Hayden Adams on Uniswap's Announcement?! | State of the Nation

Just in time for NFT NYC, Hayden Adams comes to Bankless to reveal some secret announcement! ------ 📣 NOTIONAL | Real DeFi Yield https://bankless.cc/Notional ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ROCKET POOL | DECENTRALIZED ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 5:15 Feelings Check-In 11:30 Uniswap Labs vs. Uniswap Protocol 23:47 Huge Uniswap Announcement 31:34 NFTs & Uniswap 36:15 Uniswap Airdrop?! 41:06 Is Genie Pivoting? 43:54 The Future of Uniswap Labs 50:18 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Hayden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/haydenzadams Announcement: https://uniswap.org/blog/genie ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:24David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to this edition of State of the Nation. Today, I'm without my fearless partner, Ryan. He is gone on vacation. The AI is powered down. Yet, like all episodes on Bankless, we persist nonetheless. Today on the show, we're bringing on Hayden Adams, because he's going to be the second time he's ever been on Bankless, and the first time that we've ever done a livestream with him. And Uniswap just announced something. If you go search the interwebs, that announcement just came out. They announced something, and it does indeed include the weird airdrop, but no, it is not the uni token. So we're going to go into all those details. It is no, here's a small hint, there's no coincidence that's happening during the week of NFT NYC. So we're going to talk about everything that's going on over on the Uniswap Lab side of things.

• 1:07David Hoffman?

  And also, I just want to pick his brain as an OG DeFi founder that built something really, really cool in the 2019, 2020 bear market that exploded in 2021. I want to pick his brain about how he's feeling in the world of crypto at this present moment and what he's thinking about. But of course, we're going to dive down the rabbit hole of what the hell is up with, what's going on over there at Uniswap Labs and what they're up to over there, because they're doing something cool. It might change, might surprise a few of the listeners who are tapping into this livestream right now. And thank you for all the listeners who are tapping into the livestream. Make sure to like and subscribe, because that is how you get notified of all the alpha and watch all the cool stuff that's going on around the Bankless Nation and around the crypto universe. This, of course, is the State of the Nation. It comes at you every Tuesday, where we cover the news and weekly events and news cycle

• 1:51David Hoffman?

  events that go on in this crazy world that we call crypto. And before I ask myself what the state of the nation is, because Ryan's not here to ask it for me, we got to talk about one of our friends and sponsors, Notional, because if you are feeling frustrated by the chaos of the crypto markets, perhaps a fixed APY

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  DeFi money market, DeFi, the thing that didn't break in the last two weeks or so, where everything centralized broke, DeFi did not. And you can go to notional, banklist.cc slash notional with a capital N to borrow or lend and get a fixed rate APY. So whether you wanted to borrow Ether or lend Ether or borrow USDC or lend USDC, Notional will give you a fixed rate that you can count on with the auditability and transparency and dependability of DeFi, unlike all of its C-Fi counterparts that collapsed in the last two weeks or so. Guys, I gotta ask myself, what is the state of the nation? Because the state of the nation is we are back on the frontier. Uniswap, the beloved DeFi app, Uniswap Labs, going in a slightly different direction

• 2:55David Hoffman?

  this week in the world of DeFi and getting into something perhaps a little bit unexpected. And you guys probably have hinted, gotten the hint that since it's going on during NFT NYC, it might be something NFT based. And so we are back on the frontier. We are in the bear market, we are in the build market, and people are expanding their products and expanding their horizons into new frontiers. And so, David, what is the state of the nation? And the state of the nation is we are back on the frontier. So guys, I'm gonna go get Hayden Adams, we're gonna bring him live right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Rocketpool is your friendly decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH with Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time.

• 3:38David Hoffman?

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• 4:21David Hoffman?

  Aave V3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of DeFi, including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types. And also efficiency mode, which allows for higher loan-to-value ratios. And of course, portals, allowing users to port their Aave position across all of the networks that Aave operates on, like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Harmony. The beautiful thing about Aave is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto-collateralized loan, get started at Aave.com. That's A-A-V-E dot com. And also check out the Aave Protocol Governance forums to see what more than 100,000 DAO members are all robbing about at governance.aave.com.

• 5:06David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitrum, and the DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, all the while DeFi protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Quobi, and Crypto.com. Once inside, you'll notice Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit arbitrum.io/developer to start building your DApp on Arbitrum. If you're a DGen, many of your favorite DApps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with many moving over every day.

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  Go to bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your ETH and other tokens in order to experience DeFi and NFTs in the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free.

• 6:05David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, I am pleased to bring back on Hayden Adams, the inventor of the Uniswap protocol and CEO of Uniswap Labs. Like many of us, Hayden got into the crypto industry by being convinced by one of his friends to get into crypto. So he does the ritual rite of passage by buying the top of 2017 and wrote it all the way down. And then during the bear market, instead of leaving this industry, Hayden did something cool, which was invented Uniswap. Hayden has been on the podcast just once before, and now he's back to debut something pretty damn cool. Hayden, welcome back to the show, my man.

