A conversation with Austin Adams about his journey from Uniswap Labs to building token liquidity solutions on Uniswap v4, and his vision for the future of capital formation in DeFi.

First of all, I have to ask: are you Hayden Adams' brother?
Sadly, no.

So how did you get into crypto, without the nepotism?
I was really interested in Ethereum mining around 2016. I thought it was really cool that I could run a thing in my basement that took part in this global network and gave me money. I was involved in the Ethereum mining subreddit and was constantly responding to questions there. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about, but it was great.

From there, I got really into the concept of decentralization and started working at TradFi exchanges and CeFi exchanges briefly and realized that it’s really hard to find market makers for new projects. And that's actually what got me into AMMs.

What was your experience at Uniswap Labs like?
It was a great time. I got to work with some of the smartest people in the industry. My first opportunity to really get into the crypto industry, meeting a bunch of people who were leaders in the field and who showed what it meant to be in crypto and what ideals we should be striving for. I learned a lot really quickly - it was the perfect place to be working to catch up on all things Ethereum and crypto. You could always find someone who had either worked on something, had some strong opinion, or was very versed, which was very cool to learn a lot pretty fast.

I'm probably most proud of custom accounting in Uniswap v4. I'm really glad the vast majority of TVL hooks are on custom accounting pools because of what it enables. I'm also proud of all my papers that have been well-cited by academics. I like the Auction Managed AMM one, and it's cool to see it in production now with Bunni, working as well as we had hoped. It touches upon probably every single facet of market design and mechanism design.

What motivated you to start Whetstone Research?
Uniswap Labs has a lot of incredible talent, and it was sort of time for some of it to diffuse into the community. I really wanted to build something that was on top of the Uniswap Protocol and supported the Uniswap vision, but was outside of Labs.

The Labs team was really supportive of me in starting Whetstone, and it's in line with their vision of having a decentralized community of people building on top of the protocol for the protocol. I want to push that forward in our own way. I’m excited to build things that push forward the values that the whole community has.

Tell me about Pure Markets, your v4 hook Doppler, and what's next for the project:
Pure Markets is the first interface for Doppler token liquidity bootstrapping. We're trying to make it a canonical place to explore these tokens on top of the protocol. The Doppler protocol is designed to be like Uniswap v4 for token launchers.

We're creating standards that are programmable, extensible, and easy to use. They allow people to build businesses through our interface fee split - if you build an interface on Doppler, your team gets fees. A lot of people are building token liquidity bootstrapping things that aren't ideally designed, so we're saying, 'Instead of building your own thing, build on top of this audited community.'

For Pure, we're building a source of truth, a swapping place, and an explore page for all tokens launched on any Doppler platform. Anyone who launches a token anywhere shows up on our interface and they can trade. It's about helping these communities get some love and cold start.

I want builders to know they can build on top of it today and make money today. Crypto enables earlier monetization and smaller teams to build valuable things. Our SDKs and open-source interface are on Whetstone GitHub, where people can start creating these unique tokens that are programmable and customizable.

We're getting more integrators and building customized modules. The v3 version is in production now, but v4 is coming in the next 2-3 weeks and is designed for large-scale projects. We're excited about pushing the bounds of these markets - moving tokens from being only speculative vehicles to actually meaning something or having value behind them. We'll do that by having a sophisticated, well-documented product that anyone can build on top of.

What advice do you have for new builders?
Don't get nerd-sniped. A lot of builders just build cool things that no one cares about because they think it will make the most money, but it doesn’t solve an actual problem. My advice is to try building smaller things, observe what parts of building are difficult for you, and try to improve it for the next person. Maybe it won’t be a hundred million dollar company, but you don't need it to be. You can build something small that makes a little bit of money or helps people you care about, and you can figure out the problems with the industry or where the tip of the market is and how you can improve it.

This is essentially how PhD students work - they write a bunch of papers to figure out what the ecosystem is missing, then they build their thesis at the tip. It makes more sense than just building the first thing you think about, because if it's obvious, someone will have already started building it. Spend some time figuring out what people care about, and then build those things.

Note: The views expressed herein may not reflect the views of the Uniswap Foundation. This interview is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice.