Behind the founding of Uniswap: Hayden Adams and 10 of his friends

In a fretting mood, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams announced the official launch of Uniswap on Twitter on November 2, 2018. At the time, his Twitter feed had only 200 followers.

To many, Uniswap was a new "species," but to Hayden Adams, an indie developer, it was the result of more than a year of work.

  Hayden Adams   

Now, two years later, Uniswap is widely recognized as an industry player and has grown into a unicorn of DeFi. As of October, volumes of both versions of Uniswap had reached $31 billion, equivalent to an average daily turnover of more than $40 million, with Uniswap topping Coinbase's one-day record of $995 million on Sept. 1, according to data.

Uniswap 是如何从 0 到 1 发展至今的？哪些人给初出茅庐的 Hayden Adams 带去了不可磨灭的帮助？为什么 Vitalik 还评价 Hayden Adams 是一个「真正的好人」？最初名字其实是 Unipeg（ 独角兽和飞马的混合体），后来因为什么原因改成了 Uniswap？

The information in this article is mainly from Hayden Adams' own narration. See the link at the end of the article for the original article.

The moment that changed the course of Hayden Adams's life

I just got fired :(

-- Congratulations, this is the best thing that 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 code?

-No, the code is simple. Few people start out learning how to write smart contracts, ethereum, PoS, trustless computation, and so on.

- well...

On July 6, 2017, Hayden Adams was fired from his first job as a mechanical engineer at Siemens after graduating from college. Frustrated and disoriented, he turns to his friend Karl Floersch for comfort. Karl is studying Casper FFG at the Ethereum Foundation, and the conversation takes place.

Karl Floersch   

Karl's persuasion came at a low point for Hayden Adams, when Ethereum first entered his life and "I decided to give it a try." Over the next two months, Hayden Adams learned Ethereum, Solidy, and Javascript.

To expand his skills, he decided to do a real project. At Karl's suggestion, he decided to design an automated marketmaker's product, as Vitalik had done four years earlierThis is a Reddit postAnd in 2017Blog postsAs described in.

In October and November 2018, Hayden Adams set up a proof-of-concept that included a smart contract and a web site, where the contract had a single liquidity provider and allowed only a few token exchanges. Here's what it originally looked like: to see more, clicklink

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

"It's the most fun thing I've ever done in my life. It's not even like work."

Through this trial, Hayden Adams sees the impact of automated marketmakers on the user experience. At the time, EtherDelta was the only traction platform for decentralized trading, but it was confusing, the data wasn't intuitive, and Hayden Adams felt like she had a better version.

EtherDelta.com - in October 2017

Lord Pascal Van Hecke

In February 2018, Hayden Adams lost his job for five months and lived off the cryptocurrency he bought earlier that year. At that time, Uniswap was successful by Hayden Adams' standards, knew how to write an intelligent contract, and thought it would be time to switch jobs if there was something right for the development of Solaria-Native.

The twist is a talk Karl gives at Devcon 3 in Ethereum.

Karl was at the event using Uniswap as a case study in cryptography economics and open source finance, when Pascal Van Hecke, who was there, approached Hayden Adams, who has been closely following the progress of eetham's automated market-maker, and expressed interest in supporting it, even offering Hayden Adams a research grant next month.

Pascal Van Hecke is a senior technology consultant at Innopay, a mobile payments company focused on digital identity. He has been interested in Bitcoin since 2011 and ethereum since 2014. He introduced smart contracts and authentication publicly and helped organize ethereum developer conferences

The two soon began talking on the phone weekly about the project's progress, with Pascal coming up with some new ideas. More importantly, the communication gave Hayden Adams a clear sense of responsibility for moving forward. At the time, Uniswap had two big problems to solve, but Hayden Adams had found a solution: simplify -- offering ETH/ERC20 trading pairs only and liquidity providers only.

Hayden Adams is completely captivated by ethereum's potential

In December 2018, he and Karl traveled to a conference called NYC Mesh, where Karl was recognized by Coindesk reporters who didn't want to be interviewed and introduced Hayden Adams, who made some points and was quoted in an articleThe articleIn the.

By the end of January 2018, Hayden Adams had reached out to Callil Capuozzo, who was his best friend from elementary school through high school, after renewing his Uniswap contract. 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 reconnected with a college friend & NBSP; Uciel Vilchis(he later joined the Uniswap team at the suggestion of their mutual friend Karl). At the time, Uciel had just come out of a programming boot camp and told Hayden Adams, "You should learn how to program," because his friend's programming skills were so bad.

