"Fortune" talks to the founder of Uniswap: What's the next step after raising $165 million?
Original title: "Uniswap's 165M funding round a bright spot for DeFi in Crypto Winter"
Original author: Jeff John Roberts, Fortune
Original compilation: Katie Koo, Odaily Planet Daily
On October 13, Uniswap Labs announced that it had received US$165 million in Series B financing, led by Polychain Capital, with a valuation of US$1.66 billion. The round also includes previous investors a16z, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant. The investment is one of the largest ever in DeFi. This is a powerful affirmation for the industry against the backdrop of a deep recession in which the crypto industry will be in for much of 2022.
Uniswap is a decentralized trading platform based on smart contracts and the leader of the DEX track. Users can deposit Token into the liquidity pool and get rewards.
Self-taught programmer Hayden Adams created and launched Uniswap in 2018. He sees this funding round and Uniswap’s popularity as validation for a decentralized project that is run almost entirely by autonomous code.
Adams said, "For us, the industry has started to prove itself and we see the value in it, Especially in this bear market, many centralized infrastructures have failed, and many decentralized entities have gained the upper hand." This year, Celsius and Voyager encountered "Waterloo", while Maker DAO and Uniswap were safe Over a downturn.
Adams said in the interview: “Uniswap Labs is not yet profitable, but the company intends to use the B round of financing to expand product supply, and achieve financial sustainability in the next few years; including building an NFT aggregator that will unlock new interactions between Token and NFT.”
Adams replied: "Uniswap Labs is focused on developing services that make Web3 more accessible to non-technical people. This challenge is like the early days of the Internet, such as basic navigation tools at the time. It's clumsy. NFT, Token The DeFi and DeFi worlds are seen today as two separate ecosystems, but the current crypto space is poised to evolve this into a more unified experience. "
Vision of Uniswap
Discussing decentralization Referring to his greatest influence, Vitalik Buterin, Adams praised the way ethereum's inventors evolved the protocol while allowing others on ethereum to play a leading role — an example Adams said he tried to emulate.
He said: "While my role in the Uniswap ecosystem is important, it is less important than ever. If I resign, Uniswap will continue to operate." (This sentence should be in response to the recent resignation of a large number of core figures of the Web3 project.)
Adams also said, Decentralization may be the key to reducing the number of "catastrophic" hacks that have caused severe financial and reputational damage to the crypto industry, especially DeFi. He noted that the worst hacks target centralized entities or cross-chain bridges (used to transfer data between different blockchains). Token), in Adams’ view, this is also a kind of centralization.
The answer, he suggests, is to build more decentralized services along the lines of Bitcoin, relying on sound code and peer-to-peer Rigorous auditing of the code to protect encrypted projects. He proudly pointed out that Uniswap’s smart contracts can also serve as an example. He said: "Of the $1.2 trillion that has been traded, there have been no serious hacks on Uniswap. Uniswap has been running for a few years. If there was a bug, it should have been discovered by now."
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Adams' vision for Uniswap and other decentralized services to play a bigger role in the financial sector is unknown. While Uniswap is the largest decentralized crypto trading platform, accounting for more than half of the total trading volume, and at the peak of the recent bull market, its total user base was between 3 million and 4 million, which is a healthy number, but Still relatively small compared to trading platforms like Coinbase or Binance, and insignificant compared to traditional brokers and other TradFi entities.
At the same time, the company is dealing with an ongoing investigation by the SEC and, like others in the cryptocurrency industry, is also Efforts are being made to define regulatory rules. A spokesperson for Uniswap Labs said: “The company is committed to complying with the laws and regulations of the crypto industry.”
For now, Adams says his main focus is continuing to challenge the so-called Web2 business model, typified by companies like Facebook and Google, based on taking massive amounts of customer data and selling their attention to Advertisers.
He believes that Web2 is about the competition to control users, while Web3 has the opportunity to compete by empowering users. Compete not by owning but by winning their business.
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