Something we've been working on for a while now, um, so excited to announce a project called  Uniswap X. Uh, it is a new phone, um, no, it is an auction based routing  protocol, um, so. Yeah. How does, how does unis swap X work? Basically, uh, and  we'll get into some of the benefits in a second, but unis, swap X basically works by, you know,  all, all orders. Uh, now start off as off chain signatures. Uh, today most orders are,

you know,  are, are transactions that are submitted directly. These are off chain signatures, uh, which we  are calling Dutch orders. So these orders are essentially auctions, um, the price. You sign an  order that says, this is the price I'm willing to accept, and that price goes down a little bit  over time, um, attempting to, you know, optimize the price that you get. Uh, so the price decays  until a transaction is filled, or it times out. Um, you know, there is a, a new party of, of  users.

These are actually kind of old users in disguise, uh, called fillers. Uh, they compete  to fill the order first against each other. Uh, the people, you know, that do this are  people that look like block builders, uh, etc. today. Uh, arbitrage, uh, arbitrage  today. Um, and I, I think that the important thing here is that, you know, uh, today we have  this, this problem of front running in MEV. Where, uh, you know, often you get  the worst rate you're willing to accept rather than the best rate

that is  available. And that's because, you know, people can reorder transactions within  a block and move the price. And so, by creating, uh, structuring orders as, you know,  competitive auctions, uh, you, you, you attempt to get the best rate that someone can offer, not  the worst rate that you're willing to receive. Um, uh, Additionally, so auctions take time,  and having auctions happen more quickly, um, uh, there can be tricks for that. So,  the base protocol doesn't need this, but there's

an optional ability to parameterize  these Dutch orders using an RFQ system, which helps the auction happen faster. Um, and so  this is sort of what the two variants look like. Um, pretty simple, you have, you know, a  starting price. Um, sort of like the maximum price you might expect to get, um, and then it  decays to the minimum price you're willing to receive. But again, uh, the, the sort of way  sandwiching works is that you often get the worst price you're willing to receive. And  what we

expect here is that you will get, you know, the best price that  is available, uh, when possible. And, you know, uh, complex tradeoff  space of parameterization, but aside. Um, then with the RFQ variant on the, uh, on the  right, um, uh, there is sort of this ability to converge more quickly on the, on the, the,  uh, initial price. Or the expected price. Um, it still is a public auction, so if someone  has price improvement on top of the RFQ winner. Uh, that price can be overridden. From the  m

oment that the protocol was envisioned, and up until now, Uniswap has been demonstrating  exceptional innovation and setting new standards for the world of DeFi. Thanks to Uniswap,  governance token airdrops became a standard in DeFi, and other protocols followed suit,  including Optimism, Arbitrum, and Curve. Uniswap continually innovates as seen  with the launch of Uniswap v2. and V3, which introduced features like direct ERC 20 to  ERC 20 swaps and concentrated liquidity. These innovations en

hance the user experience and  the efficiency of the platform. For Uniswap, there's a futuristic Uniswap X that's going to  enhance swapping in many ways, including better prices by aggregating liquidity sources, gas free  swapping, protection against maximal extractable value, or MeV, failed transactions with zero  cost, and even gas free cross chain swaps. And there you have it, a closer look  at Uniswap and its visionary founder, Hayden Adams. Uniswap's innovative approach  to decentralized e

xchange has revolutionized the DeFi landscape, making it more accessible and  user friendly than ever before. If you want to see another documentary of a Web3 pioneer, Then make  sure you click that video that's on screen now. Thank you guys so much for watching all the way  until the end of this video. Make sure you click that subscribe button, and let us know what you  think about Uniswap in the comment section below.