Today, when people want to swap tokens on Ethereum, Uniswap is often the first thing that comes to mind. But its creator, Hayden Adams, wasn’t a programmer before he built Uniswap—he was a mechanical engineer who had just been laid off.

Related token: $UNI Current price: 6.867 (24h -4.07%).

After being laid off:

Hayden Adams’s first job after graduating from college was as a mechanical engineer at Siemens. In July 2017, he was laid off.

His friend Karl Floersch suggested he learn to develop Ethereum smart contracts, telling him that his “new mission was to write smart contracts.” Hayden took the advice and began teaching himself from scratch.

It started with an idea:

The core idea behind Uniswap was inspired by a post by Vitalik introducing automated market makers (AMMs): instead of using an order book, liquidity providers deposit two tokens into a pool, and the exchange price is calculated automatically based on the ratio of the two tokens in the pool.

In 2018, the project received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. On November 2 of that year, Uniswap was deployed to the Ethereum mainnet—the final day of Devcon 4.

How it evolved—and UNI:

Since then, Uniswap has released v2 (2020), v3 (2021), and v4 (2025). v3 introduced “concentrated liquidity,” allowing liquidity providers to choose their own price ranges. v4 introduced “hooks,” which let developers add custom logic at key points in a pool’s operation.

In September 2020, Uniswap issued its governance token, UNI, and airdropped it to addresses that had used the protocol in the past. Each eligible address received at least 400 tokens.

A few things to keep in mind:

Anyone can create a pool for any token on Uniswap, so many tokens share the same name. Always verify the token contract address before trading. In pools with low liquidity, a single large trade can push the execution price far off course, so remember to set a reasonable slippage tolerance.

Before becoming a liquidity provider, make sure you understand impermanent loss: when prices change significantly, the fees you earn may not make up for the loss.

Here’s the practical takeaway:

Uniswap’s story is often used to show that good protocol design can sometimes come from a simple idea. But as a user, understanding the rules and checking addresses matter more than remembering the story. Take the time to understand the rules before you act, and don’t make decisions based on gut feelings.

What would you like to learn about next—DeFi or something else?

This may not be entirely accurate, so use your own judgment.