A Brief Introduction to Uniswap History
It all started or ended in July 2017, when Hayden Adams, a Mechanical Engineer was fired from Siemens.
Prologue
Cycles close
“Every ending is a beginning. We just don’t know it at the time.” -Mitch Albom
Hayden asked for help from his smart friend, Karl. To raise morale again, he presented the early Ethereum code as a way to Hayden earn money again.
And with this insight into the future, Hayden began to learn programming, which could be used to program money, where the duo believed the gold mine to be.
A brilliant project
To apply his studies on Blockchain, Hayden built a proof of concept on top of a Reddit post. The concept was Automated Market Maker, a kind of automated exchange system that provides liquidity between ETH/ERC20 token pairs for people who wanted to buy and sell these cryptocurrencies. This project was called Uniswap.
V1
Hayden was still unemployed, so he went to Seoul to show his project to Vitalik, and there he recommended writing in Vyper and applying for a prize.
Coming back from the trip motivated by the grant, he rewrote everything in two weeks, wrote the whitepaper, and updated the project documentation.
In July 2018 he won the $50k prize and rushed to launch the project to the world.
So, on November 2, 2018, at Devcon 4 in Prague, Uniswap was launched on Mainnet.
This version came with initial liquidity of $30k distributed among 3 pairs of tokens, enough to make the protocol grow more.
V2
A problem was still there, only ETH/ERC20 exchanges were available. So the second iteration of the Uniswap protocol was launched on May 18, 2020, written on Solidity.
The Great Feature
Now we could break the middle and make peer-to-peer exchanges, without using ETH, a revolution in Blockchain.
The Beauty Feature
For a better experience, they enhanced the usability and the visual design, bringing even a dark mode!
These are other functions that V2 brought:
- Price Oracles
- Flash Swaps
- New Architecture
Token Launch
On September 16, 2020, 1 billion UNI tokens were released to those who believed in the project, below is the allocation:
With this token, the democratization of the protocol came, so anyone with tokens could vote on proposals that would change the course of Uniswap.
V3
As the bullet train doesn’t stop, V3 was launched in March 2021, bringing more innovations to users.
The big innovation of the time was the Concentrated Liquidity, where the user could openly customize the concentration of their capital within a pool.
Making now Uniswap the most efficient AMM protocol ever designed.
Conclusion
With a simple post on Reddit, Hayden was able to see an opportunity to automate tradings, in a much fairer way than any CEX has seen.
He believed and worked hard in his project, until reaching the current version, becoming a world reference in exchanges, a revolution in the history of finance by Uniswap.