• 6:41David Hoffman?

  How'd you like that intro?

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  Of course, of course. And before we get into the detail and the alpha and the announcement that's coming out of Uniswap Labs, I just want to do like a quick feelings check in, just because like, I think that's kind of what everyone's really looking for. Ether price, Bitcoin price, crypto prices stabilized. We're not for at least seven days. So like, maybe we're feeling a little bit good, but a lot of people are overall like down bad. And this was both you and I, like, you know, like I said, the rite of passage into the crypto world for us. So as somebody who has been through the bear market and bought the top of 2017 and wrote it all the way down, like overall, just feelings check in. How are you feeling right now?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  This is down in the markets, but I say that, you know, I guess the way that I view it is markets go up and down really fast. And they sort of, but they sort of still oscillate around this like fundamental value that's being built. And, you know, what's been so exciting is over the past three years, you know, since the last time around, there's just been this like steady progress of new projects and value that's being built and developed. And so, you know, I think that we saw this last time around with the ICO boom, where there was this massive amount, you know, everything went up a huge amount and everything went down a huge amount. But out of all of that was some new fundamental technologies that were being built and developed. A lot of the, even like the early ICOs funded a lot of the early work into DeFi.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And then in the, out of the 2018 bear market, you know, we had all these different projects, MakerDAO, Uniswap Compound, that were built and launched. And that helped set the stage for the next, you know, for the next round of new projects. And, you know, so we definitely have, maybe the thing that's most different this time around is that there does seem to be, it used to be that crypto, like everything, the thing that affected the crypto market was always things that were happening in crypto. And I think something that's a little bit different this time around is that there does seem to be some element of like macro effects as well, where crypto now has maybe grown to be big enough that it's affected by things that happen, you know, around it in the world. But, you know, to me,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Something that's really exciting about these times, one way that I think about it is that you know, the any project can do well when everything is rampant speculation and when everything is up. And then I think what happens in the bear markets is the projects that do well are the projects that have the most fundamental value and you know, real use case. And so I think bear markets are a real time for discovering, you know, what is really working, what was, what just seemed like it was working and wasn't actually working. And you know, out of that, we'll be able to develop the next set of use cases and the next set of projects that, that you know, will set the stage for Web3 in the future.

• 9:27David Hoffman?

  And you know, judging by how Uniswap Labs is making announcements and just knowing you as a person, doesn't really sound like you're going anywhere during this bear market. You're gonna, you're gonna stick it out and wait until the next bull run?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty funny because I mean, no, I mean, you know, people, a lot of people are new to the space. And so definitely people will reach out and be like, are you okay? Like, you know, for us, right, we're, you know, we're building for the long term. We're, you know, we're here because we see the fundamental value and promise this technology. And, you know, I think we're still very much in the early days of the, you know, the projects and the value that we built. So we're definitely not going anywhere. We definitely have a lot that we're working on, you know, some things being announced today, some other things probably being announced later this summer. So we have a lot going on. You know, our team has grown a huge amount. When we launched V3, we were about 12 people. So when we launched V1, it

• 10:23Speaker 01

  was one person, V2 was four people, V3 was 12 people. And today we're about, well, post, you know, the announcement today, about 85. So our team has grown a lot. We're, we're parallel processing some stuff. Yeah, we're, we're really pumped and excited. You can see, this is our, this is our Soho office. You can see a lot of people here hanging out, having a good time.

• 10:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, wow, that is, that's pretty, pretty damn good growth. Does that 85 number, as crypto prices go down, does that 85 number of, of, you know, heads that you have to employ, does that number scare you? Or are you feeling good about that?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  I think that we're feeling quite good about our positioning today. Yeah, I'd say that we didn't grow too fast and we're definitely slowing down a little bit now. We had a big growth spurt, but we had a lot we wanted to build and we're working on right now. And so, you know, we definitely have plenty of runway to build through the bear market. And, you know, we're probably not going to grow to like 300. You know, we're going to slow down our hiring for sure. But yeah, no issues on our end there.

• 11:28David Hoffman?

  Slow down the hiring, but not end the hiring. I love the sound of that. Uniswap still hiring some people here and there. One thing that I, as listeners that have paid attention, I have made my way over to New York, Williamsburg. And so I actually got to take a peek around the office a week ago. That's where we chatted and I got a little bit about the details that we're about to release today. And so from my perspective of things, this is just the first of a number of things that is being worked on at Uniswap Labs that we're about to get into that announcement shortly. But just from my perspective, like Uniswap Labs is going in a handful of different directions, not just, not just one different direction. And let's, let's actually talk about Uniswap Labs. You want to say something? Go for it.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I just, you know, I'd say that we are working on a number of different, different things at once, but it's always sort of a clear unified vision and mission and something that we're working towards. And I'd say as the different pieces come out, it will sort of start to come together.

• 12:30David Hoffman?

