Uniswap Is Building The Liquidity Network For Everything | Hayden Adams

And so I think that, like, you know, there's just, like, this long-term strategic thinking, and when that stuff pays off, that's, like, some of the, like, the most kind of, uh, you know, motivat-motivating, uh, things.

And, like, so for example, Uniswap V4 hooks, right? Like, you know, Uniswap V4 was initially we started working on it almost maybe more like even, like, four years ago, and we spent years developing it, and, you know, we had all these ideas around how we could make the, the market structure of Uniswap just much more flexible and customizable and programmable.

And, you know, when we released it, we didn't have any of the hooks themselves built because we'd just spent the whole time building the platform.

And a lot of people were...

There was a lot of, like, skepticism, or like, "What can you do with hooks?" Or, you know, "What-- Uh, is it actually that big, big of an innovation? Can-- Will it actually speed up development? How will routing work?" And all, there was all these conversations and questions, and I think people didn't quite understand the, the, the power impact, and it's only even now, like, uh, maybe n- you know, uh, it's been a while, it's been out on the market for, like, a year or whatever.

It, it's only really now that we're starting to kind of see, uh, hooks have their, their really big moment, where people are starting to recognize, "Oh," like, "I can create a completely customized market structure and still have it work within the entire Uniswap ecosystem." You know, and I could do that, like...

It, it speeds up the development time.

Building a, a new AMM from scratch could take years.

Yeah.

And so, you know, having, being able to build something in a, in a matter of days and being able to have it be extremely customizable, like, that's really powerful.

But it took a long time for people to even, like, kind of like, grok the, like, the core thing here.

And so, you know, that's just an exam- like, one of many examples.

But, like, you know, just having these sort of, like, long-term vision and then having it sort of start to pay off, like, years out when, when there was like, along the way, there was, like, all sorts of, you know, conversations like is this, was this a bad decision? Was it, you know...

Should we have just built a more, um, you know, a more opinionated singular implementation of an AMM that doesn't give people as much flexibility, but, uh, adds some improvements on top or something? Uh, but, so it just, uh, feels really good to kind of see that pay off.

It's a gratifying feeling to be like, "I wasn't completely crazy two years ago when I said..." [chuckles]

Yeah.

Yeah.

I-

Yeah.

Well, and, and the, there's also the-

Another feeling that, yeah.

Yeah

... there's also just, like, the in- interesting dynamic where, like, when you're working in crypto, you have to make a lot of, like, very fast decisions, and you al- like, you have to, like, sort of balance your short-term decisions against your long-term.

And, like, sometimes you have to move really fast, like with, like, the launchpad we did recently, we, we actually moved very quickly from, like, "Should we build this?" to, like, "Let's build it," to, like, it shipped with, like, a matter of weeks, not, you know, years.

And so you sort of have to balance, like, when you're moving really, really fast, uh, with, like, when you're moving kind of like, uh, almost, like, really slow.