A (very) Brief History Of Uniswap 🦄
A mechanical engineer with no prior knowledge of coding get’s fired from his first job and goes on to create one of the most revolutionary decentralized exchanges (DEX) in the history of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
From such humble beginnings to a $4 billion market cap in 2022, and a daily trade volume of approx $150 million. I present to you – The story of Uniswap.
But what exactly is Uniswap?🦄
Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange based on a decentralized network protocol that allows users to exchange different Ethereum ERC-20 tokens directly without having to rely on a middleman.
Now that we know what Uniswap is, let’s go ahead and dive a little deeper into the story on Uniswap, Where did the idea come from and who built it?
The genesis of Uniswap as we know it🦄
It all started when Alan Lu, a programmer at Gnosis at the time, came up with the idea of market makers on Ethereum (x*y=k)
Building a decentralized exchange on Ethereum
The story of Uniswap started when this idea caught the eye of Vitalik Buterin, he realized its potential and took the idea public and started posting about it on his blog and Reddit.
Let’s run on-chain decentralized exchanges the way we run prediction markets
9 months after Vitalik puts out the Reddit post, a mechanical engineer at Siemens loses his job, though these two events were not connected at the time, but hey, you can only connect the dots backwards.
His name was Hayden Adams. Hayden wasn’t happy about losing his job, who would be? But little did he know that everything is gonna work out for him better than he could have ever imagined. Feeling directionless, Hayden broke the news to his friend Karl Floersch.
This is when Karl introduced Ethereum and smart contracts into Hayden’s life. And since Hayden recently lost his job and was at a very low point in life, he decided to give it a shot.
Hayden spent the next few months learning about the basis of Ethereum, Solidity, and JavaScript. But just learning about it wasn’t enough and Hayden knew it so he decided to implement an automated market maker that Vitalik had been talking about in his Reddit and blog posts. Do you see the dots connecting?
After 3 months of hard work, Hayden built a proof-of-concept, including a smart contract and the very first website of the project. You can find it here. On 2 November 2018- the final day of Devcon 4, the first version of Uniswap was published on the Ethereum mainnet.
Fun fact: Hayden originally called it unipeg, when Vitalik first heard about it he said “Unipeg? it sounds more like a Uniswap”.
✨And that is how Uniswap was born.✨🦄
Hayden also announced the launch to his ~200 Twitter followers at the time.
1/🦄 Excited to announce the launch of @UniswapExchange ! It's a protocol for automated exchange of ERC20 tokens on Ethereum. https://t.co/czTqyRit7u
— hayden.eth 🦄 (@haydenzadams) November 2, 2018
From the first launch in Devcon 4 to one of the biggest decentralized exchanges in the world, Uniswap has come a long way, and we can only wish for it to grow further. If you have made it to the end, here’s a random meme I found funny-
Thank you for reading!