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

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

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 

Welcome Bankless Nation to this edition of State of the Nation. Today, I'm without my fearless partner, Ryan. He has 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. He's going to be the second time he's ever been on Bankless. And the first time that we've ever done a live stream 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 UniToken. 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. And also, I just want to pick his brain as an OG defy 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 I can do something cool. It might change. It might surprise a few of the listeners who are tapping into this live stream right now. And thank you for all the listeners who are tapping into live stream. 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. 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've 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, defy money market, defy, the thing that didn't break in the last two weeks or so, where everything centralized broke. Defy did not. And you can go to Notional banklist.c.c. Notional with the capital N to borrow or lend and get a fixed rate APY.

So whether you want to borrow ether or lend ether or borrow USC or lend USC, Notional will give you a fixed rate that you can count on with the auditability and transparency and dependability of Defendibility of Defi, unlike all of its C-Fi counterparts that collapsed in the last two weeks or so. Guys, I got to ask myself, what is the state of the nation? Because the state of the nation is we are back on the frontier. Utiswap, the beloved. Defi app, Unisop Labs, going in a slightly different direction this week in the world of

Defi and getting into something perhaps a little bit unexpected. And you guys probably have hinted, gotten a 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? The state of the nation is we are back on the frontier. So guys, I'm going to go get Hayden Adams. We're going to bring him live right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Rocket Pool is your friendly, decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH with Rocket Pool and get

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right 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. Thanks so much for having me. Of course. Before we get into the detail and the alpha and the announcement that's coming out of Uniswap Labs, I 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're and I like, you know, like I said, the right 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? 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, 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. And then in the out of the 2018 bear market, you know, we had all these different projects, Maker Dow,

Uniswap, compound that were built and launched. And that helps 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 uh you know around it in the world but you know to me something that's really exciting about these times uh one way that i think about 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 real time for discovering, you know, what is really working, 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 for web three in the future 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 doing this bear market you're going to you're going to stick it out and wait until the next bull run yeah it's pretty funny because i mean not i mean you know people

a lot of people are new to the space um 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 we're We're here because we see the fundamental value in promise of this technology. And I think we're still very much in the early days of 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. Some things being announced today. Some other things probably been announced later this summer.

So we have a lot going on. Our team has grown a huge amount. When we launched V3, we were about 12 people. So when we launched V1, it was one person, V2 was four people, V3 was 12 people. And today we're about, well, post the announcement today about 85. So our team has grown a lot. We're parallel processing some stuff. Yeah, 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. Yeah, wow, that is pretty damn good growth. Does that 85 number, as crypto prices go down, does that 85 number, number of you know heads that you have to employ is that number scare you or are you feeling good about that I think that you know we're feeling quite good about our positioning today yeah I see that we didn't grow too fast and we're definitely slowing down a little bit now we had 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 have we definitely have plenty of runway to build through the to 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. 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 I've 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, Uniswap Labs is going in a handful of different directions, not just one different direction.

And let's actually talk about Uniswap Labs. You want to say something? Go for it. I just, you know, I'd say that we are working on a number of 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. 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,

that got released is Uniswap Labs versus Uniswop Protocol. Can you explain the difference between these two things? Who is leading the progress of the Uniswop the protocol and who is leading the progress of Uniswap laps? Because you've said a lot of we, right? Uniswap started at one person and then Unswap V2 started at four people, Unswap V3 had 12 people and now you're at 80 people. You said we're we a lot. Who's we? And like how do we think about the differences between Uniswop Labs and Uniswap Protocol? That's a really good question, and I hope it will be very clarifying. So Uniswob Labs is a company where a software development company, product development company,

and the Uniswop protocol is a decentralized protocol for exchanging tokens on Ethereum and on other, and other EVM chains. So much the way that the Ethereum Foundation or consensus does not, you know, unilaterally control the Ethereum network. The UNISWOP protocol is decentralized. We're kind of like the Satoshi or the Vitalik of the USWP protocol and that we helped, I mean myself and other people at the company helped create the protocol.

