$UNI
🔥 A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNISWAP 🔥
Uniswap is the largest decentralised exchange protocol operating on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by Hayden Adams who, prior to the platform's deployment, had little to no coding or financial experience. Adams was introduced to his future project, an automated market maker (AMM), in 2017, after his friend and Ethereum Foundation employee Karl Floersch sent him a Reddit post that Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin wrote in 2016.
Adams would spend the next year attending crypto conferences and coding Uniswap while unemployed. In July 2018, he was granted US$50,000 in funding from the Ethereum Foundation, which led to the first version of Uniswap being published on the Ethereum mainnet in November 2018. By July 2020, the exchange had completed over $1 billion in transactions, and by April 2021, it recorded more than $10 billion in weekly transaction volume for the first time.
In an effort to prevent users from defecting to rival DEX SushiSwap, Uniswap launched its governance token UNI in September 2020. A total of 1 billion UNI tokens were minted at launch, with 60% to be distributed to community members and the rest to team members, investors, and advisors.