THE HISTORY OF UNISWAP
The beginning of Hayden Adams.
Feb 24
After being laid off from his job as a mechanical engineer at siemens in 2017 feeling down and directionless Hayden Adams. informed his friend Karl Floersch of his bizarre situation
Guess what! Karl congratulated him for getting sacked from his former job and gave him a perspective that would let him out of that dying field… writing smart contracts
By that time Hayden had no idea on anything concerned with coding.
Until when he decided to accept Ethereum and got into learning its basics i.e., javascript and solidity.
Back to the main story.
UNISWAP V1
On 2nd Nov 2018, Hayden Adams published the first version of uniswap on ethereum mainnet after a culmination of over a year’s worth of work.
At the time of building uniswap V1, EtherDelta was a more decentralized exchange with some traction.
EtherDelta, even popular at that time, was based on an order book model that doesn’t fit well in the first layer of blockchain protocol like ethereum. Beside that, EtherDelta has an intuitive sense that results in poor user experience and lack of liquidity.
While working and optimising smart contracts and preparing a potential main launch, Hayden applied for an ethereum foundation grant that was accepted in July 2018.
The money from the grant allowed for auditing UNISWAP smart contracts by a company called RUNTIME VERIFICATION. The initial audit of the runtime verification resulted in adding extra safety checks and re-working math operations to minimize the rounding error. On top of that, a formal verification is on the way.
Before launching the protocol, Hayden decided to rebuild the user interface for an even better user experience.
The first version of the protocol was launched on the last day of the DEVCON conference with a $30,000 worth of liquidity across three different tokens.
The protocol gained a lot of attention which resulted in initial seed investment that allowed the UNISWAP team to work for the second version of the protocol.
UNISWAP V2
In May 2020, UNISWAP launched a second version of the protocol called UNISWAP V2.
The main feature is the addition of the ERC20-ERC20 liquidity pool. Before V2, each liquidity pool should consist of ETH as one of the currencies.
V2 also had other features including on-chain price feeds and flash swaps. An interesting fact is that all V2 smart contracts were written in solidity. This can be compared to V1 in that all its smart contracts are written in vyper.
Due to its decentralized and permissionless nature, the first version of the protocol was still actively used alongside V2 for some time, regardless of the Uniswap team encouraging liquidity providers to migrate their liquidity to V2. This also shows the true power of unstoppable code.
In August 2020 the Uniswap team raised $11M in series A from a few notable VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, USV, Paradigm.
The funds were used to grow the team and build UNISWAP V3 which will dramatically increase the flexibility and capital efficiency of the protocol