But it's highly decentralized. It runs on its own. You know, piggybacks off the decentralization of Ethereum and other blockchains and allows people to trade tokens with each other peer to peer. There's of course also, also, the unitoken and the unit swap governance system. So, you know, way back in DFI summer,

there were, you know, one of the ideas and values that came out was community ownership and community participation. And, you know, having, giving, you know, communities and early participants, you know, almost like a say and part of the direction of, you know, decentralized platforms and projects. And so, you know, the Unitoken

and Uniswap governance system is, is really meant to be a system that exists around the UNSWOP protocol, governing the USWP protocol, and overseeing its direction. And maybe even when we speak about decentralization, there's a lot of different types of decentralization. To me, the most decentralized thing is something that is automated and autonomous and can run on its own without any governance required.

And so that's why the vast majority of the USWP protocols, 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 is, you know, broader distribution and ownership. And so, you know, when we, did that you know the original uv a big part of that was giving uh you know a lot of ownership to the early you know community members and users and so now you know the there's a further

decentralization of that part of things so unisop labs um and then you know out of the unespop governance system we've had a whole bunch of separate independent teams and projects spin up with direct funding from from the governing system and uh that report back to the government system. So, you know, the most popular, or I say like the most successful initiative probably to come out of governance, although it's been a whole bunch. It's probably Uniswop Grants Program, which, you know, is led by Ken, who, you know, before you 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 2018. And so now, you know,

he's leading the UNSWOP grants program. Since, you know, he put a proposal directly to the token holders and governance system and received some funding. And since then, he's allocated out to a, I believe 100, they just put out of 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, all these different things built on top of the UNSWP protocol. So UNISWAP labs, you know, and you can,

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

And so very similarly, you know, Uniswap Labs, the company, we have some, you know, smart contract developers, but in addition, we are also building a number of products on top of the you know within the broader web three ecosystem that you know we think are really important to the growth of the ecosystem and so yeah i mean i can pause there if you have follow questions can keep going but that's kind of a rough breakdown yeah right so we got the uniswap foundation which uh you know banklist listeners will remember we once uh ran and uniswap governance and grant programs right but uh oh excuse me unuswap yes right the the the governance system, the Uni grants, and all that stuff.

Bankless listeners will once upon a time, remember the Uniswop ad that we ran on bankless and we got that through the Uniswop Grants Foundation. Or is it Grants Foundation? Grants Program. It's a grants program. Grants program. Yeah. So they submit governance proposals directly to the government system.

Right. And so like that's how and that's how the ad, the Uniswap ad came on bank list, 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 lab 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?

Yeah, I'd say that I think that that's right. With the added, like, I'd say that Uniswap Labs is, you know, our primary product today is the Uniswop Web App, which is, you know, the most popular interface. You know, 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 arbitrage, by bots, by other interfaces. So 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, Unself Labs is really excited. Maybe one way, like one way I approach even what we work on and what we build. What we want to do is we want to, you know, we're not working on Defi or Web 3 or Ethereum just for its own sake. We're doing it because we want to add value to the world. 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, it 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. But I think that, you know, even when you look at the state of uniswap today, the UNIFPRA protocol has something like 70 to 80% market share in decentralized exchange.

And very few people will say like the core blocker to further growth of Web3 and DFI is, you know, efficiency of the UNISO 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 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, Uniswop and other Web3 protocols 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 use 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 Web3 as well as, you know, a developer audience making it easier to build on top of, you know, Unipop 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. 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, Web2 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 trainings and like all these. these other use cases that can be built out of the protocol around with other other utilities as well. Would that be a good summary? Yeah, yeah, basically, you know, Uisop V3, but, you know, also Ethereum and Web 3 more broadly. You know, I'd say that not 100% of everything will ever do in the future will be entirely on Unisop V3.

I think that there's like a lot of other sort of ways that we can add value the ecosystem. For what it's worth it, 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 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 see ourselves adding a value to Web3 more broadly as well in addition to making, you know, unlocking the value of the Utah protocol. 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 Dietz. Give me the deets, my man. What's the alpha? What did, what happened? What did uniswap release? What's going on? Yeah. So I'm going to start with saying that, you know, today the world of ERC 20 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 token, ERC to start with just ERC20. Like, the thing that excited me about here is the 20 tokens is that they represent digital ownership. And, you know, there is sort of, you know, there's almost like the file format 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 ideas 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 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. 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. I guess I'm still teasing. But I think that's okay. 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. And so, you know, to me, what's so exciting about EERC20 tokens is that they help unlock, you know, the ability to create new assets, represent ownership, you know, with the UNSWP 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 it's worth, our mission statement at UN swap lab is unlock universal ownership in exchange, 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.

