SBF

Chapter 16Uniswap and Decentralized Exchanges

In summer 2017, a certain category of person was getting very excited about cryptocurrency.  A lot of them, who already had some, were excited because they were getting richer without doing anything.

Others believed that the ICO sales at that time would eventually make them even richer than the old bitcoin guys, if they got in soon enough.

However, there was one person who was not at all excited about cryptocurrency. Hayden Adams had been laid off from his job as a mechanical engineer at Siemens, and he wasn't sure what he was going to do. One thing he definitely didn't care about was crypto.

But with a little encouragement from a college friend, Adams would start to learn coding on Ethereum for want of something better to do. Eventually, his attitude would change and he would leap into crypto, a field he knew nothing about before he started learning to engineer it. He would build an extremely basic version of what would eventually become the decentralized exchange, Uniswap.

Next, he would have a small piece of amazing luck: Adams would meet Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's creator. Meeting Vitalik would eventually land Adams a small grant from the Ethereum Foundation to get Uniswap off the ground.

There are only two true mononyms in crypto: Satoshi and Vitalik, but Satoshi is gone. Vitalik remains, and while crypto is full of gurus and cult figures, Vitalik is bigger than any of them. He is now more prophet than guru.

As a decentralized ...