  Cool. So we're getting some breadcrumbs, we're getting some puzzle pieces. We're going to unveil the first puzzle piece today. And over time, as more and more puzzle pieces become clear, we're going to be able to map them together and see what the hell is going on over at Uniswap Labs. And the last topic I want to get through before we actually talk about, I'm teasing the hell out of the Bankless Nation right now. The last topic I want to get to before we get to the actual information that got released is Uniswap Labs versus Uniswap Protocol. Can you explain the difference between these two things? Who is leading the progress of the Uniswap Protocol? And who is leading the progress of Uniswap Labs? Because you're saying, you've said a lot of we, right? Uniswap started at one person and then Uniswap V2 started at four people. Uniswap V3 had 12 people and now you're at 80 people. You said we a lot. Who's we?

• 13:12David Hoffman?

  And like, how do we think about the differences between Uniswap Labs and Uniswap Protocol?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  That's a really good question, and I hope it will be very clarifying is. So Uniswap Labs is a company, we're a software development company, product development company. And the Uniswap Protocol is a decentralized protocol for exchanging tokens on Ethereum and on other, and other EVM chains.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So, you know, much the way that the Ethereum Foundation or consensus does not, you know, unilaterally control the Ethereum network, you know, the Uniswap Protocol is decentralized. We're kind of like the Satoshi or the Vitalik of the, of the Uniswap Protocol in that, you know, we helped, I mean, myself and other people at the company helped create the protocol. But, you know, it's entirely decentralized, it runs on its own, it, you know, piggybacks off the decentralization of Ethereum and other blockchains.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, allows people to trade tokens with each other peer to peer. There's of course also the uni-token and the Uniswap Governance System. So, you know, way back in DeFi summer, there were, you know, one of the, the ideas and values that came out was community ownership and community participation. And, and, you know, having, giving, you know, communities and early participants, you know, almost like a say and, and part of the direction of, of, you know, decentralized platforms and projects. And so, you know, the uni-token and Uniswap Governance System is really, you know, meant to be a, a system that exists around the Uniswap Protocol, governing the Uniswap Protocol, and, you know, overseeing its, its direction.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, maybe even when just, when we speak about decentralization, there's a lot of different types of decentralization. To me, you know, the, the most decentralized thing, right, is something that is automated and autonomous and can run on its own without any governance required. And so that's why, you know, the vast majority of the Uniswap Protocol's functionality and functions don't require any active governance. And so, you know, people can add liquidity and trade against each other, and there's no sort of unilateral ability for governance to prevent that or to control that. But when it comes to, you know, future growth and development and funding an ecosystem of projects around it, you know, having, I'd say that like the next tier of decentralization

• 15:42Speaker 01

  is, you know, broader distribution and ownership. And so, you know, when we Did that, you know, the original U V airdrop, right? A big part of that was giving, you know, a lot of ownership to the early, you know, community members and users. And so now, you know, the, the, there's further decentralization of that part of things. So Uniswap Labs, and then, you know, out of the Uniswap Governance System, we've had a whole bunch of separate, independent teams and projects spin up with direct funding from, from the governance system and that report back to the governance system. So, you know, the most popular, or I'd say like the most successful initiative probably to come out of governance, although there's been a whole bunch, is probably Uniswap

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Grants Program, which, you know, was, is led by Ken, who, you know, before used to lead the Ethereum Foundation Grants Program. It was actually a funny story about Ken. He was on the grants committee that helped get Uniswap, its original grant, from the Ethereum Foundation back in 20, in 2018. And so now, you know, he's leading the Uniswap Grants Program. Since, you know, he, he put a proposal directly to the, to token holders and governance system and received some funding. And since then, he's allocated out to a, I believe 100, and they just put out a retrospective, I believe 120 different projects in the ecosystem, teams all around the world that are all building different interfaces, education, tools, you know, strategy, liquidity strategies,

• 17:07Speaker 01

  all these different things built on top of the Uniswap Protocol. So Uniswap Labs, you know, and you can almost imagine, if you look at the Ethereum ecosystem, the role of governance is similar to almost like the role of the Ethereum Foundation within Ethereum. And then, you know, Uniswap Labs is actually a little bit more of, of something that looks like, a little bit more like Consensys, in that we're building, we, you know, Consensys also has core development contributors and, and teams. But in addition, you know, Consensys is building a whole bunch of products that are built on top of Ethereum that, that are valuable for the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, mutually beneficial, right? They succeed if Ethereum succeeds, but, you know, Ethereum also succeeds with, with,

• 17:49Speaker 01

  you know, the, the addition of their products such as Infura, MetaMask and all that. It's a very similarly, you know, Uniswap Labs, the company, we have some, you know, smart contract developers, but, you know, in addition, we are also building a number of products on top of, you know, within the, the broader Web3 ecosystem that, that, you know, we think are, are really important to the growth of the ecosystem. And so. Yeah, I mean, I can pause if you have follow up questions, can keep going. But that's kind of a rough breakdown.

• 18:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. So we got the Uniswap Foundation, which, you know, Bankless listeners will remember, we once ran.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Uniswap Governance and Grant Programs.

• 18:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  But.

• 18:30David Hoffman?

