From Unemployed Engineer to DeFi King: How Hayden Adams Changed Crypto Trading with a Single Formula

Starting from Giving Up

In July 2017, 24-year-old Hayden Adams received a termination notice from Siemens. The mechanical engineer was underperforming in the field of heat flow simulation, and the company was also laying off staff. But Adams didn’t feel despair; instead, it was as if he had let go of a burden. He never thought he was suited for traditional engineering.

The turning point came from a phone call. His college roommate Karl Floersch worked at the Ethereum Foundation and was a blockchain enthusiast. During a three-hour conversation, Floersch painted a whole new world for Adams: fund flows without banks, applications without corporate control, systems driven by code rather than human decisions.

Adams made his decision. He would leap from mechanical engineering into the crypto space.

Learning to Code from Scratch

Adams returned to his old bedroom in the suburbs of New York. He had no programming experience, not even written a line of code. He self-taught with JavaScript tutorials on YouTube, read Solidity documentation, and understood Smart Contracts as machines—inputs transformed into outputs according to rules.

Progress was slow but steady. Every small success narrowed the gap between theory and practice. Floersch visited regularly, offering guidance and encouragement.

By the end of 2017, Floersch gave him a specific challenge: implement the automated market maker (AMM) concept mentioned by Vitalik Buterin in a blog post. This was a disruptive trading method—no longer requiring matching buy and sell orders, but instead pricing through liquidity pools and mathematical formulas.

A One-Month Challenge Turns into an Empire

Floersch demanded Adams build a prototype within 30 days and showcase it at the Devcon conference. Adams took on this hot potato.

But it took over a year to go from prototype to production. Adams repeatedly iterated on Smart Contracts, conducted security audits, and optimized the user interface. Vitalik advised him to rewrite the contract in Vyper and applied for funding from the Ethereum Foundation.

He received a grant of $65,000. This money changed everything.

November 2, 2018, Uniswap Officially Launches

The core formula is x × y = k—this constant product formula ensures that the product of the two tokens in a trading pair remains unchanged. The fewer one token has, the higher its price.

Adams deployed the contract at Devcon 4, announcing it to his 200 Twitter followers. Reactions varied. Developers appreciated its elegant design and permissionless architecture, but some doubted whether AMMs could compete with centralized exchanges.

Adams didn’t mind. Uniswap’s advantage wasn’t trading efficiency but:

• Permissionless: anyone can create a token market
• Trustless: liquidity pools automatically make markets without human intervention
• Composability: other applications can build on top of it

The Era of Wild Growth

In early 2019, daily trading volume steadily increased. By summer 2020, DeFi Summer exploded. Uniswap became central, with daily trading volume soaring from millions to billions of dollars.

Adams founded Uniswap Labs and secured a $11 million Series A funding led by a16z.

Continuous Iteration and Evolution

• V2 (May 2020): direct trading between any ERC-20 tokens, introduced flash loans, empowering the entire DeFi ecosystem
• UNI governance token (September 2020): airdropped 400 UNI to every address that used Uniswap, one of the largest airdrops in crypto history
• V3 (May 2021): concentrated liquidity increased market maker capital efficiency by 4000 times, attracting professional market makers
• Unichain Layer-2 (February 2025): a Layer-2 optimized for DeFi on Ethereum, using trusted execution environments and private memory pools, solving MEV issues, with transaction speeds of 200 milliseconds

From Code to Infrastructure

The launch of Unichain marked Adams’s upgrade from protocol developer to infrastructure provider. This Layer-2 network hides transaction details, processing transactions on a first-in, first-out basis rather than bidding by gas price. This prevents ordinary traders from being exploited by arbitrageurs.

The V4 version launched in 2025 introduced Hooks, allowing developers to customize pool behavior for specific scenarios.

Today

Uniswap handles $2-3 billion in daily trading volume across multiple blockchains.

From an unemployed engineer’s idea in a bedroom to a permissionless system processing billions daily, Uniswap proves that: decentralized systems can compete with traditional financial institutions.

Hayden Adams, with a simple formula x × y = k, has changed the way hundreds of millions of people trade crypto assets worldwide. That is the story of Uniswap.