Hayden Adams

Hayden Adams is a New York-based entrepreneur with a background in engineering. He is best known for founding Uniswap Labs, a decentralized trading and automated market makingmarket-making protocol on the Ethereum blockchain.

Adams was born on October 21, 1992, in the United States. He attended Stony Brook University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. While attending college, he worked as a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center and developed a search algorithm to retrieve specific articles from PubMed.

When Adams graduated from Stony Brook University in 2016, he worked as an engineer for companies such as Siemens. A year later, he was no longer working for Siemens and was spending much of his time learning about cryptocurrency and how to code. In October 2017, Adams founded Uniswap Labs to contribute to the development of products and infrastructure for web3Web3 and decentralized finance.

Uniswap Labs was officially launched in 2018, and it is reported that there has been a trading volume of $1 trillion since its launch, making it one of the most widely used decentralized exchanges in the world.

In July 2023, Adams''s Twitter account was the target of hackers. The hackers made several tweets encouraging his more than 254,000 followers to click on malicious links that sent them to scam websites. The tweets alleged that specific cryptocurrency tokens were compromised and that some of Adams' followers were eligible for gifted $UNI tokens. Neither of those tweets werewas true, and several of the posts were removed.

Hayden Adams is founder of Uniswap, one of the most widely used decentralized applications built on Ethereum and it is currently the world leading DeFi DEX. Prior to Uniswap, Adams was an engineer at Siemens. He graduated from Stony Brook University with a bachelor in engineering in 2016.

Stony Brook University

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Mechanical Engineering, Senior

2012 – 2016

Prior to the establishment of Uniswap, Adams worked as a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center (June 2012 – October 2014), Mechanical Engineering Intern at Vista Wearable Inc. (June 2015 – September 2015), and an Engineer at Siemens (July 2016 – July 2017).

As a Siemens Engineer, Adams performed engineering simulations and design exploration for clients in the automotive and aerospace industries. Additionally, he wrote Java macros and learned the UNIX operating system at Siemens.

After about a year working at Siemens, Adams was laid off from his position, according to Cointelegraph. CoinDesk adds that he lived with his parents for some time after the layoff.

From a perspective of ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,’ it was scary at the time. I was living at home [in the New York suburbs] for a while.

In the fall of 2017, at the age of 26, Adams was introduced to his first crypto-related project through a Reddit post entitled “Let’s run on-chain decentralized exchanges the way we run prediction markets”, authored by Vitalik Buterin. Buterin is the creator of the Ethereum blockchain platform, as well as the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

The article was sent to Adams by his college friend Karl Floersch (who was at the time working at the Ethereum Foundation). While studying at Stony Brook University, Floersch became interested in Ethereum and entered the world of crypto after graduating.

Unlike Floersch, Adams became interested in crypto much later. Adams had been hesitant about investing in crypto for years, even passing up Ethereum when it was valued at $0.30.

In 2020:

• Launched V2 of Uniswap
• Launched UNI token and its airdrop
• In Sep 2020, Uniswap recorded monthly volumne of $15.3 billion, surpassing Coinbase

Founder & CEO

Uniswap Labs

Oct. 2017 - present time

New York City Area

Engineer

Siemens

July 2016 - July 2017

Melville, NY

Performed engineering simulations and design exploration for numerous clients in the automotive and aerospace industries. Provided thermodynamic analysis for Daimler AG (Mercedes-Benz) vehicles. Innovated new techniques to automate the simulation process using STAR-CCM+ software. Wrote Java macros, worked on a 100+ node cloud cluster, and learned UNIX.

Mechanical Engineering Intern

Vista Wearable Inc.

June 2015 - September 2015

Greater New York City Area

At Vista Wearables, he was responsible for designing, modeling, and rapid prototyping a wearable device that assists visually impaired individuals. All models were built using SolidWorks, and followed best practices. He has experience 3D printing on multiple machines including Makerbot 2, Ultimaker 2, and Stratasys Object500 Connex3. He was also responsible for modifying existing CAD models for injection molding.

Researcher

Columbia University Medical Center

June 2012 - Oct 2014

New York City

At Columbia University Medical Center he worked on a research project with Dr. Carol Friedman, Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and Dr. Joseph Finkelstein, Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins University. He was tasked with developing an effective search algorithm to retrieve relevant articles concerning adverse drug reactions from the medical database PubMed.