  Oh, excuse me. Uniswap, yes, right. The Governance System, the Uni Grants and all that stuff. Bankless listeners will, once upon a time, remember the Uniswap ad that we ran on Bankless. And we got that through the Uniswap Grants Foundation. Or is it Grants Foundation? Grants Program?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  It's a Grants Program.

• 18:49David Hoffman?

  Grants Program, right.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  So they submit governance proposals directly to the governance system.

• 18:53David Hoffman?

  Right. And so like that's how. And that's how like the Uniswap ad came on Bankless, but we didn't go to Uniswap Labs for that. We went to Uniswap Grants for that, and that was answered by the Uni Token Holders. The Uniswap Labs side of things kind of seems like a product software layer on top of Uniswap. In the same way that you alluded to consensus is like a product layer on top of Ethereum. But there isn't actually like one core consensus product. There are many, many, many products that are built by consensus around the Ethereum ecosystem. And same, could I extrapolate that to Uniswap Labs too? As in, there are many, many, many products being built by Uniswap Labs that will surround Uniswap, the protocol. How do you feel about this distinction?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say that I think that that's right.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  With the added like, I'd say that Uniswap Labs is, you know, our primary product today is the Uniswap Web App, which is, you know, the most popular interface. It does around 20% of trading through the protocol. And, you know, another, you know, 80% is done either directly with the smart contracts, by arbitrators, by bots, by other interfaces. So, you know, that's our primary product today. And it primarily serves as an on-ramp and gateway to the protocol. But I think that moving forward, Uniswap Labs is really excited. Maybe one way, like one way I approach even what we work on, what we build. What we want to do is we want to, you know, we're not working on DeFi or Web3 or Ethereum just for its own sake. We're doing it because we want to add value to the world.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  We want to build things that people can use and improve their lives. That's really like something that we anchor in everything that we do is what we're working on, something that will, you know. Be better for society, will be something that will, you know, be useful to users. And historically, the vast majority of our work was on these initial, you know, protocol versions. And, you know, there's still a lot of protocol development and research and stuff that we want to think about. And but I think that, you know, even when you look at the state of Uniswap today, the Uniswap protocol has something like 70 to 80% market share in decentralized exchange.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  And a very few people will say like, the core blocker to further growth of Web 3 and DeFi is, you know, efficiency of the Uniswap protocol, right? The core blocker is, you know, the difficulty onboarding, you know, the difficulties in the user experience, people not feeling like they understand the use cases or how they can apply it to their daily life, like the all the things that connect these core underlying protocols, which I think do are extraordinarily valuable and useful to their daily life. And so I think that a lot of what we're working on today, you know, especially as we've grown as a team, is things that take, you know, Uniswap and other Web 3 protocols

• 21:49Speaker 01

  and make it, you know, more useful and accessible, easier to use. Because that's what we're working towards, right? That's the point of all of it. There's no point in anything we're working on if no one uses it. And so, you know, we're looking at serving both like a consumer user audience, people, you know, everyday people who want to use Web 3 as well as, you know, a developer audience, making it easier to build on top of, you know, Uniswap and other protocols, as well as a, you know, professional trading audience. So there's a lot of different people, all of whom are have various pain points and struggles when it comes to using this stuff. And so, you know, we're really excited to build a whole suite of products and tools that will make it, you know, a lot more accessible.

• 22:29David Hoffman?

  Right, so the answer I just heard is that you think that there is a ton of latent potential in the Uniswap V3 code, the Uniswap V3 software that's on Ethereum, and that in order to unlock that full potential, we need some like Web 2 styled or just like software layers on top of the Uniswap V3 code that is built for so many different use cases. You listed a few, just like retail access, like professional tradings and like all these other like use cases that can be built out of the protocol around with other utilities as well. Would that be a good summary?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, basically, you know, Uniswap V3, but you know, also Ethereum and Web3 more broadly. You know, I say that not 100% of everything we'll ever do in the future will be entirely on Uniswap V3. I think that there's like a lot of other sort of ways that we can add value to the ecosystem. For what it's worth, it's not our first time that we've done, you know, even, you know, a simple example is like the token list project that we released a while, which, you know, today is like the canonical way that people like create lists of ERC20 tokens. It's a small thing, but it's like a contribution to the ecosystem. And there's a lot of different ways that we can, we see ourselves adding a value to Web3 more broadly as well. In addition to making, you know, unlocking the value of the Uniswap protocol.

• 23:47David Hoffman?

