Original author: Daniel Kuhn
Original compilation: Block unicorn
Uniswap, the first decentralized crypto exchange, for Hayden Adams, is his highest honor and contribution to Ethereum. The latest V4 release has attracted both praise and criticism, earning him a spot on the list of the most influential people of 2023.
The birth of Uniswap is like a movie
In 2018, just a few months after Hayden Adams was introduced to the cryptocurrency space by Karl Floersch (who is also on the list of the most influential people of 2023), Adams flew to South Korea to attend the Deconomy conference . He lost his first job out of college as a mechanical engineer at Siemens in mid-2017, and used that time to learn programming, essentially starting by writing beginner-unfriendly smart contracts.
He was 24 years old and broke at the time, and his main investments were in cryptocurrencies, which he bought during the 2017 boom, but almost all of which lost value. But he also had a working prototype, a website and a name: Uniswap. His friend Floersch suggested that Adams build something called an automated market maker (AMM), a type of decentralized protocol for exchanging assets without permission that was originally proposed by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. With the determination of his faith, he bought a plane ticket but not a conference ticket, intending to show Buterin the version 0 of Uniswap. He slipped into Deconomy. Then was kicked out. In a twist of fate, he met Floersch, who was working at the Ethereum Foundation. Floersch introduced Adams to Buterin. Within months, Adams was speaking solo at multiple conferences, including Toronto, New York, and Hong Kong.
At the time, there were some important projects on Ethereum, but none like Uniswap. When speaking to the world or meeting with like-minded individuals, Adams not only discusses decentralized exchanges, but also the meaning behind them. After the 2018 market crash, ongoing hacks on corporate crypto exchanges, and rampant profiteering, the crypto world lacked a tool that could truly be its own, Adams wrote in a history of Uniswap. He recalled his thoughts at the time: Something felt wrong in the Ethereum space. The major projects on Ethereum embody some of its characteristics, but few projects fully embrace them. Centralized single point of failure, auditable applications And the overly complex architecture, DAPP applications designed around token transactions do not require a centralized approach at all.”
Today, Uniswap is one of the largest and most successful DeFi projects, and Adams is reportedly one of the wealthiest founders in the industry. It is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) by total value locked (TVL), with over $3.9 billion currently locked on the platform.
Since its launch in October this year, Uniswap Labs has accumulated approximately $1.5 million in transaction fees, which will help fund ongoing development efforts. This is separate from the protocol fee, which can be enabled in an independent vote among holders of UNI, the protocol token issued in one of the earliest experiments in DAO governance in 2020, and it may accumulate to UNIs holder, but governance was never voted on.
Its daily trading volume is comparable to, and often exceeds, Coinbase, the largest exchange in the United States.
To say Adams is influential in the crypto space is an understatement, he has inspired envy as well as earned respect and affection. Uniswap may not have been his brainchild (Adams credits Gnosiss Alan Lu with the specific swap mechanism), but he certainly built it, with significant help along the way. In the beginning, of course, there were people like Floersch and Buterin, but also Pascal Van Hecke, Callil Capuozzo, and Uciel Vilchis who contributed code; friends like Philip Daian, Dan Robinson, Andy Milenius, and Jinglan Wang who provided advice and comfort; and Funders like Richard Burton.
business concessions
Adams has also been involved in some controversy. After the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash, Uniswap Labs said the protocol front-end (i.e. on-ramp) it powers will begin censoring addresses that interact with cryptocurrency mixers, undercutting the “permissionless” nature that attracted Adams to Ethereum in the first place. and “censorship-resistant” properties. In June this year, Uniswap also announced that it would soon launch its latest version, V4. This upgrade will bring many new features and changes, including a single contract address called a Singleton that will house all pools that need to exchange different crypto assets, thereby reducing gas costs for all users. In addition, a new feature called hooks will allow developers to add code that changes the behavior of the protocol under different conditions.
Hooks (Uniswap’s hook feature) has its detractors, with some arguing that it improves customizability while sacrificing decentralization. But the most controversial aspect of Uniswap V4 is the Business Source License it will release. The license restricts use of the source code in commercial settings, meaning it is not fully open source, at least not until the license expires in up to four years.
In fact, although Uniswap is a revenue-generating project, it also has financial backers. And with financial backers, there is an incentive to protect profits and limit risk. Ethereum has changed since Adams discovered it, partly due to Adams influence.
However, the Uniswap team is building the application publicly and soliciting comments. The application does not yet have an official release date and will require Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1153 to run as part of the Ethereum Cancun upgrade expected to be completed before the end of the year. Such is the reality of open source development.