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. 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 and to our values. And so, okay, I think I'm teasing 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 the very early days of them. And we're very early in the days of just like the interplay between the 30 tokens and NFTs. So that's why we're so, so incredibly excited to you know announce that Uniswop Labs has acquired Jeannie. Jeannie for people who don't know is the first or was the first NFT marketplace aggregator.

So I think most people know about OpenC and other NFT marketplaces that let you buy and sell and discover NFTs. Jeannie basically lets you buy and sell and discover NFTs across all the different marketplaces. So, you know, in addition to OpenC looks rare, Coinbase NFT, rareable, you know, all the different NFT marketplaces. And so, you know, we acquired their team. there were a team of around 15 people. 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 UNISwb 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, for all digital value as opposed to just ERC20 tokens. 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 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 115s, it doesn't matter if it's just a token that you own. UNOSOP 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 kind of the high level of summer here? 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 from the from the year C 20 space I think the NFT space is well it's been around for a while it's still a little bit younger in an earlier stages than the defy 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 uniseox 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. And in NFTs, that can be kind of exchanged for I think some people might realize they're on a bank list. And, you know, so the UNIFT has been around for a long time and it's also one of the first instances of crypto fashion. And then in addition, at the UNISwap V3 launch, we had two things that came out with for NFTs. One was the Uniswap V3 launch video. We launched as an NFT with People Pleaser. And that actually

spawned Pleaser Dow and a whole bunch of things that came out of that. And then the Uniswap V3 LP positions were also NFTs. And we're basically the first or one of the first instances of on-chain generative SVG art. 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 NewC20 space and

bring it with us to the NFT space. So we're really excited. GM, yes. GM, GM, yeah. I'm about to play a video, but just a real quick, 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 long it's been, three years, looking back to 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 to call your baby primitive hit and it's made great strides. But like now I'm wondering if we're kind of on that same trajectory with NFTs. Because like NFTs are also in very much need of liquidity and more liquidity tooling. And so I want you to think about that question, wow, I play 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 going to just hear the music, but here we go. All right, so there was that.

So yeah, NFT is going to get built into app.uniswap. I can't remember the URL. It just auto-poppopplopped in my browser. But the main unit swap front end owned by the labs. And so eventually, like, not only am I going to go to the uniswap page to swap my ERC20 tokens, but also to swap my NFTs. Is that kind of the idea? Yeah, exactly.

And I think that's just a starting point. And also by 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, bit on them. So, yeah, what you hope for, you know, people who want to come into the space buy an NFT. 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 you in the spot. Beautiful, beautiful. Now, Hayden, there is an air drop 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.

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go to Lido.Fi to get started. That's L-I-D-O-F-I to get started. All right, Bankless Nation, we are back for the second half of the show. Hayden, there's anirdrop coming. Can you talk about the details of theirdrop associated with Jeannie? I can lightly talk about the details.

So, yes, one air-drop, 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 there are 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, you know, 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 doing a, as part of the, as part of the acquisition, we allocated a bunch of money to basically airdrop to historical historical genie users.

So the air drop is going to be in USCC. I think it's going to be everyone who's used genie more than once. It's going to get at least some USC. And then, yeah, and then they had an NFT that they had released a while ago and some people who own their NFT. we'll get a little bit more. But, you know, full details will be announced soon. You can't farm this air drop. 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 Juni will be rewarded and sharing the value. So what's the, this is the first air drop that I've heard that is of a stable coin, rather than a brand new native token. So like there's literally just not a valueless governance token being hairdropped, straight up like cash. Can you talk about it a little bit about that choice?

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 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 in USC seem to make the most sense. But why do an AirDrop at all? If this was like a private acquisition of Unoswap Labs from another private company, like why pay the community any money at all? Because, again, you know, where did the value in Jeannie come from?

