HAYDEN Adams is the multimillionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap.
But what is story behind Hayden Adams and what is his net worth?
Who is Hayden Adams?
Hayden Adams started his career at Siemens as a car engineer working on computational fluid dynamics but was let go after only a year.
“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,” Adams said.
Adams was introduced to the idea of Uniswap by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a Reddit post entitled “Let’s run on-chain decentralized exchanges the way we run prediction markets.”
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The post itself was based on work from prediction market Gnosis and even earlier theory from libertarian-leaning economist Robin Hanson.
Buterin’s article was sent to Adams by Karl Floersch in 2017 who worked at Ethereum at the time.
Floersch was a friend of Adams’ at Stony Brook University in New York and is now the chief technical officer at blockchain scaling firm Optimism.
Adams had resisted moving into crypto for years, even declining buying Ethereum at $0.30 a coin.
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But in 2017, after losing his job, that changed.
Floersch told Adams there was a lack of smart contract developers for Ethereum, so, he started to learn JavaScript and Solidity.
Adams said: “It was a very weird time.
“I was getting very into Ethereum and from that perspective, it was a really great thing.
“The layoff definitely turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Adams became determined to create a cryptocurrency exchange that would be more user-friendly than the ones on the market and founded Uniswap.
In the early days of his startup, Hayden Adams was working full-time and creating Uniswap on the side.
He said: “I was working so much I couldn’t take a break.
“My girlfriend at the time would say, ‘You can’t do this, you’re working all day, and then you’re going home and doing Uniswap.’”
It wasn’t long until Floersch introduced Adams to Etheruem co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who told him apply for an Ethereum Foundation grant.
Ethereum awarded Uniswap a $65,000 grant and the money was used to examine the project’s code.
In 2018, Hayden and his team launched Uniswap during DevCon 4, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that is now one of the most popular in the world.
In just 12 months, Uniswap facilitated transactions worth more than $1.8 billion.
After launching the UNI token as a stimulus payment for early developers, investors, holders of the Uniswap $SOCK token, and owners of any wallet that had interacted with Uniswap contracts, Uniswap saw a sharp increase in popularity.
What is a Uniswap?
Uniswap is a decentralized or Dapp application built on the Ethereum network.
It allows users anywhere in the world to trade crypto without a ‘middleman’.
Adams said in a Uniswap blog post that the city’s initial name was supposed to be Unipeg but he chose Uniswap because Buterin, who offered advice on the project whenever he and Adams crossed paths, thought it made more sense.
What is Hayden Adams’ net worth?
Adams’ net worth is estimated to be around $250 million.
He has an annual salary of $550,000 and a bonus of $850,000.
He also receives another $2.25 million annually in other bonuses.