Behind the scenes of Uniswap’s creation: Founder Hayden Adams and his 10 friends

On November 2, 2018, with an anxious mood, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams announced the official launch of Uniswap on Twitter. At that time, he had only 200 followers on Twitter.

For many people, Uniswap at that time was a brand new "species", but for independent developer Hayden Adams, it was the result of his hard work over the past year.

Now, two years have passed, and Uniswap's industry status has been widely recognized by practitioners, and it has grown into a "unicorn" in the DeFi field. Data shows that as of October this year, the cumulative trading volume of the two versions of Uniswap has reached 31 billion US dollars, equivalent to an average daily trading volume of more than 40 million US dollars. Among them, Uniswap set a single-day trading volume record of 995 million US dollars on September 1, surpassing Coinbase.

How did Uniswap develop from 0 to 1? Who provided indelible help to the fledgling Hayden Adams? Why did Vitalik describe Hayden Adams as a "really good person"? The original name was actually Unipeg (a hybrid of Unicorn and Pegasus), but why was it later changed to Uniswap?

The information in this article mainly comes from Hayden Adams’s autobiography. The original text can be found in the link at the end of the article.

The opportunity that changed the trajectory of Hayden Adams' life

—I just got fired :(

—Congratulations, this is the best thing that has ever happened to you!! Mechanical engineering is a dying field. Ethereum is the future, and it’s not too late for you. Your new mission is to write smart contracts!

—Don’t I need to know how to write code?

—In fact, the code is very simple. Few people know how to write smart contracts, Ethereum, PoS, trustless computation, etc. from the beginning.

-All right…

On July 6, 2017, Hayden Adams was fired from his first job as a mechanical engineer at Siemens after graduating from college. Feeling frustrated and lost in life, he sought comfort from his friend Karl Floersch. At the time, Karl was working on Casper FFG at the Ethereum Foundation, and the two had the above conversation.

Karl Floersch

Karl’s persuasion coincided with Hayden Adams’s low period. At that time, Ethereum entered his life for the first time, and “I decided to give it a try.” In the next two months, Hayden Adams learned Ethereum, Solidity, and Javascript.

To expand his skills, he decided to work on a real project. At Karl’s suggestion, he decided to design an automated market maker product, as Vitalik described in a Reddit post four years ago and a blog post in 2017.

From October to November 2018, Hayden Adams built a proof of concept, including a smart contract and a website. At that time, the contract had only one liquidity provider and only allowed exchange transactions of several tokens. Here is what it looked like at first: Click the link for details

This demo version is consistent with its original version. To make it compatible with MetaMask in 2019, Hayden Adams only added one line of code window.ethereum.enable()

“This is the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life. It doesn’t even feel like work.”

After this attempt, Hayden Adams saw the impact of automated market makers on user experience. At that time, EtherDelta was the only decentralized trading platform with traction function, but it felt confusing and the data was not intuitive enough. Hayden Adams felt that his version was better.

EtherDelta.com – October 2017

Pascal Van Hecke

In February 2018, Hayden Adams was unemployed for five months, living off the cryptocurrency he bought earlier that year. At the time, Uniswap was a success by Hayden Adams’ standards, he knew how to write smart contracts, and he was thinking it was time to change careers if there was a suitable Solidity-native development job.

The turning point was a speech Karl gave at Ethereum Devcon 3.

At the time, Karl used Uniswap as an example of crypto economy and open source financial application cases at the event. Pascal Van Hecke, who was attending the conference at the time, found Hayden Adams, who had been closely following the progress of Ethereum's automated market maker. He expressed interest in supporting it and even gave Hayden Adams research funds for next month.

Note: Pascal Van Hecke is a senior technical advisor at mobile payment company Innopay, focusing on the field of digital identity. He has been paying attention to Bitcoin since 2011 and has been interested in Ethereum since 2014. He has publicly introduced smart contracts and identity verification and helped organize Ethereum developer conferences.

The two soon began weekly phone calls to discuss the project progress, and Pascal also proposed some new ideas. More importantly, these communications helped Hayden Adams clarify his thoughts and responsibilities. At that time, Uniswap still had two major problems to be solved, but Hayden Adams had found a solution: simplifying - only providing ETH/ERC20 trading pairs and only providing services to liquidity providers.

Hayden Adams is completely fascinated by the potential of Ethereum

In December 2018, he and Karl went to a conference called NYC Mesh. At the venue, Karl was recognized by a reporter from Coindesk. He did not want to be interviewed and introduced Hayden Adams to the reporter. The latter talked about some opinions and was quoted in an article by the reporter.

At the end of January 2018, after updating the Uniswap contract, Hayden Adams contacted Callil Capuozzo, who had been his good friend from elementary school to high school. The two discussed the project in detail, and Callil offered to help with the front-end business and build a new interface.

Callil Capuozzo

A few weeks later, Hayden Adams contacted his college friend Uciel Vilchis (who later joined the Uniswap team at the suggestion of their mutual friend Karl). At the time, Uciel had just graduated from a programming training camp, and because his friend’s programming skills were so poor, he told Hayden Adams that he should learn how to program.

