Dialogue with the founder of Uniswap: What's the next step after raising $165 million?

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, the original author: JEFF JOHN ROBERTS, compiled by Odaily translator Katie Koo.October 13,Uniswap Labs announced that it has received $165 million in Series B financing, led by Polychain Capital, with a valuation of $1.66 billion. The round also includes previous investors a16z, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant.

The investment is one of the largest ever in DeFi. With the crypto industry in deep recession for most of 2022, this is a powerful affirmation for the industry.

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange based on smart contracts and the leader of the DEX track. Users can deposit tokens into liquidity pools to earn rewards.

Self-taught programmer Hayden Adams created and launched Uniswap in 2018. He sees this funding round and Uniswap's popularity as validation for decentralized projects that run almost entirely on autonomous code.

“For us, the industry has started to prove itself and we see the value in it, especially in this bear market where a lot of centralized infrastructure has failed and a lot of decentralized entities have prevailed,” Adams said. This year, Celsius and Voyager encountered "Waterloo", while Maker DAO and Uniswap survived the downturn.

Adams replied: "Uniswap Labs is focused on developing services that make Web3 more accessible to non-technical people. This challenge is like the early days of the Internet, such as when basic navigation tools were often clumsy. NFTs, tokens and the DeFi world today seen as two separate ecosystems, but the current crypto space is poised to evolve this into a more unified experience.”

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Uniswap Vision

In discussing the virtues of decentralization, Adams referred to his greatest influence, Vitalik Buterin, praising the way Ethereum’s inventors evolved the protocol while allowing others on Ethereum to take the lead — something Adams said he tried to Mimic this example.He said: “While my role in the Uniswap ecosystem is important, it is much less important than ever.If I resign, Uniswap will continue to operate.

"(This sentence should be in response to the recent resignation of a large number of core figures of the Web3 project.)

Adams also said that decentralization could be the key to reducing the number of "catastrophic" hacks that have caused severe financial and reputational damage to the crypto industry, especially DeFi. He pointed out that the worst hacks target centralized entities or cross-chain bridges (used to transfer tokens between different blockchains), which in Adams’ view is also a kind of centralization.

The response, he suggested, is to build more decentralized services along the lines of Bitcoin and rely on sound code and strict audits of that code to protect crypto projects. He proudly pointed out that Uniswap’s smart contracts can also serve as an example. He said: "Out of the $1.2 trillion that has been traded, there has been no serious hack on Uniswap. Uniswap has been running for a few years. If there is a bug, it should have been discovered by now."

Whether Adams' vision of Uniswap and other decentralized services playing a bigger role in the financial space will come to fruition is unknown. While Uniswap is the largest decentralized crypto exchange, accounting for more than half of total trading volume, and had a healthy total user base of between 3 and 4 million at the peak of the recent bull run, Still relatively small compared to exchanges like Coinbase or Binance, and insignificant compared to traditional brokers and other TradFi entities.

At the same time, the company is dealing with an ongoing investigation by the SEC and, like others in the cryptocurrency industry, is also trying to determine the rules of regulation. A spokesperson for Uniswap Labs said: “The company is committed to complying with the laws and regulations of the crypto industry.”

For now, Adams said his main focus is continuing to challenge the so-called Web2 business model, typified by companies like Facebook and Google, based on taking massive amounts of data on customers and selling their attention to advertisers.he thinks