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Author: Thejaswini, Source: Token Dispatch, Compiled by: Shaw Bitchain Vision
On July 6, 2017, HR called.
Hayden Adams was fired after a year as a mechanical engineer at Siemens.He felt that he had never been suitable for heat flow simulation.Adams did not perform well in this position.The company is laying off employees.
Adams, 24, felt relieved.
He has been struggling with whether the career path of engineer is suitable for him.The layoffs forced him to make a decision that he had been avoiding.
His cell phone buzzed, a text message from his college roommate.
Karl Floersch works for an institution called the Ethereum Foundation.He has been promoting blockchain technology for many years.Smart contracts and decentralized applications are all revolutionary things.
Adams always turned a deaf ear to his words.Too abstract and weird.
Now that he is unemployed and his future is uncertain, he decided to listen.
The call lasted for three hours.Flosch paints a picture of the future: code runs without manual supervision.Funds can be transferred without a bank.The application can serve millions of people without enterprise control.
The subsequent dialogue laid the groundwork for the birth of Uniswap.
But first, he had to convince himself that it would be wise to switch from mechanical engineering to the cryptocurrency field.
Ethereum Evangelist
Adams sees uncertainty, while Flosch sees opportunities.
Ethereum was still young at the time, and anyone who was interested could become an expert in a few months.The threshold is low because few people know this technology.
Adams had some concerns.He has no programming experience except for basic courses.He has never built a website or written a smart contract.The prospect of shifting from mechanical engineering to software development was awkward.
Flosch proposed a framework: learn by building real things.Instead of taking online courses, Adams should choose a specific project and work hard to achieve it.Learning will happen naturally in the process of creation.
Flosch explained how Ethereum works, the importance of decentralized applications, and the issues that need to be solved.He describes an emerging ecosystem where small teams can build products that serve millions of users without traditional enterprise infrastructure.
Despite Adams’ suspicion, he found himself interested.
He made a decision.He will spend the next year learning programming and develop something meaningful on Ethereum.At the end of the conversation, Adams remained cautiously optimistic.
Basement Laboratory
Adams moved back to his childhood bedroom in the suburbs of New York.
His parents tried their best to support him.Their son studied mechanical engineering at SUNY Stony Brook and later worked for a well-known company.Now, he wants to learn programming and develop applications on something called blockchain.
The learning curve is steep.Adams watched a tutorial on JavaScript on YouTube and read the documentation for the Ethereum programming language Solidity.What seems intuitive for computer science graduates, but it requires in-depth research for those in the field of physical engineering.He handles programming like he does any engineering problem.Each function has its purpose in a larger system.Every variable has meaning.A smart contract is a machine that converts inputs into outputs based on predetermined rules.
Progress is slow.Adams built a simple contract for storing and retrieving data.He learned to deploy code to Ethereum’s test network.With every small success, the gap between abstract concepts and practical applications gradually narrows.
Flosch often visited Adams and gave him guidance and encouragement.During a visit in late 2017, he raised a specific challenge to Adams.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has written a blog post about automated market makers.This concept describes a new way of facilitating transactions without the need for a traditional order book.Instead of matching a buy and sell order, traders interact with a liquidity pool controlled by mathematical formulas.
No one has successfully built a feasible implementation plan.
Adams studied this concept.Market maker mechanisms involve complex systems that require multiple participants, precise calculations and real-time responses.This problem combines mathematical theory with practical engineering, which fascinates him very much.
Flosch made a proposal to develop a runnable prototype with a user interface within a month and demonstrate it at the upcoming Ethereum conference Devcon.
Adams accepted the challenge.He has 30 days to learn web development, implement automatic market maker logic, and create something worth showing to the global Ethereum community.
A protocol that changes everything
November 2, 2018.Adams is preparing to deploy his smart contract to the Ethereum mainnet.
It took more than a year to go from prototype to formal production.Originally just a month’s challenge for Flosch, it has now evolved into a comprehensive protocol that has undergone many iterations.The first demonstration on Devcon 2 proves the feasibility of this concept.But Adams wants to build a system that is mature and robust enough to allow real users to use real funds.This process includes rewriting smart contracts, performing security audits, and optimizing the user interface.Each improvement brings the system closer to production.
Vitalik Butling suggests rewriting contracts in another programming language, Vyper.He suggested applying for funding from the Ethereum Foundation.The funding application process forced Adams to articulate his vision clearly.
The $65,000 grant provides financial support for Adams to devote himself to the project.Adams used the funds to audit the smart contract, built an interface that could be put into production, and prepared the main network to go online.Every detail is crucial because users will entrust real money to the system.
The mathematical formula at Uniswap is x * y = k.
This constant product formula ensures that the product of the quantity of the two tokens in the liquidity pool remains unchanged during the trading process.When a token becomes scarce, its price will rise proportionally accordingly.
Adams deployed these contracts at the Devcon 4 conference in Prague.Launched at Ethereum’s largest conference will maximize the attention of developers and early adopters.He announced the deployment to about 200 followers on Twitter.
Early responses were mixed.Some developers praised its elegant design and license-free architecture.Others question whether automated market makers can compete with traditional centralized exchanges.The transaction volume was not large in the early weeks of its launch, and it was limited to curious developers and DeFi enthusiasts.