CoinDesk writes that Hayden Adams soon took two decisions that would eventually lead him to his success with Uniswap. First, he purchased Ethereum in March 2017. Second, he started to learn to code while living at his parents’ house.

Fortunately for Adams, his friend Floersch had “it all figured out for him”. Floersch told Adams that there was an acute lack of smart contract developers for Ethereum, which prompted Adams to learn JavaScript and Solidity. An additional incentive for him was the dramatic rise in cryptocurrency prices in the summer of 2017.

It was a very weird time. I was getting very into Ethereum and from that perspective it was a really great thing.

He added that the layoff “definitely turned out to be the best thing that ever happened” to him.

Soon, Adams felt the urge for a “real project” to stay motivated, which would lead him to discover automated market making. Adams was unfamiliar with finance and markets, but Floersch assisted him by introducing him to decentralized exchanges.

While living in Brooklyn, N.Y., off his Ethereum stash, Adams became obsessed with his Uniswap proof of concept.

Adams began attending various conferences in New York City and Canada. He additionally flew to a crypto conference in Seoul, South Korea. He wasn’t allowed in since he didn’t have a ticket, but he did manage to talk about Uniswap with Vitalik Buterin thanks to Floersch.

CoinDesk writes that Adams would sit in the MakerDAO or Balance offices by day and code Uniswap by night. Adams admitted that this wasn’t bad work, especially compared to what he had been doing at Siemens:

Programming with money is just really fun. Being able to write functions that send money and receive money in a native way is very fun.

A $65,000 grant from Ethereum Foundation allowed Adams to carry out a full audit of his project’s code. Additionally, Adams migrated Uniswap from Solidity to Vyper – a programming language specifically designed for Ethereum smart contracts.

At DevCon 4 in November 2018, Adams finally launched Uniswap v1. While promising, it lacked certain essential features – among other things, orders could only be routed through Ethereum and a token. Besides, Uniswap v1 debuted at a time when Ethereum had a 95% drawdown from its peak value.

Uniswap saw an immense rise in popularity after introducing the UNI token as a stimulus check for early developers, investors, Uniswap $SOCK holders, and holders of any wallet that had interacted with Uniswap contracts. This was done as a response to the aggressive promotional campaign of the competing SushiSwap that offered high returns to liquidity providers (LPs).

Uniswap’s TVL (Total Value under Lock, the total dollar value of tokens locked in smart contracts on the platform) has since not dipped below $1 billion and even stayed above $3 billion for several days in November.

Numerous updates of Uniswap have been introduced since its launch. These are detailed in the Uniswap blog.

There is no credible information online about Hayden Adams’ net worth, but it is known that Uniswap has become immensely successful.

As of April 16, 2021, CoinMarketCap estimated that the 24-hour trading volume of Uniswap was $1.204 billion, which made Uniswap the top third decentralized exchange by trading volume after MDEX ($2.218 billion) and PancakeSwap ($1.398 billion).

In October 2020, the average daily trading volume on Uniswap reached about $220 million. On March 30, 2021, Uniswap’s 24-hour trading volume spiked to a record of $7.17 billion.

According to Crypto Fees, Uniswap generated 1-day fees of $3.53 billion as of April 16, 2021.

Hayden Adams is present on Twitter and LinkedIn. On Twitter, Adams promotes Uniswap and shares his opinion on the current state of the financial system, among other things.

The current financial system is unfair, outdated, and generally broken.

CoinDesk included Adams in its list of the most influential people in crypto in 2020. Cointelegraph similarly considers Adams to be the top 6th individual in the industry (Sergey Nazarov, Anthony Pompliano, and Raoul Pal are other notable people on the list).

Hayden Adams is a New York-based entrepreneur with a background in engineering. He is best known for founding Uniswap Labs, a decentralized trading and automated market making protocol on the Ethereum blockchain.

Adams was born on October 21, 1992 in the United States. He attended Stony Brook University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. While attending college, he worked as a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center and developed a search algorithm to retrieve specific articles from PubMed.

When Adams graduated from Stony Brook University in 2016, he worked as an engineer for companies such as Siemens. A year later, he was no longer working for Siemens and was spending much of his time learning about cryptocurrency and how to code. In October 2017, Adams founded Uniswap Labs to contribute to the development of products and infrastructure for web3 and decentralized finance.

Adams has been featured in several podcasts and interviews as well.

