Uniswap创始人Hayden：相关性交易对将推动AMM进入全球金融市场

Odaily Planet Daily News: Uniswap Founder Hayden posted on the X platform, stating that correlated trading pairs are emerging. The top five tokenized SPY trading pairs by volume are "bridge" pairs connecting to other common base pairs, which then primarily connect to highly correlated tokenized stocks. This type of market is global, programmable, low-cost, and operates 24/7.

Uniswap Founder Hayden posted on the X platform, stating:.

I have been working at the forefront of DeFi for 9 years. It is a fascinating field with infinite depth and the ability to transform capital markets.

I have always believed in the immense potential of AMMs, but over the past decade, one question has persisted: Can this novel market structure truly become the core engine for all financial markets?

After years of evolution and development, the path for AMMs to achieve global dominance is becoming increasingly clear. Explaining this requires starting from 1976.

Tokenization changes market makers.

Index funds celebrate their 50th anniversary this month. When Jack Bogle launched the index fund in 1976, he hoped to raise $150 million but ultimately raised only $11.3 million. Competitors called it "Bogle's Folly," posting posters claiming index funds were un-American. They believed a fund that made no decisions could not possibly beat the professionals who were paid to make them. Today, the majority of U.S. fund assets are allocated to passive investment vehicles.

I have been thinking about this lately because the tokenization "folly moment" is ending. The SEC has approved tokenized stocks for trading on Nasdaq and the NYSE. DTCC, which handles nearly all U.S. securities settlement, also conducted live pilot tests of tokenized trades in July. Almost all related activities are described in the same way: viewing tokenization as an infrastructure upgrade.

The same market, faster, cheaper, and always open. These statements are all true, but I believe the infrastructure upgrade framework obscures a larger change. Tokenization makes markets programmable, altering their form, their market makers, and what is traded within them.

In 2018, I created Uniswap, an automated market-making protocol. Anyone can deposit two assets into a shared liquidity pool and earn fees from every trade, while prices adjust along a curve as users buy and sell. Uniswap has operated autonomously since its launch, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $4.6 trillion, and has driven the share of spot trading volume on decentralized exchanges from under 1% to over 20%.

As AMMs like Uniswap continue to evolve, their liquidity has formed a pattern that most financial markets have yet to notice: correlated trading pairs.

The easiest area to find initial success.

To succeed everywhere, one must first succeed somewhere. AMMs found product-market fit in the long-tail market because most assets previously couldn't attract professional market makers at all. On Uniswap, anyone can create a market with a single transaction, and issuers and early supporters can become the first liquidity providers.

Then came stablecoin pairs. Take USDC/USDT, for example; a good passive strategy can approach optimal levels, with low capital costs sufficient to cover the gap. This is why professional trading firms no longer participate in market-making for these stablecoin swaps—because passive AMMs are cheaper.

High profits and a lack of competition.

Traditional financial markets are completely dominated by market-making firms. These firms integrate capital, trading strategies, execution technology, settlement, and distribution into a vertically integrated business. This structure exists for good reason: assets reside in separate, siloed systems, settlement is slow, and every function needs to be performed by someone, so one institution ends up shouldering them all.

At a large enough scale, all fixed costs are covered. Citadel Securities handles about 25% of U.S. stock trading volume and generated a record $12.2 billion in net trading revenue last year on roughly $21 billion in trading capital.

Most people see these numbers as proof that the system works; I see them as a sign of market entrenchment.

Unbundling the business.

Blockchain introduces competition at every layer, splitting apart previously bundled operations. Trade execution is handled by code, and custody and settlement become shared services that anyone can plug into. What once required proprietary infrastructure is now open-source software.

In AMMs, capital is the scarce input, and the advantage goes to those who can hold inventory at the lowest cost. Trading firms require high returns to cover their operating overhead, so liquidity providers willing to accept lower returns gain a competitive edge. Most market makers hedge all of their price exposure, and hedging costs money. Therefore, investors who already hold the related asset can take on that exposure for free. Asset issuers even have a negative cost of capital, as they typically pay professional market makers to provide liquidity for their new assets.

In short, DeFi and AMMs have lowered the barriers to market-making, opening the market to more participants. Their advantage can come from various sources: lower capital costs, a willingness to hold inventory exposure that professional firms typically hedge away, or even directly from the asset issuers themselves.

But all of this hinges on one question: Can automated strategies perform well enough to sustain this system?

Liquidity follows correlation.

