Author: Jordan, PANews

 

Uniswap is still the undisputed leader of DEX in the cryptocurrency market. However, as an early investor in the project, Balance.io CEO Ric Burton recently revealed some unknown behind-the-scenes stories of Uniswap's early entrepreneurial process and had a "fight" with Uniswap founder Hayden Adams on Twitter. Ric Burton even took Hayden to court, but Hayden called it all a lie.

PANews compiled the content of both parties as follows:

Ric Burton tweeted a long post saying, "For many years, I have wanted to tell this story publicly, but I couldn't bear to do it because it is full of love and sadness. However, with some changes in my life, I realized one thing: some old stories need to be made public, otherwise I will not be able to continue new adventures."

Let's go back to the spring of 2018 in New York. Summer was coming, but the cryptocurrency industry had entered a cold winter, and the entire market was shrouded in depression. At that time, I was still the CEO of Balance.io, a company that provides interface services on Ethereum. The original intention of founding the company was that we felt that most Dapps were terrible. So, I decided to fund some Dapp developers, providing them with money, time, studios, and love, and invested in projects such as WalletConnect, The Graph, and Uniswap.

At that time, there was a developer who left a very deep impression on me, he was: Hayden Adams. He was in "combat" mode at the time, and every time I saw him, he would talk about Uniswap. It took me a while to figure out this project, and then I was deeply attracted to this project, so I decided to do my best to help him.

Hayden Adams and I were very close at the time, and we were both working on one thing: making Ethereum more magical. In the process of trying to build a startup in an ecosystem without many reliable projects, Hayden Adams and I supported each other, and I also admired his tenacity and focus.

The idea of ​​an automated market maker (AMM) is not new. Many people have explored the concept before. But Hayden Adams had a key insight: the need to incentivize liquidity and focus entirely on ease of use. When Hayden Adams couldn't pay his rent, Balance and I used our limited funds to keep him afloat, allowing him unlimited use of our studio. Vitalik Buterin didn't invest at this stage, and Hayden Adams only had one loyal believer at that time, which was me.

Next, we started working on the swap interface.

In the summer of 2018, we launched Balance Exchange, powered by ShapeShift's API, which was an engineering effort by the entire team. At that time, Balance Exchange worked with people from the entire crypto ecosystem, including Hayden Adams, and we found a great design pattern for exchanging tokens.

However, HaydenAdams was out of money again, so I started thinking about how to help him raise funds and studied all possibilities: from issuing tokens to equity crowdfunding. Finally, Vitalik Buterin realized that Uniswap had great potential, so the Ethereum Foundation participated in the investment.

At this point, I made a mistake that caused me countless sleepless nights: I believed Hayden Adams’ words. He told me that he would let me participate in Uniswap’s next round of financing to “compensate” for the time and money I had invested before. I was very happy at that time, so I introduced him to Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Paradigm, because I felt that Hayden Adams needed Paradigm’s support. They are one of the most sensitive teams in the field of cryptocurrency and care very much about the ecosystem (although Paradigm refused to invest in my company Balance), but I knew Hayden Adams would be a very suitable candidate, so I told him that he could visit Fred Ehrsam and paid for his travel expenses.

So Hayden Adams came to San Francisco and showed Uniswap to Paradigm, and decided to transform the project from a nonprofit organization into a startup, and even hoped to raise a larger round of financing - it can be said that I "gave" him to Paradigm, and this was the second mistake I made.

Dan Robinson is a programmer/lawyer at Paradigm. Here’s a photo of him discussing Uniswap with Hayden Adams and us in New York. You can see we were all very excited.

I was really happy for Hayden Adams, the guy was getting better, he was throwing himself into writing code and working on interface ideas with our team. Uniswap was also making progress, and I considered Hayden Adams one of my closest friends in New York. Honestly, I would have taken a bullet for him. Hayden Adams got along well with my family, my closest friends, and my old friends, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I loved watching him work and supported him in any way I could, and we have many great memories.

I introduced Hayden Adams to as many engineers, designers, and finance people as possible, helping to hire many key people for the early Uniswap team.

But in the next moment, the atmosphere of our relationship completely changed...

In March 2019, my grandmother passed away, so I flew home for the funeral, and I was in deep grief for a few days. But the day before the funeral, the co-founder of Balance asked me to resign as CEO and emailed me. It was an email that came at a very bad time. To this day, that period is still the most painful thing I have experienced in my career. After all, it feels terrible to be asked to leave your own company.

However, Uniswap was doing surprisingly well, and Hayden Adams raised over $1 million. I thought he was going to let me get involved, but it turned out that Paradigm had other ideas - they didn't want a failed founder to appear on Uniswap's list, which of course made perfect sense.

However, there is one thing that makes me unhappy. Hayden Adams never gave me dividends, he took the money himself, never offered to compensate me, and he began to ignore me. However, when the UNI token plan started, the situation began to change again. Hayden Adams realized that he had to repay his debts, so he asked me to sign a gag order and prohibit me from talking about his name in any public occasion. As long as I agreed, he could pay me back before the launch of the UNI token. It can be said that this is one of the most aggressive contracts I have ever seen, so now-I decided to sue him, and the screenshot of the lawsuit document is as follows:

Please forgive me for taking the time to write all these stories. I also want to give the community time to digest this document. You can ask me questions, criticize me, object to any claims, give me constructive feedback, whatever. If you think what I said is completely unreasonable, you can also tell me, because I want to use Uniswap's governance method to resolve this dispute.

Next, let's take a look at Hayden Adams' response:

Ric Burton is one of the many early supporters I met about 8 months after building Uniswap, and I am saddened and disappointed by his recent comments, which are extremely misleading and outright lies. I have been hesitant to respond to Ric Burton because he is currently suing me (in fact, most of his lawsuits have been dismissed), so after thinking twice, I wanted to share some details to set the record straight.

At that time, Ric Burton did get the opportunity to invest in Uniswap, and I sent him a Simple Agreement for Future Equity with a blank amount so that he could fill in the amount he wanted to invest, but he chose not to do so because his company Balance could only maintain operations for about 1 month at the time.

Ric Burton confused time and facts, conflating his rejection of the future equity simple agreement with the funds invested before that. To clarify, he did give me a grant, but it happened in the early stages of Uniswap, but he later rejected the opportunity to invest in Uniswap again. Then, I offered to repay his investment, but was rejected.

Ric Burton’s claim that it was his idea for me to get funding from Paradigm is also false. I knew Dan Robinson before I met Ric Burton, we became friends, and it was Dan Robinson who introduced me to Paradigm. Ric Burton lied when he said his breach of contract claim was going to trial, and that claim was dismissed by the judge - all records are public.

I could go on and on about more lies in Ric Burton's recent tweets, but ultimately decided to cut ties with him because he treats people around him, including my friends and colleagues, very badly. Nonetheless, I appreciate the role Ric Burton played in the history of Uniswap. I'm sure Ric Burton will rant about my response, but I won't respond further.

I'm so grateful for all the support people have given me and now I'm going to get back to work.