On Aug 30 2020 - the first time Uniswap surpassed Coinbase Pro in daily trading volume, he tweeted:

Wow, Uniswap 24hr trading volume is higher than Coinbase for the first time ever. Uniswap: $426M, Coinbase: $348M Hard to express with how crazy this is.

Everyone knows this, everyone understand this and defi fixes this. The narratives play extremely well and imo will resonate with a wider audience faster than many seem to think. — Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) April 16, 2021

Today, the Uniswap v2 WBTC/ETH pair has $318m in it. If WBTC/ETH LPs instead provided to the range of 0.0295 and 0.0454 on v3 they could create the same amount of liquidity, and take on the same amount of impermanent loss with just 318/9.8 = $32m — Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) April 8, 2021

Dune and Foundation are his favorite sci-fi book series.

Uniswap Labs was officially launched in 2018 and it is reported that there has been a trading volume of $1 trillion since its launch, making it one of the most widely used decentralized exchanges in the world.

In July 2023, Adams' Twitter account was the target of hackers. The hackers made several tweets encouraging his more than 254,000 followers to click on malicious links that sent them to scam websites. The tweets alleged that specific cryptocurrency tokens were compromised and that some of Adams' followers were eligible for gifted $UNI tokens. Neither of those tweets were true and several of the posts were removed.

Hayden Adams is founder of Uniswap, one of the most widely used decentralized applications built on Ethereum and it is currently the world leading DeFi DEX. Prior to Uniswap, Adams was an engineer at Siemens. He graduated from Stony Brook University with a bachelor in engineering in 2016.

Stony Brook University

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Mechanical Engineering, Senior

2012 – 2016

Prior to the establishment of Uniswap, Adams worked as a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center (June 2012 – October 2014), Mechanical Engineering Intern at Vista Wearable Inc. (June 2015 – September 2015), and an Engineer at Siemens (July 2016 – July 2017).

As a Siemens Engineer, Adams performed engineering simulations and design exploration for clients in the automotive and aerospace industries. Additionally, he wrote Java macros and learned the UNIX operating system at Siemens.

After about a year working at Siemens, Adams was laid off from his position, according to Cointelegraph. CoinDesk adds that he lived with his parents for some time after the layoff.

From a perspective of ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,’ it was scary at the time. I was living at home [in the New York suburbs] for a while.

In the fall of 2017, at the age of 26, Adams was introduced to his first crypto-related project through a Reddit post entitled “Let’s run on-chain decentralized exchanges the way we run prediction markets”, authored by Vitalik Buterin. Buterin is the creator of the Ethereum blockchain platform, as well as the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

The article was sent to Adams by his college friend Karl Floersch (who was at the time working at the Ethereum Foundation). While studying at Stony Brook University, Floersch became interested in Ethereum and entered the world of crypto after graduating.

Unlike Floersch, Adams became interested in crypto much later. Adams had been hesitant about investing in crypto for years, even passing up Ethereum when it was valued at $0.30.

In 2020:

• Launched V2 of Uniswap
• Launched UNI token and its airdrop
• In Sep 2020, Uniswap recorded monthly volumne of $15.3 billion, surpassing Coinbase

Founder & CEO

Uniswap Labs

Oct. 2017 - present time

New York City Area

Engineer

Siemens

July 2016 - July 2017

Melville, NY

Performed engineering simulations and design exploration for numerous clients in the automotive and aerospace industries. Provided thermodynamic analysis for Daimler AG (Mercedes-Benz) vehicles. Innovated new techniques to automate the simulation process using STAR-CCM+ software. Wrote Java macros, worked on a 100+ node cloud cluster, and learned UNIX.

Mechanical Engineering Intern

Vista Wearable Inc.

June 2015 - September 2015

Greater New York City Area

At Vista Wearables, he was responsible for designing, modeling, and rapid prototyping a wearable device that assists visually impaired individuals. All models were built using SolidWorks, and followed best practices. He has experience 3D printing on multiple machines including Makerbot 2, Ultimaker 2, and Stratasys Object500 Connex3. He was also responsible for modifying existing CAD models for injection molding.

Researcher

Columbia University Medical Center

June 2012 - Oct 2014

New York City

At Columbia University Medical Center he worked on a research project with Dr. Carol Friedman, Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and Dr. Joseph Finkelstein, Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins University. He was tasked with developing an effective search algorithm to retrieve relevant articles concerning adverse drug reactions from the medical database PubMed.