Not long ago, I was on a call with one of the largest institutions in finance. They asked what the most common base pairs in DeFi were. I explained that Ethereum-based assets typically trade against ETH, Solana ecosystem assets usually trade against SOL, and stablecoins pair with each other, with only a handful of highly liquid pairs acting as bridges between these clusters.

This pattern wasn't designed by anyone; it emerged naturally, partly because liquidity providers perform better when the assets they hold move in the same direction. Correlation means lower inventory risk for LPs, allowing them to deepen liquidity. As assets become tokenized, the world's largest markets will reorganize in the same way.

Traditional markets currently cannot do this. Out of necessity, settlement in traditional markets is overwhelmingly conducted in USD. Assets exist in isolated systems, and fiat rails like SWIFT and Fedwire act as the glue holding the whole system together. But blockchain is a more expressive form of glue. Once assets are tokenized, they can share the same settlement layer, allowing any asset to trade directly against any other.

NVDA/USD can become NVDA/SPY, with SPY/USD as the bridge to the dollar. Oil companies can trade against oil ETFs or tokenized crude. Private credit can trade against tokenized Treasury funds. Tokenization also enables markets that span different asset classes, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for traditional financial infrastructure.

Delta neutrality is an inefficient approach.

Traditional market-making firms typically attempt to be "delta neutral." This is trader-speak for pricing in USD and minimizing non-dollar risk. When market-making volatile assets, they usually pay for options to reduce non-dollar exposure—i.e., hedging. This is one of the most expensive parts of traditional market-making.

Grouping assets into low-volatility "correlated pairs" connected by a few highly volatile "bridge" pairs generates several efficiency gains. Most importantly, if market makers genuinely want to hold the correlated underlying assets, market-making becomes cheaper and more efficient.

The higher the correlation between pairs, the smaller the gap between passive AMM strategies and the most sophisticated active strategies—making it easier to compete with active strategies purely on lower inventory costs.

Specifically, if someone is long NVIDIA, they are very likely also long SPY. The efficiency gap between a passive AMM strategy and an active strategy is far smaller for NVDA/SPY than for NVDA/USD.

Connected liquidity.

If stocks trade against SPY, then all trades that begin or end in dollars will route through the same pair: SPY/USD. These bridge pairs will still require significant expertise, but there will be far fewer of them, and they will carry enough trading flow to justify professional firms allocating resources.

DeFi has already proven this. ETH/USDC is one of the deepest on-chain liquidity markets because every cluster routes through it. Passive LPs provide liquidity for correlated pairs, while active LPs compete around bridge pairs.

Investors can still buy and sell all assets using dollars because trades automatically route through multiple pools. Liquidity will concentrate where risk is lowest, not where it is forced to remain due to legacy infrastructure constraints. This will push the deepest markets toward correlated pairs—precisely the area where AMMs already have an edge.

Correlated RWA pairs already exist.

On-chain correlated liquidity initially came from crypto-native assets. But the first correlated markets for tokenized stocks have already appeared: 10 tokenized stocks are trading against SPY in Uniswap pools on Robinhood Chain.

In the first 12 days, these pools generated $33 million in volume from over 11,000 unique traders, with a significant portion occurring while U.S. equity markets were closed. Some trades directly swapped one stock for another without ever passing through the dollar.

Notably, we're also beginning to see memecoins paired with "related" stocks—like Elon-themed memecoins paired with Tesla, or hot-dog-themed memecoins paired with Costco. It's unclear how much they truly correlate in price, but I suppose "vibe" can count as another form of correlation.

AMMs will succeed.

Correlated trading pairs are only part of the story; the other part is AMM design and customization.

Uniswap v4 Hooks enable full market customization, significantly boosting returns for liquidity providers. For example, our recently released DualPool Hook puts passive AMM capital to work earning lending yields when it's not being used for swaps.

Even though Uniswap's volume has reached roughly $4.6 trillion, I believe AMMs are still in their early stages, with many paths ahead to enhance their competitiveness. Many initiatives are being built inside Labs, by partners, and by other ecosystem participants to improve LP returns. More is on the way.

In 1976, the argument against index funds was that a fund making no decisions couldn't beat the professionals who were paid to make them. Fifty years later, funds that make no decisions have beaten roughly 90% of professionals. More importantly, index funds democratized investing and improved the lives of ordinary people. I believe passive liquidity will follow a similar path to success—and have an even greater impact by dramatically lowering the barriers to creating and participating in markets.