Hayden Adams

Founder & CEO Uniswap Labs

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Hayden Adams is the founder and chief executive of Uniswap Labs and the inventor of the Uniswap protocol, the automated market maker that became the largest decentralised exchange on Ethereum and the template that most of decentralised finance copied. His origin story is unusually literal: trained as a mechanical engineer and working as one, he lost the job, was pointed at Ethereum by a friend, read a blog post by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin about on-chain market makers, and set about implementing it as a way to learn to code. The result, launched on 2 November 2018 with support from an Ethereum Foundation grant, replaced the order book with a constant-product formula and a pool of two assets, which meant anyone could list a token and anyone could provide liquidity without permission. In November 2025 he co-authored the “UNIfication” proposal, the most significant governance change in Uniswap’s history, which turned on protocol fees for the first time, began burning UNI, and folded most of the Uniswap Foundation’s staff into Uniswap Labs.

Career Highlights

• Invented the Uniswap protocol and launched version 1 on Ethereum on 2 November 2018, establishing the constant-product automated market maker as the dominant design for decentralised trading.
• Built the first version after teaching himself smart-contract development, supported by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
• Raised a $165 million Series B for Uniswap Labs in 2022, reported at a $1.66 billion valuation.
• Co-authored the “UNIfication” proposal, published on Uniswap’s own blog on 10 November 2025 with Ken Ng and Devin Walsh, and approved by Uniswap governance in December 2025.
• Through that proposal, activated Uniswap protocol fees, introduced Protocol Fee Discount Auctions and aggregator hooks, and created a mechanism to burn UNI from protocol revenue, including a retroactive burn of 100 million UNI from the treasury.
• Set Uniswap Labs’ interface, wallet and API fees to zero under the same proposal, shifting Labs from monetising its own front ends to growing the protocol, with a proposed annual growth budget of 20 million UNI.
• Joined the Uniswap Foundation board alongside Callil Capuozzo as part of the same restructuring, with most Foundation employees transitioning to Labs and a small grants-focused team remaining.
• Extended the ecosystem beyond the protocol into Unichain, Uniswap’s own layer-2 network, whose sequencer fees are directed into the burn mechanism.

Professional Journey

Adams trained as a mechanical engineer and worked as one, including a period at Siemens. Losing that engineering job in 2017 is the hinge of his career. A friend working in Ethereum suggested he look at the technology, and he began learning Solidity, the language used to write Ethereum smart contracts, with no background in software. His practice project was an implementation of an idea Vitalik Buterin had sketched in a blog post: an on-chain market maker that would price trades automatically from the ratio of two assets held in a pool, rather than matching buyers and sellers through an order book.

That project became Uniswap. He received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to continue the work and launched version 1 on 2 November 2018, at the Devcon 4 developer conference. The design’s significance was as much social as technical: because pricing was formulaic and liquidity was contributed by anyone, there was no listing process, no market maker to negotiate with, and no gatekeeper. Any token could trade immediately. That property made Uniswap the settlement layer for the wave of token issuance that followed and, later, the standard reference implementation that hundreds of other decentralised exchanges forked.

Uniswap Labs grew up around the protocol as the entity that develops the software, the web interface and the wallet, while the protocol itself runs autonomously on-chain and is governed by holders of the UNI token, distributed in a 2020 airdrop. This split is the defining structural feature of the business and the source of its central commercial tension: for years the protocol generated enormous trading volume while returning nothing to UNI holders, because the protocol fee switch was never activated, and Labs earned its revenue instead from fees on its own interface and wallet. In 2022 Uniswap Labs raised a $165 million Series B, reported at a $1.66 billion valuation.

In November 2025 Adams resolved that tension. With Ken Ng and Devin Walsh he published the “UNIfication” proposal on Uniswap’s blog, and Uniswap governance approved it the following month. It activated protocol fees, introduced Protocol Fee Discount Auctions and aggregator hooks, and directed revenue, including sequencer fees from the Unichain layer-2 network, into burning UNI, together with a one-off retroactive burn of 100 million UNI from the treasury intended to approximate what would have been burned had the fee switch been live since launch. In exchange, Uniswap Labs gave up the revenue it had been earning from its own products, setting interface, wallet and API fees to zero and taking a proposed annual growth budget of 20 million UNI instead. The organisational half of the proposal moved most Uniswap Foundation employees into Labs, left a small grants team at the Foundation, and placed Adams and Callil Capuozzo on the Foundation’s board.

The effect is to align Uniswap Labs’ incentives with the protocol and the token rather than with its own front end, and to concentrate development under a single organisation. It is the clearest statement to date of how Adams intends the relationship between a decentralised protocol and the company that builds it to work.

Education

Stony Brook University

B.S., Mechanical Engineering