CoinDesk writes that Hayden Adams soon took two decisions that would eventually lead him to his success with Uniswap. First, he purchased Ethereum in March 2017. Second, he started to learn to code while living at his parents’ house.

Fortunately for Adams, his friend Floersch had “it all figured out for him”. Floersch told Adams that there was an acute lack of smart contract developers for Ethereum, which prompted Adams to learn JavaScript and Solidity. An additional incentive for him was the dramatic rise in cryptocurrency prices in the summer of 2017.

It was a very weird time. I was getting very into Ethereum and from that perspective it was a really great thing.

He added that the layoff “definitely turned out to be the best thing that ever happened” to him.

Soon, Adams felt the urge for a “real project” to stay motivated, which would lead him to discover automated market making. Adams was unfamiliar with finance and markets, but Floersch assisted him by introducing him to decentralized exchanges.

While living in Brooklyn, N.Y., off his Ethereum stash, Adams became obsessed with his Uniswap proof of concept.

Adams began attending various conferences in New York City and Canada. He additionally flew to a crypto conference in Seoul, South Korea. He wasn’t allowed in since he didn’t have a ticket, but he did manage to talk about Uniswap with Vitalik Buterin thanks to Floersch.

CoinDesk writes that Adams would sit in the MakerDAO or Balance offices by day and code Uniswap by night. Adams admitted that this wasn’t bad work, especially compared to what he had been doing at Siemens:

Programming with money is just really fun. Being able to write functions that send money and receive money in a native way is very fun.

A $65,000 grant from Ethereum Foundation allowed Adams to carry out a full audit of his project’s code. Additionally, Adams migrated Uniswap from Solidity to Vyper – a programming language specifically designed for Ethereum smart contracts.

At DevCon 4 in November 2018, Adams finally launched Uniswap v1. While promising, it lacked certain essential features – among other things, orders could only be routed through Ethereum and a token. Besides, Uniswap v1 debuted at a time when Ethereum had a 95% drawdown from its peak value.

Uniswap saw an immense rise in popularity after introducing the UNI token as a stimulus check for early developers, investors, Uniswap $SOCK holders, and holders of any wallet that had interacted with Uniswap contracts. This was done as a response to the aggressive promotional campaign of the competing SushiSwap that offered high returns to liquidity providers (LPs).

Uniswap’s TVL (Total Value under Lock, the total dollar value of tokens locked in smart contracts on the platform) has since not dipped below $1 billion and even stayed above $3 billion for several days in November.

Numerous updates of Uniswap have been introduced since its launch. These are detailed in the Uniswap blog.

There is no credible information online about Hayden Adams’ net worth, but it is known that Uniswap has become immensely successful.

As of April 16, 2021, CoinMarketCap estimated that the 24-hour trading volume of Uniswap was $1.204 billion, which made Uniswap the top third decentralized exchange by trading volume after MDEX ($2.218 billion) and PancakeSwap ($1.398 billion).

In October 2020, the average daily trading volume on Uniswap reached about $220 million. On March 30, 2021, Uniswap’s 24-hour trading volume spiked to a record of $7.17 billion.

According to Crypto Fees, Uniswap generated 1-day fees of $3.53 billion as of April 16, 2021.

Hayden Adams is present on Twitter and LinkedIn. On Twitter, Adams promotes Uniswap and shares his opinion on the current state of the financial system, among other things.

The current financial system is unfair, outdated, and generally broken.

CoinDesk included Adams in its list of the most influential people in crypto in 2020. Cointelegraph similarly considers Adams to be the top 6th individual in the industry (Sergey Nazarov, Anthony Pompliano, and Raoul Pal are other notable people on the list).

Adams has been featured in several podcasts and interviews as well.

On Aug 30 2020 - the first time Uniswap surpassed Coinbase Pro in daily trading volume, he tweeted:

Wow, Uniswap 24hr trading volume is higher than Coinbase for the first time ever. Uniswap: $426M, Coinbase: $348M Hard to express with how crazy this is.

Everyone knows this, everyone understand this and defi fixes this. The narratives play extremely well and imo will resonate with a wider audience faster than many seem to think. — Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) April 16, 2021

Today, the Uniswap v2 WBTC/ETH pair has $318m in it. If WBTC/ETH LPs instead provided to the range of 0.0295 and 0.0454 on v3 they could create the same amount of liquidity, and take on the same amount of impermanent loss with just 318/9.8 = $32m — Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) April 8, 2021

Dune and Foundation are his favorite sci-fi book series.