The concept of a decentralized exchange has been a holy grail in the cryptocurrency space for many years. Many attempts have been made, but most decentralized exchanges suffered from central points of failure, poor user experience and little liquidity.
Launched during Ethereum's DevCon 2018, Uniswap is one of the first fully decentralized exchanges and managed to become the leading DEX very fast. We were joined by Uniswap Founder Hayden Adams to discuss Uniswap's unique model, the different participants in the protocol and the importance of decentralized exchanges for the blockchain space.
Topics covered in this episode:
How Hayden's exploratory project to learn smart contract development took off and became Uniswap
How Uniswap works and its different participants
The advantage of an automated exchange instead of using order books
The role of liquidity providers in Uniswap
Feedback loops that can make Uniswap markets popular or collapse
The challenging economics of liquidity shares
Addressing Arthur Hayes' criticism of decentralized exchanges
Why Uniswap didn't create a tokeneconomic monetization model
Episode links:
Uniswap Exchange Protocol
Uniswap Whitepaper
Uniswap: Getting Started & Documentation
Unisocks Exchange
Distributed 2018: Presentation about Decentralized Exchanges by Arthur Hayes (BitMEX)
Buidl Asia 2019 Conference in Seoul, Korea on July 22-23
HackAtom Seoul on July 19-21
Sponsors:
Azure: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks - http://aka.ms/epicenter
Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/292