Uciel Vilchis

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

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

Meet Vitalik

By April 2018, Hayden Adams had been out of work for 10 months. The cryptocurrency on which he lives has fallen by more than 75 percent. Nevertheless, he booked the last flight to Seoul, South Korea. It was the first time in 24 years that he had left North America, and it was something of a personal trip.

Hayden Adams attempts to attend the conference without a ticket, but is lucky to meet Karl, who arrives with the rest of the Ethereum Foundation. Karl introduces Him to Vitalik, and the two have discussed Uniswap before. The conversation went something like this:

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

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

Hayden Adams: Of course!

Vitalik: What's the website?

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

Vitalik: Have you considered writing in Vyper? In addition, you should apply for ethereum Foundation funding.

[Deconomy 2018] Vitalik Buterin "Ethereum Next 12 Months"

回国后，Hayden Adams 听从 Vitalik 的建议重新编写了合约。后来，他在一个小型社交聚会上碰到了 Philip Daian、 Dan Robinson（律动注：现为 Paradigm 研究员）和 Andy Milenius，他们成了好朋友，并一起为 Uniswap 的成功添砖加瓦。

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

Two weeks later, in May, Hayden Adams flew to Toronto for Edcon 2018, where he spoke, met friends and showed off Uniswap. Four of Hayden Adams's friends were there and introduced him to many more. Of all the new friends, Hayden Adams was impressed by Jinglan Wang (co-founder and CEO of Optimistic PBC), who has since offered a lot of advice to Uniswap and "is an excellent consultant".

Jinglan Wang

On the plane back to New York, Hayden Adams and his new friend Dan Robinson work together to optimize Uniswap, and in that time alone, Uniswap is 30% more efficient.

Hayden Adams went on to attend various events and parties during Blockchain Week in New York, until he saw an event tweet from Balance founder of ethereum wallet startup Richard Burton. With only 15 minutes to go, Hayden Adams decided to check it out. After watching the Demo, Richard Burton wants to know how Uniswap works, and a long conversation ensued.

Richard Burton

This experience also taught Hayden Adams that if he wants people to use Uniswap, he needs to make them understand that Uniswap's biggest challenge is getting people to accept it.

In the days that followed, Hayden Adams worked in the Balance office during the day, working on protocols, writing white papers, attending events during business hours, and applying for Ethereum's Grant. Richard knew he was running out of money, so he gave him a generous grant.

The Balance of the office, there is a traditional three share time there will be two hours, we will share the recent major encrypt the progress of the project, and Hayden Adams in nearly every week, to the different people explain Uniswap repeatedly, he learned how to talk about Uniswap in different occasions, and will soon be able to explain to almost all of it, this time he began to try to use social media.

Later, Hayden Adams spent time with Maker's office, where he met a group that included Ashleigh Schapp ; Including many MakerDAO friends. In July, Hayden Adams received an email that Uniswap was being funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

Ashleigh Schap

Next, Uniswap lands faster. Although Uniswap has not been made public, the project is no longer a secret. In September 2018, Hayden Adams was invited to speak at ETHIS, an Ethereum industry Development Summit held in Hong Kong.

At the activity, Hayden Adams met Vitalik again. He looked at the final code of Uniswap, and found a mistake: Hayden Adams misspelled "recipeint", about 20 times. Hayden Adams also stumbled into a MEME by way of an interview with the Ethereum Foundation about ETH 2.0.

Vitalik at ethereum Industry Development Summit ETHIS

Back in New York, Hayden Adams decided to launch Uniswap on the final day of Devcon 4 in Prague on November 2, 2018, his busiest five weeks to date.

About a week before Devcon, Hayden Adams finished the documentation and white papers, and some friends helped Uniswap with more detailed front-end and code issues. Hayden Adams also has a hoodie designed for the release of Uniswap.

Unishirt design model

On November 2, 2018, the last day of Devcon 4, Uniswap was deployed to ethereum's main network. Hayden Adams also reached out to anyone who might be willing to provide liquidity once Uniswap goes live.

The eve of Uniswap's launch

After the official launch, an excited Hayden Adams spent nearly an hour writing and changing Uniswap's tweet before pressing the post button after a friend Ashleigh walked by to help confirm the tweet.

No matter how nervous and excited Hayden Adams was about the future, we knew it was time for an era pioneered by Uniswap.

The original link, have cut

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