Where did, you know, how did Jeannie get to where it was? It was off its, you know, it was because of its early users, its early community members and supporters. And so, you know, when we acquired Jeannie, we wanted to reward the early users and supporters of Jeannie. rather than, you know, it seemed like obviously the D&T members and, and founder and stuff got, you know, we're rewarded. But we also wanted to make sure that some of the value is to set aside for the early

community members who, you know, used it as well. And, you know, if they, you know, come along and become, you know, Uniswop NFT community members, then we're very happy and would love to have them. Is there still, I'm going to go ahead and guess you're not able to answer this question. but I'm going to go ahead and ask it. Anyways, is there still the possibility of a genie token on the table? I think that is highly unlikely. So I don't think people should speculate on that or, yeah, that is highly, highly unlikely.

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. It's more like 15. 15. Okay, well, congratulations to all 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? 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 reasons, like working with them on a acquisition over the past, you know, month or two has been really, um, You know, it's been really great to work with them. You know, we wouldn't have done it if we hadn't clearly aligned on the vision and the values and the mission. You know, there's throughout all of it, their founder, Scott, and the rest of their team has been really, you know, awesome to work with. So, you know, their whole team is now working towards what we're calling the unification.

And, you know, soon, you know, soon will be, you know, like it will all be one, you know, unified team. And that's really, you know, basically merging the two products. So building their features and functionality directly into the Uniswob web app. And that's where we're going to start. And so there's definitely some work to do to get to that and to get to sort of feature parity with them today in our experience. But then from there, you know, we're going to work together on a unified roadmap across, you know, tokens and NFTs. There's going to be one team and we're going to, We're going to work towards a vision for the app. Well, as somebody who always ends up going to univop to swap my tokens

and then kind of gets confused, it's 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 Jeannie 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?

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

Yeah. 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 Uniswop Labs? Yeah, I don't know if I can make more than one announcement today, but I guess what I'll say is that, and I don't know if I can make all the alpha, 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 gonna do to kind of improve the experience. And we really wanna sort of, you know, a lot of people, as you said, use both NFTs and here 20 tokens. And we wanna really work to support, you know, both of our user types as well as, you know, start to better support.

Again, our early days, we're all about the protocol, called today we're all about, you know, making it up more accessible. And so, you know, I think historically, I guess this is some of the Sunnetwork. 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. What I mean by that is like creating new token pairs, like providing, providing liquidity with a lot of capital efficiency, providing liquidity with little capital efficiency, you know, 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 there's this 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 the, 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, not to support our consumers, our swappers, our NFT users, but also our, you know, LPs, the equity 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 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 three it to me web three is like it's just the it's like the next iteration of the internet right the internet democratize you know information and access to information and the ability to spread and share information and it did a lot of it on the backs of standardized information

sharing protocols um you know SMTP for for uh for uh emails and, you know, HTTP 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 primitive people to put together to build the internet. And to me, Web3 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, build directly into the internet. 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 Web3. And I think that like it's going to, you know, you're going to start to see like convergence. Today there's like a lot of separation between like the social platforms, the cultural centers and the financial institutions. And I think here we're going to start to see like culture and ownership and community. And so here we're going to start to see like ownership and value, you know, brought much closer to culture and social interaction. And it's all going to 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 like a lot in the long term we can do to start to make, you know, you can like ownership and value a lot more accessible, a lot more like culturally present and relevant and a lot more social community oriented. And so that to me is like a really exciting frontier. And to be honest, like having, you know, 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 going to be built. And they're not all going to be built by us. They're going to 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 competitors. And 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. I was like strictly like that strong league or to the extent that it's competitive with something, it might still really be positive some. 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 came to Unswap from it. And I think similarly, we're going to see that in the NFT space. While there's a lot of different teams, they're going to all have different users 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's just like a lot of value in cool things to go around. And so we're really excited to also just like collaborate really closely with other people in the NFT community and world. Yeah, and build towards a better future. I think if there's one thing that I really took away from this interview, Hayden, is that there are 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 Uniswop 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 Unswap Labs has up its sleeve and also really just what the you 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. So Hayden, next time Uniswob 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. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. It's been really great talking to you. And so we will get all the links for checking air drops and claiming air drops 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 air drop coming your way,

you make sure to hit up bank lists because we'll do a show on it. Risk and disclaimers for everyone, of course, ETH is risky, crypto is risky. NFT yield aggregators are probably, or 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.