  Okay, I think I have definitely teased the Bankless Nation enough. We've provided definitely enough context. So Hayden, let's go ahead and go right into this actual announcement. Give me the deets, give me the deets, my man. What's the alpha? What did, what happened? What did Uniswap release? What's going on?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm going to start with saying that, you know, today, the world of ERC20 tokens and NFTs are almost viewed as like two separate ecosystems. People think of like the NFT community, the Web3 community, the DeFi community. It's sort of viewed as like these two separate things. But, you know, in my view, like I view ERC20, to start with just ERC20. Like my, the thing that excited me about ERC20 tokens is that they represent digital ownership.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, there is sort of, you know, it's almost like the file format for, for digital value or something. And, you know, to me, NFTs represent, you know, the same thing, right? It's just two different types of ownership. And they're both, you know, really powerful. And, you know, the idea of ownership is really important to me. I think that, you know, there's so much value that exists in the world that to me is almost like, like potential value. It's like, you know, people, you know, the value of a community or the value of something someone creates. You know, but because of the way that like value exists today and that like, it's very difficult to create a new asset. It's very difficult to interact with new assets.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And if you create some new asset, you have to sort of create an entire financial system for it. Different asset classes have completely different infrastructure.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  I guess I'm still teasing, but I think that's okay.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So different asset classes have completely different infrastructure. And if you want to build like a new asset, you have to kind of figure out where does it fit in? And you know, some types of assets don't have any infrastructure at all. Right? And so, you know, to me, what's so exciting about your C20 tokens is that they help unlock, you know, the ability to create new assets, represent ownership. You know, with the USW protocol, create markets for that ownership. You might own something, but if you can't sell it, you can't exchange it. Do you really own it? Not really. That value is all like locked up. For what's worth, our mission statement at USW Labs is unlock universal ownership and exchange.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Which I don't think we've ever really, we've teased that, but I don't know if we've ever said in that way. That's news to me. And you know, universal to me means for everyone and everything in a standard way. You know, ownership to me, like so much wealth in the world accrues to people who own things and people who are able to create and represent the ownership of things. And you know, historically, I think that a lot of value has accrued disproportionate to people who have early access to owning something. And so, you know, unlocking sort of a more universal form of ownership and exchange, to me will help, you know, lower barriers of entry to creation of value, to creation of wealth, and ultimately create a more fair and equitable world.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And that's, you know, what I'm working towards. And that's what, you know, our company, and it doesn't just come from me. It was like a very long process across our entire team to get to that mission statement and to our values. And so, okay, I think I've teased enough. With that in mind, you know, NFTs are a big part of digital ownership. A lot of value can't easily be divided. And that's, that's, you know, you know, where NFTs come in. And I think we're only in the very early days of them. And we're very early in the days of just like the interplay between the C20 tokens and NFTs. So that's why we're so, so incredibly excited to, you know, announce that USW Labs has acquired Genie. Genie, for people who don't know, is the first, was the first NFT marketplace aggregator.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  So I think most people know, you know, about OpenSea and other NFT marketplaces. They let you buy and sell and discover NFTs. Genie basically lets you buy and sell and discover NFTs across all the different marketplaces. So, you know, in addition to OpenSea, LooksRare, Coinbase NFT, Verbal, you know, all the different NFT marketplaces. And so, you know, we acquired their team. There were a team of around 15 people.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  They're going to be joining us and we're going to be working on unifying our two products and building in a full NFT experience directly into the Uniswap web app. I think, you know, in parallel, we're going to be working to improve the experience for all our existing users, token holders, or token, you know, people who want to trade tokens and access liquidity pools and work towards, you know, a much more unified experience across the two and essentially become, you know, a marketplace for all digital value as opposed to just ERC 20 tokens.

• 28:43David Hoffman?

  And so, Hayden, you didn't just see what I was just showing on the screen, but I was just showing the Genie front end. You weren't able to see that in Zoom and so the viewers were able to get a tease for that. And so, I think the, going back to like the statement, the vision of Uniswap Labs of just like democratizing ownership and access, what you're saying is that Uniswap Labs doesn't care about the form factor of ownership. It just thinks that ERC 20s, ERC 721s, ERC 1155s, it doesn't matter if it's just a token that you own. Uniswap Labs is focused on democratizing access to ownership and into using its Genie by acquiring it to spread that power all across the internet. Is that the kind of the high level of summary here?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  That is said perfectly, probably better than I said it. And I'll add that, you know, we as a team are bringing a huge amount of expertise and knowledge from the ERC 20 space. I think the NFT space is, while it's been around for a while, is still a little bit younger and in its earlier stages than the DeFi space, both of which are pretty new things. And, you know, it's also not our first foray into NFTs for what it's worth. Unisox, we got one here. Unisox was a project we launched in spring 2019 and was, I think, the first instance of NFT liquidity pools, you know, basically NFTs that are backed by real world assets, in this case, physical socks.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  And in NFTs, that can be kind of exchanged for here's my tokens. I think some people might realize they're on the bankless. And, and, you know, so the Uniswap has been around for a long time and is also one of the first instances of crypto fashion. And then in addition, at the Uniswap V3 launch, we had two, two things that came out with for NFTs. One was the Uniswap V3 launch video. We launched as an NFT with, with people pleaser and that actually spawned pleaser Dow and a whole bunch of things that came out of that. And then the, the Uniswap V3 LP positions were also NFTs and were basically the first or one of the first instances of on-chain generative SVG art.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And so I think that we're definitely bringing with us a lot of experience in the smart contract space. A lot of kind of, you know, I think we're also known for just being very rigorous about making the user experience as simple and safe feeling as possible. I think a lot of people, at least to me, have come up and told me in the past that Uniswap was like the first time that, that for them, you know, crypto or web free felt like usable. And so we were trying to bring, you know, everything we brought to the year 2020 space and bring it with us to the NFT space. So we're really excited. GM, guess.