Adams anticipated the doubts.Uniswap’s original design intention is not more efficient than centralized exchanges.Instead, it provides transactions without trust intermediaries, token launch services without permission, and composable liquidity that can be built for other applications.Centralized exchanges rely on market makers to actively participate in the market and adjust liquidity according to price changes.Automatic market makers (AMM) subvert this model and realizes the automation of market makers.This means you no longer need market makers.Once the fund pool is deployed, the fund pool logic will automatically perform the market-making function.
Tokens can be created without anyone’s permission.Therefore, with the launch of new tokens on Ethereum, there should be a license-free trading method.Centralized exchanges charge high listing fees and require a lengthy approval process.Uniswap allows anyone to create a market by depositing tokens and earn fees from subsequent transactions.
By early 2019, Uniswap’s daily trading volume continued to grow.The agreement handles multi-million dollar transactions without any staff, office or traditional business operations.Adams constructs a system that runs based on mathematical rules rather than human decisions.
In the summer of 2020, some changes have taken place in decentralized finance (DeFi).
The DeFi summer has brought explosive growth to blockchain-based financial applications.Uniswap is at the center of this movement, providing infrastructure to support new programmable currencies.
Adams witnessed monthly trading volumes soaring from millions to billions of dollars.The agreement handles more transaction volume than many traditional financial institutions, while maintaining the decentralized and license-free nature.
This success has attracted the attention of venture capital.Adams founded Uniswap Labs to formally form a team and accept institutional investment.The company raised $11 million in a Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz Fund, providing financial support for accelerated development.
The second edition launched by Uniswap in May 2020 has been significantly improved.The new contract supports direct transactions between any ERC-20 tokens, not just paired with Ethereum.They include price oracles, which other protocols can use for a variety of applications.
Lightning loan allows users to temporarily borrow tokens in a single transaction.
These innovations have achieved application scenarios that Adams had never expected.Other developers have built lending protocols, derivatives platforms and earnings farming strategies on top of Uniswap’s infrastructure.The Uniswap protocol has become a composable infrastructure that drives innovation across the DeFi ecosystem.
In September 2020, with the launch of UNI governance tokens, Uniswap once again ushered in a milestone.Adams and his team distributed 400 tokens to all addresses that once used Uniswap, creating one of the largest airdrops in cryptocurrency history.This retrospective distribution rewards early users and combines their interests with the long-term success of the agreement.
The third edition launched by Uniswap in May 2021 introduces centralized liquidity capabilities.Liquidity providers can concentrate their funds in specific price ranges, thereby increasing the efficiency of certain strategies by up to 4,000 times.This innovation attracts professional market makers while still maintaining accessibility to individual users.
The centralized liquidity function fundamentally changes the way Uniswap market makers operate.Previously, liquidity was spread across all possible price ranges, resulting in inefficiency in capital.The V3 version allows liquidity providers to accurately define the range of liquidity they want to provide.This allows them to make a more strategic layout and better manage risks.
Liquidity providers can set up a stop loss mechanism for impermanent losses by concentrating positions within the expected trading range, thus making the market more mature and professional.
Uniswap V3 attracts both professional market makers seeking advanced strategies, as well as individual users who benefit from higher accessibility and funding efficiency.
Each iteration of Uniswap continues to expand its capabilities while retaining its core principles.The agreement remains licensing-free, trust-free and censor-resistant.Anyone can trade any token without providing personal information or seeking approval from an intermediary.
Adams created what traditional finance thinks is impossible: a fully automated exchange that does not require manual regulation, but handles billions of dollars in transaction volume every day.
October 10, 2024.Uniswap Labs announces the launch of Unichain, an Ethereum Layer2 network designed specifically for DeFi applications.
Blockchain represents Adams’ transition from a protocol developer to an infrastructure provider.Building a dedicated network allows Uniswap to optimize the entire automated market making architecture.
Unichain was officially launched on February 11, 2025, using Rollup-Boost technology.Trusted execution environment enables private memory pools and fair transaction sorting.This technological innovation solves a long-standing problem in decentralized transactions: Maximum Extractable Value (MEV).
In traditional blockchain networks, experienced traders can observe pending transactions and take the lead in the average user by paying higher fees.This practice extracts value from ordinary traders, making it more expensive to trade.Unichain’s private memory pool hides transaction details until the transaction is processed, while a trusted execution environment ensures that transactions are fairly sorted based on the transaction arrival time rather than the amount of fees paid by the user.
The network processes transactions at a subblock speed of 200 milliseconds.The speed increase allows Uniswap to compete with centralized exchanges in terms of latency-sensitive trading strategies.These technological advances reduce the value that mature traders extract from ordinary users, thus creating a fairer trading environment.
Today, Uniswap processes more than $2 billion to $3 billion in transaction volume every day, spanning multiple blockchain networks.The 4th edition launched by Uniswap in 2025 introduces a hook mechanism that allows developers to customize fund pool behavior based on specific use cases.While the agreement continues to evolve, it retains its revolutionary simplicity and ease of use.
Adams remains focused on his original mission to make the exchange of value as easy and convenient as the exchange of information.
From childhood bedrooms to billions of daily transactions today, Uniswap proves that decentralized systems can compete with traditional institutions.
