Uniswap Founder Interview: Hayden Adams
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, far-removed from crypto social media and Ethereum Twitter, you’ve probably heard of Uniswap, the decentralized exchange that took the Ethereum world by storm in the latter half of 2018. Uniswap has become a favorite for many thanks to to its fee distribution to liquidity providers, tokenless model, and top-notch memes. We sat down this week with Uniswap founder Hayden Adams to ask a few questions about the popular DEX.
Who is Hayden Adams?
Hayden Adams is the creator of Uniswap. As you may know, Hayden was inspired by Vitalik Buterin to create a decentralized exchange similar to Bancor’s model, but without the BNT token.
We asked the Uniswap founder for his perspective on the history and future of his creation.
How’d you get into crypto?
“Friend of mine from college ended up getting a job at the Ethereum Foundation. After I got laid off working as a mechanical engineer (July 2017), he convinced me to learn smart contract development. I was pretty bored at my Engineering job so decided to give it a shot. Spent about two months messing around with ERC20 and ICO contracts in Solidity before deciding to learn on a more ambitious project. That project ended up being Uniswap.”
What was the hardest part/biggest obstacle/most worrisome thing about building Uniswap?
“Hardest part – probably figuring out the details pooling liquidity and fee distribution.
Biggest obstacle – Almost no coding experience. Also no experience with finance/trading. For the initial proof-of-concept I had to learn Solidity, python (unit tests), and web dev with Javascript/React.
Most worrisome – Was worried there might be no volume and liquidity providers would lose money. Or that no one would put in any liquidity. Or that they would put in liquidity and the contracts would be hacked. Seems to be working out though.”
How’d you recruit Mike Demarais as Hypeman?
“I didn’t. He just started calling himself that and hyping up Uniswap. Now journalists reach out to him before me for comment on Uniswap related articles. Very happy with the quantity/quality of Uniswap related memes he has created and inspired.”
What’s next for Uniswap?
“Short term plan is to grow the liquidity pools, improve UX, create better developer tooling/APIs/docs, and further integrate Uniswap into the #dopefi ecosystem.
Medium term plan is still being fleshed out but may involve growing the liquidity pools, scaling, privacy, complex mechanisms/derivatives/financial applications built on top of Uniswap. Lots of memes, and maybe mainstream adoption.
Long term plan is still global domination. And growing the liquidity pools.”
How do you envision Uniswap integrating further with other projects/protocols?
“Go to source for liquidity for dapps, traders, and other exchanges. Collateralization of liquidity tokens, derivatives, other fun things.”
When asked which Uniswap integration surprised him the most, Hayden replied, “Kyber!”
What is the community lacking that you’d like to see get built?
“Good question. So many cool things have [been] coming from the open source community forming around Uniswap including analytics sites, integrations, arbitrage bots, writeups, libraries, memes, and integrations (like Burner Wallet).
Personally, I’d like to see a MakerDAO CDP interface that increases your leverage by recursively withdrawing the DAI, swapping it for ETH on Uniswap, and locking that ETH back in the CDP.
Also more stuff around liquidity tokens.”
Does the Uniswap unicorn have a name?
“Not yet.”
Sounds like a job for the Uniswap community!
That wraps up our Uniswap founder interview
Thanks so much to Hayden for taking the time to chat with us! We’re certainly impressed by his fast journey from laid-off engineer to Uniswap founder! Stay tuned for our upcoming interview with Conlan Rios, creator of Uniswap.info and key contributor to the Concourse Open Community.
More Uniswap stuff
You can find Uniswap founder Hayden Adams on Twitter, and you can access the protocol at https://uniswap.exchange.
You can use the Swap Tool app on Settle to trade ETH for tokens on Uniswap, see how Uniswap’s prices compare to other DEXes with DEX.AG, or keep track of Uniswap’s rank among top DeFi projects at DeFi Pulse.