• 31:33David Hoffman?

  GM, GM, yeah. I'm about to play a video, but just a real quick. When we, when Uniswap launched V1, it was like groundbreaking because we were all used to order book exchanges. And now like going back and looking at Uniswap V1, like fast forwarding four years or three years or however, ever long it's been, three years. Looking back at Uniswap V1, where it was only ETH pairs, there was no concentrated liquidity. Like now it seems so primitive. And I'm wondering if we're seeing that same, not, not to call your baby primitive, Hayden, it's made great strides. But like now I'm, I'm wondering if we're kind of on that same trajectory with NFTs. Cause like NFTs are also in very much need of liquidity and more liquidity tooling.

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  And so I wanted you to think about that question. Wow. I played this cool, awesome promo bid that you guys threw to me a little bit before the show. That kind of will help, I think, illustrate Uniswap and NFTs in the intersection of these things. Podcast listeners, sorry, you're gonna just hear the music, but here we go.

• 33:04David Hoffman?

  All right, so there was that. So yeah, NFT is gonna get built into app.uniswap. I can't remember the URL, it just auto-populates in my browser, but the main Uniswap front-end owned by the Labs. And so eventually, like, not only am I gonna go to the Uniswap page to swap my ERC20 tokens, but also to swap my NFTs. Is that kind of the idea?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think that's just a starting point. But, and also, eventually, I think you should think, like, fairly soon. I don't want to promise a date, but, you know, it's definitely not something that we're expecting to take, you know, an extraordinarily long time. I think that the first starting point is basically going to be, you know, adding a new tab, actually, potentially two new tabs, but we can talk about, you know, people who are diligent, watching the video, might have seen, there are other new tabs as well. But, you know, adding a new tab for NFTs, you can explore NFTs across all the marketplaces. You'll be able to, you know, buy them from directly within the site. You'll be able to list them as well, bid on them. So yeah, we hope for, you know, people who want to come into the space, buy an NFT.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  You don't want to think about, you know, which marketplace has the liquidity that you want. So, you know, you can come straight to Uniswap.

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  Beautiful, beautiful. Now Hayden, there is an airdrop in this conversation. And so I want to pick your brain on that. But before we do that, that is just perfect tease to tell the Bankless Nation all about. There's an airdrop coming, so we're going to talk about that in the second half of the show, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. There is a brand new staking feature in the Ledger Live app today. We all like staking the assets that we're bullish on. And now you can stake seven different coins inside the Ledger Live app. Cosmos, Polkadot, Tron, Algorion, Tezos, Solana, and of course Ethereum. With Ledger Live, you can take money from your bank account, buy your most bullish crypto asset, and stake that asset to its network, all inside the Ledger Live app. Through a partnership with Figment, Ledger also lets you choose which validator

• 35:04David Hoffman?

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• 35:49David Hoffman?

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• 37:05David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, we are back for the second half of the show. Hayden, there's an airdrop coming. Can you talk about the details of the airdrop associated with Genie?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I can lightly talk about the details. So yes, one airdrop, and you guys definitely succeeded in teasing that one. So I'd say, you know, something that we even actually saw recently with other acquisitions that have happened, you know, I think that a lot of early supporters and community members, you know, we talked about this earlier even on the show, is that, you know, the idea of rewarding and sharing with the early community members and participants in projects. And so, you know, in acquiring the Genie team, we didn't want to leave the Genie community and users behind. And so we're going to be, you know, doing a, as part of the, as part of the acquisition,

• 37:58Speaker 01

  we allocated a bunch of money to basically airdrop to historical, historical Genie users. So the airdrop is going to be in USDC. I think it's going to be everyone who's used Genie more than once is going to get at least some USDC and then, yeah, and then they had an NFT that they had released a while ago and some people who own their NFTs will get a little bit more. But, you know, full details will be announced soon. You can't farm this airdrop. We have a, you know, we checkpointed it to before we made the decision to do it, just like with the uni launch. And so, you know, no way to farm it. But, you know, all the early users of Genie will be rewarded and sharing the value.

• 38:43David Hoffman?

  So what's the, this is the first airdrop that I've heard that is of a stablecoin rather than like a brand new native token. So like, there's literally just not a valueless governance token being airdropped, straight up like cash. Can you talk about a little bit about that, Troyce?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that like, you know, historical Genie users can choose what they want to do, right? If they want to, you know, cash it out to their bank account, if they want to, you know, buy ETH to reimburse to the gas that they spent in the early days, if they want to buy uni, if they want to, whatever they want to do, they can do it. And so I think it's just about, you know, giving the recipients, you know, a choice. It definitely made some of the accounting easier in terms of our, on our end. And yeah, we really just wanted to, you know, reward the early Genie users and then they can choose. Because there's no, you know, like the Genie protocol is more of a routing protocol. It's not a liquidity protocol itself and they didn't have their own token. So doing it

• 39:44Speaker 01

  in USDC seemed to make the most sense.

