Uniswap is a decentralized exchange built in the Ethereum chain, is well-known as being the most popular decentralized exchange achieving an exorbitant level of traded volume month after month. Few anticipated it could move as much money as it does today considering it was launched at the end of 2018.
Hayden Adams is the developer of the Uniswap, the story of how he created the most famous DEXs is certainly incredible, how a cumulus of coincidences made Uniswap possible. Of course, if it wasn’t for him and his project right now the crypto space and especially Defi would be completely different and probably less developed.
In mid 2017 Hayden got fired from his job, his friend Karl Floersch informed him about this new revolutionary blockchain technology, little did he know how this would change his life and how game-changing his protocol would be for the crypto space. It was at this moment that Hayden went down the Web3 rabbit hole.
By April 2018, Hayden Adams decided to buy a last-minute flight ticket to Seoul to attend Deconomy 2018, he knew that there he could get in contact with the best blockchain developers and most influential people of the crypto space to develop and improve his protocol. He tried to enter the event without a ticket and got rejected, luckily Karl Floersch, who was going to participate in the event, managed to let him in. There he met Vitalik and other developers who were impressed with his project and provided Hayden feedback to improve the project.
The launch of Uniswap was a real revolution in the crypto ecosystem, there was no longer a central authority that ensured that both parties carried out the exchange correctly, instead, there was a smart contract that guaranteed that if the two parties performed the agreed exchange, the smart contract will be executed and the exchange will take place. He first implemented the automated market maker, being the backbone of modern DEXs and a key component of DeFi.
How automated market maker works. Source: cryptorobin.com
In May 2020 Uniswap v2 was released which resulted in a noticeable improvement of the protocol. Price oracle was introduced, protecting traders from high price spikes, also transition to Solidity smart contracts was introduced to optimize execution among many other implementations.
A few months later, the airdrop was distributed to the users that had interacted with the protocol, creating a governance token for further decentralization. This expanded the community enormously and empowered them, giving direct influence on which direction to approach the project.
Right now, Uniswap is currently in v3 with significant improvements and integrations with regard to version 2, the most outstanding being perhaps the integration of Layer2 chains. With endless possibilities for expansion and an emerging and revolutionary sector such as cryptocurrencies, the road to future updates of Uniswap is exciting, the team is working taking full account of the feedback and demands of the community so we can only expect positive changes.