Uciel Vilchis

By March 2018, the three friends had completed a fully functional demo version of Uniswap.

This demo version is consistent with its original version. To make it compatible with MetaMask in 2019, Hayden Adams only added one line of code window.ethereum.enable()

Meet Vitalik

By April 2018, Hayden Adams had been unemployed for 10 months. The cryptocurrency he depended on for survival had fallen by more than 75%. Despite this, he bought the last flight to Seoul, South Korea. It was the first time in his 24 years that he had left North America, and it was partly a personal trip.

At that time, Hayden Adams tried to attend the meeting without a ticket, but failed. Fortunately, he met Karl who was at the venue with other members of the Ethereum Foundation. Karl introduced him to Vitalik, and the two had discussed Uniswap together before. The conversation at that time was roughly like this:

Karl: This is my friend Hayden, he created Uniswap!

Vitalik: Hi, nice to meet you! Is it open source?

Hayden Adams: Of course!

Vitalik: What’s the URL?

Hayden Adams: https://github.com/haydenadams/uniswap (Vitalik read the entire smart contract on his phone)

Vitalik: Have you considered writing it in Vyper? Also, you should apply for a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.

[Deconomy 2018] Vitalik Buterin 『Ethereum Next 12 Months』

After returning home, Hayden Adams followed Vitalik's advice and rewrote the contract. Later, he met Philip Daian, Dan Robinson (note: now a researcher at Paradigm) and Andy Milenius at a small social gathering. They became good friends and worked together to contribute to the success of Uniswap.

From left to right: Philip Daian, Dan Robinson and Andy Milenius

Two weeks later in May, Hayden Adams flew to Toronto to attend Edcon 2018, where he gave a speech, met friends, and demonstrated Uniswap. Four of Hayden Adams' friends were there and introduced him to more people. Among all the new friends, the one who impressed Hayden Adams the most was Jinglan Wang (note: co-founder and CEO of Optimism PBC), who later provided a lot of advice to Uniswap and "was an excellent consultant."

Jinglan Wang

On the plane back to New York, Hayden Adams and his new acquaintance Dan Robinson worked together to optimize Uniswap. Unexpectedly, during this period of time, the efficiency of Uniswap increased by 30%.

Next, Hayden Adams continued to attend various events and parties during the New York Blockchain Week until he saw an event tweet from Richard Burton, the founder of Ethereum wallet startup Balance. Since it was only 15 minutes away, Hayden Adams decided to go and take a look. After watching the demo, Richard Burton wanted to know how Uniswap worked, and a long conversation ensued.

Richard Burton

This experience also made Hayden Adams realize that if he wanted people to use Uniswap, he needed to make users understand that the biggest challenge of Uniswap was how to get everyone to accept it.

In the following days, Hayden Adams worked in the Balance office during the day, continued to improve the protocol, wrote white papers, participated in activities during business hours, and applied for Ethereum grants. Richard knew that his funds were running out, and generously gave him a grant.

There is a tradition in Balance's office area. There is a two-hour sharing time every Wednesday, where everyone will share the progress of their recent major crypto projects. Hayden Adams participates almost every week, repeatedly explaining Uniswap to different groups of people. He learned how to talk about Uniswap in different occasions and was soon able to explain it to almost everyone. At this time, he also began to try using social media.

Later, Hayden Adams also stayed in Maker's office for a while, where he met many MakerDAO friends including Ashleigh Schapp. In July, Hayden Adams received an email that Uniswap had received funding from the Ethereum Foundation.

Ashleigh Schap

Next, Uniswap's landing speed accelerated. Although Uniswap has not been announced yet, the project is no longer a secret. In September 2018, Hayden Adams was invited to give a speech at ETHIS, an Ethereum industry development summit held in Hong Kong.

At the event, Hayden Adams met Vitalik again. He looked at the final code of Uniswap and found a mistake: Hayden Adams mistakenly spelled "recipient" as "recipeint" about 20 times. Hayden Adams also accidentally participated in an interview with the Ethereum Foundation about ETH 2.0 and became the protagonist of MEME for the first time.

Vitalik at the Ethereum Industry Development Summit ETHIS

After returning to New York, Hayden Adams decided to launch Uniswap on the last day of Devcon 4 in Prague (November 2, 2018), which was also his busiest 5 weeks to date.

About a week before Devcon, Hayden Adams finished the documentation and white paper, and some friends helped Uniswap solve more detailed front-end and code issues. In addition, Hayden Adams also carefully prepared a sweatshirt designed specifically for the Uniswap launch.

Unishirt Design Model

On November 2, 2018, the last day of Devcon 4, Uniswap was deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. Hayden Adams also contacted everyone who might be willing to provide liquidity after Uniswap went online.

Uniswap on the eve of launch

After the official launch, the excited Hayden Adams spent nearly an hour writing and revising the tweet about Uniswap's launch. At that time, his friend Ashleigh happened to pass by and helped confirm the tweet before he pressed the publish button.

No matter how nervous and excited Hayden Adams was about the future at the time, we know that an era ushered in by Uniswap has arrived.

Original link, edited