• 39:47David Hoffman?

  But why do an airdrop at all? If this was like a private acquisition of Uniswap Labs from another private company, like why, why pay the community any money at all?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Because again, you know, where did the value in Genie come from? Where did, where did, you know, how did Genie get to where it was? It was off its, you know, it was, it was because of its early users, its early community members and supporters. And so, you know, when we acquired Genie, we wanted to reward the early users and supporters of Genie rather than, you know, it seemed like, obviously, the Genie team members and founder and stuff got, you know, were rewarded. But we also wanted to make sure that, that some of the value was set aside for the early community members who, you know, Used it as well. And you know, if they if they you know, come along and become, you know, Uniswap NFT community members, then we're very happy and would love to have them.

• 40:42David Hoffman?

  Is there still, I'm gonna go ahead and guess you're not able to answer this question, but I'm gonna go ahead and ask it anyways. Is there still the possibility of a genie token on the table?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Um, I think that is highly unlikely. Um, so I don't think people should speculate on that or or, um, yeah, that is highly, highly unlikely.

• 41:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you said you've acquired not just genie the product, but also the team. I think you alluded to like 12 people. Have they, now that they are a part of Uniswap?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  It's more like 15.

• 41:16David Hoffman?

  15? Okay, well, congratulations to all of them. I think joining Uniswap Labs is a pretty awesome opportunity, especially if you guys are growing and growing all your resources. Are they, are you, as CEO of Uniswap Labs, having them pivot what they are doing at all? Or are they just going to continue doing exactly the same thing that they were doing prior?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're fully integrating and merging our teams. And by the way, I just want to shout out like, you know, one of the like, working with them on a position over the past, you know, month or two has been really, um, you know, it's been really great to work with them. Um, you know, we wouldn't have done it if if we hadn't clearly aligned on the vision and the values and the and the mission. Um, you know, there's throughout all of it, their founder Scott has been and the rest of their team has been really, you know, awesome to work with. Um, so, you know, their whole team is now working towards what we're calling the unification. Um, and, you know, soon, you know, soon we'll be, you

• 42:15Speaker 01

  know, like it will all be one unified team. Um, and, you know, that's really, you know, basically merging the two products. So building their features and functionality directly into the Uniswap web app. Um, and that's where we're going to start. Uh, and so there's definitely some work to do to get to that. Um, and to get to sort of feature parity with them today in our experience. Uh, but then from there, you know, we're going to work together on a unified, unified roadmap across, you know, tokens and NFTs. Um, there's going to be one team and we're gonna, we're gonna work towards a vision for the, for the app.

• 42:49David Hoffman?

  Well, as somebody who always ends up going to Uniswap to swap my tokens and then kind of gets confused as to where I should go to swap my NFTs. I'm excited to have that kind of all put into the same space. I'm also interested to see how the pricing dynamics work out. And it's also, I think, important to note that Genie is not an NFT marketplace. It's an NFT marketplace aggregator. And so that hopefully should just add just quality of life improvements, but also perhaps pricing optimizations too as well. Would you say that's a fair take?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I think that we're really excited to take our, all of our knowledge and experience when it comes to trade routing and aggregation. Like routing and trade execution, smart contracts, and really optimize and improve on what already exists in the NFT space.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  So I think that, yeah, there's definitely a lot of, you know, and beyond that, getting to a world where, you know, you can swap any token for any NFT. Sell any NFT for every, any token and have it be a really seamless experience. So, yeah, yeah, I think that that's definitely something to, you know, to look forward to. Yeah.

• 43:54David Hoffman?

  What else can we glean from this? So, you know, I don't think anyone woke up this morning thinking that Uniswap Labs was going to acquire an NFT marketplace aggregator. So like, what lesson should we, should we learn from this? Is like, what else Uniswap Labs is getting up to? Like, what else is going on in the future roadmap of Uniswap Labs?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know if I can make more than one announcement today, but I guess what I'll say is that, and, you know, don't know if I can make all the effort, but like, I guess, first off, you know, there's a lot coming for our existing users as well. There's a lot we're going to do to kind of improve the experience. And we really want to sort of, you know, a lot of people, as you said, use both NFTs and NFT20 tokens. And we want to really work to support, you know, both of our user types as well as, you know, start to better support. Again, our early days were all about the protocol. Today, we're all about, you know, making it more accessible. And so, you know, I think historically, I guess this is some, I'd say historically, you know, the Uniswap web app has done a really good job splitting the difference between a lot of different types of users.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  What I mean by that is like creating new token pairs, like providing liquidity with a lot of capital efficiency, providing liquidity with little capital efficiency, swapping tokens, day trading. There's like a lot of different users for the new swap web app. And I think part of it is because it's really simple, easy experience. But I think that something that I've started to feel really strongly, as well as the rest of our team, is that by kind of continuing to try to split the difference, we're almost not going simple enough for the most, for like the new users. And we're not going, you know, and we don't have enough features or information for the more advanced, complex users. And so I think that what we're really interested in doing is making sure that we're building,

• 45:43Speaker 01

  not just support, you know, our consumers, our swappers, our NFT users, but also our LPs, the liquidity providers, the professional traders, and just make sure that we're like building things for everyone and improving the experience for everyone. And so I guess, you know, maybe something to glean is that there's a lot more coming, both across all of that, as well as developers. And a few other things that we think about is just like, again, maybe even further out, when I'm thinking like years out, to me, the, just the world of Web 3, to me, Web 3 is like, it's just the, it's like the next iteration of the internet, right?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  The internet democratized, you know, information and access to information and the ability to spread, you know, share information. And it did a lot of it on the backs of standardized information sharing protocols. You know, SMTP for emails and, you know, HTTPS for websites and even like, you know, whatever the, you know, stuff is behind, I forget what the Wiki standard is. But anyway, there's all these different protocols that are how, and primitives people put together to build the internet. And to me, Web 3 is about adding in, you know, ownership across different forms of value, exchange across different forms of value, you know, and all the, and a whole economy, you know, built directly into the internet.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And I think, I guess some other thoughts I have here are like, so first off, like that's what we're working towards, but then... I think that to bring it to the values that we have, again, the internet can be used for good and for bad, but I think everyone knows that like the internet has been democratizing in many ways and it's increased access to information. And so I think similarly, like, we want to build towards the positive use cases of Web3. I think ultimately, you know, the same way that the internet was very, very, it's community oriented, very social, you know, culture is really important. These are all, you know, immensely important to

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Web3. And I think that like, it's gonna, you know, you're gonna start to see like convergence. Today, there's like very, a lot of separation between like the social platforms, the cultural centers, and, and the financial institutions. And, and I think here, we're gonna start to see like culture and ownership and community. And so here, we're gonna start to see like ownership and value, you know, brought much closer to culture and, and social interaction. And it's all gonna kind of swirl together. And, you know, we're really excited for it. And I think that there's a lot, you know, going beyond this initial vision and what we're working towards in the short term, there's

• 48:40Speaker 01

  like a lot in the long term we can do to, to start to make, you know, again, like ownership and value a lot more accessible, a lot more like culturally present and relevant, and, and a lot more social, community oriented. And so that to me is like a really exciting frontier. And to be honest, like having fungible and non-fungible value feels like an important, having both of those feel like a really important stepping stone to getting into this like broader world of cool things that are gonna be built. And they're not all gonna be built by us. They're gonna be built by a whole world and community. There's a lot of, you know, something that we didn't really touch on is like competition and competitiveness.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  The thing they'll say that there is like so much value to be built. We don't necessarily view that what we're doing here as like strictly like isn't that like that strongly? Or to the extent that it's competitive with something, it might still really be positive sum. For what it's worth, that was one of the biggest takeaways for me from the whole sushi saga. Is that I think it was ultimately very positive sum with Uniswap and ultimately a lot of value. You know, came to Uniswap from it. And I think similarly, we're going to see that in the NFT space. While there's a lot of different teams and they're going to all have different users and and maybe even be competing or not competing. In general, you know, it's going to be really positive some, there's going to be a huge amount of value that's going to get built out of all of it. And, you know, there is, there's just like a lot of value and cool things to go around. And so.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  We're really excited to also just like collaborate really closely with with other people in the NFT community and world. Yeah, and and build towards a better future.

• 50:19David Hoffman?

  I think if there's one thing that I really took away from this interview Hayden is that there is so much left to do that a lot of people aren't really paying attention to. A lot of opportunity on the table for teams that you might not have expected previously to seize. I did not, I did not have on my 2022 bingo card Uniswap Labs acquiring an NFT marketplace aggregator. But after you've explained it to me, it totally makes sense, especially in the context of democratizing asset ownership. And so Hayden, I am excited to see what else Uniswap Labs has up its sleeve and also really just what the what the whole entire industry has up its sleeve as well. It seems to be that the bear market really presents a lot of surface area for growth and opportunity for the people that are willing to take it.

• 51:03David Hoffman?

  So Hayden, next time Uniswap Labs does something cool, you make sure to hit me up and we will bring you back on to talk about it then. Thanks for coming on, my man.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. It's been really great talking to you.

• 51:16David Hoffman?

  And so we will get all the links for checking airdrops and claiming airdrops into the show notes shortly after this. So thank you everyone for tuning into this special episode of me flying solo, but I got Hayden Adams here to do it with me. So thank you everyone for tuning in. Make sure to like and subscribe because it's where you get all the alpha. It's where all the companies come and release all their announcements, especially if it's got an airdrop involved. And so if you have an airdrop coming your way, you make sure to hit out bankless because we'll do a show on it. Risk and disclaimers to everyone, of course. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. NFT yield aggregators are probably not yield aggregators. Marketplace aggregators are probably risky too at some way or another. You can lose what you put in. We are headed west. We're on the frontier. It's not for everyone, of course.