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

Transcript

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 banquets we persist nonetheless today on the show we're bringing on hayden adams he's gonna 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 you swap just announce something if you go search the interwebs that announcement just came out they announced something uh and it does indeed include the word airdrop but no it is not the uni token uh so we're gonna 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 uh so we're going to talk about everything that's going on over on the uni-swap lab side

of things and also i just want to pick his brain as an og d5 founder that built something really really cool in the 2019-2020 bear market that exploded in 2021. uh i want to pick his brain about how he's feeling in the 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 uh what's going on over there at uniswap labs and what they're up to over there because i'm doing something cool uh it might change um 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 the 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 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 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 d5 money market defy the thing that didn't break in the last two weeks or so where everything centralized broke d5 did not and you can go to notional bank list cc slash notional with a 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 usdc notional will give you a fixed rate that you can count on with the auditability and transparency and defense dependability of defy unlike all of its c5 counterparts that collapsed in the last two weeks or so uh 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 uh uniswap uh the beloved defy app uh uniform labs going in a slightly different direction this week uh in in the world of d5 and getting into something up perhaps a little bit unexpected and you guys probably have hinted gotten the 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 then they say to the nation is we are back on the frontier so guys i'm gonna go get hayden adams we're gonna 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 east with rocket pool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your east and use it in d5 at the same time you can get four percent on your east by sticking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocket pool is the only

staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating nodes running a rocket pool node is easier to set up than running a solo node and you only need 16e to get started why would you do this you get an extra 15 staking commission on the pool to ease so your apy is boosted so if you're bullish east staking you can increase your apy and get some extra tokens by adding your node to the decentralized rocket pool network which currently has over a thousand independent validators it's yield farming but with ethereum nodes you can get started at rocketpool.net and also join the rocketpool community in their discord you can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat so i'll see you there ave is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol and now ave v3 is here ave v3 has powerful new features to

enable you to get the most out of d5 including isolation mode which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types and also efficiency mode which allows for a higher loan to value ratios and of course portals allowing users to port their ave position across all of the networks that ave operates on like polygon phantom avalanche arbitram optimism and harmony the beautiful thing about ave is that it's completely open source decentralized and governed by its community enabling a truly bankless future for us all to get your first crypto collateralized loan get started at ave.com that's aabe.com and also check out the ave protocol governance forums to see what more than a hundred thousand dow members are all robbing about at governance.ave.com arbitram is an

ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use device and nfts over 300 projects have already deployed to arbitrarium and the d5 and nft ecosystems are growing rapidly some of the coolest and newest nft collections have chosen arbitrary as their home all the wild d-fire protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity using arbitrary has never been easier especially with the ability to deposit directly into arbitrary through all the exchanges including binance ftx hobie and crypto.com once inside you'll notice arbitrary increases ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas feed if you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users visit arbitrum dot io developer to start building your dap on arbitrary if you're a d-gen many of your favorite dapps on ethereum are already

on armatrom with many moving over every day go to bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your eth and other tokens in order to experience defy nfts in the way it was always meant to be fast cheap secure and friction free all right bank class nation i am pleased to bring back on hayden adams the inventor of the uniswap protocol and ceo of uniswap labs like many of us hayden got into the crypto industry by being convinced to by one of his friends to get into crypto so he does the ritual rite of passage by buying the top of 2017 uh and wrote it all the way down uh 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 how'd you like that intro of course of course and before we get into the detail and the alpha and the announcement that's coming out of unisop 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 uh and this was both you and i like uh you know like i said the rite of passage into the crypto world for us so as somebody who

has been through the bear market uh and bought the top of 2017 and wrote it all the way down like overall just feelings check in how you feeling right now this is down in the market but i'd say that you know i i guess the way that i view it is markets go up up and down really fast um and they sort of but they sort of still oscillate around this like fundamental value that's being built uh and you know what's been so exciting is over the past three years uh 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 uh 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 defy and then in the out of the 2018 bear market uh you know we had all these different projects maker dow uniswap compound that were built and launched uh and that helped set the stage for the next you know for the next round of new projects and uh you know so we we definitely have uh maybe the thing that's most different this time around is that there it does seem to be it used to be that crypto like every the thing that affected the crypto market was always things that were happening in crypto

um 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 around it in the world uh but you know to me something that's really exciting about these times uh one way that i think about it is that you know the pro any project can do well uh when everything is is rampant speculation and when everything is up um 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 and uh you know real use case um and so i think bear markets are real time for discovering you know what is really working what was what just seemed like

it was working and wasn't actually working um and you know out of that we'll be able to develop the next set of use cases in the next set of projects that that you know will set the stage for for web3 in the future and you know judging by how uni-swap 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 gonna you're gonna stick it out and and wait until the next bull run yeah it's pretty funny because i mean no 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 you know we're here because we see the

fundamental value and promise of this technology and you know i think we're still very much in the early days of the you know the projects and the value that we built um so we're definitely not going anywhere uh we definitely have a lot that we're working on you know some things being announced today uh some other things probably be announced later this summer so we have a lot going on um you know our team has grown a huge amount uh 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 uh uh well post uh you know the announcement today about 85. so our team is going a lot we're we're parallel processing some stuff um yeah we're we're really pumped and excited

you can see this is all right this is our soho office you can see a lot of people here hanging out having a good time yeah wow that is that's pretty pretty damn good growth uh does that 85 number as crypto prices go down does that 85 number of you know heads that you have to employ does that number scare you or are you feeling good about that i i think that you know we're feeling quite good about our positioning today um yeah i'd say 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 uh you know we have we definitely have plenty of runway to build through the through the bear market and you know

um we're probably not gonna grow to like 300 you know we're gonna we're gonna slow down our hiring um for sure uh but uh yeah no issues that are in there slow down the hiring but not end the hiring i love the sound of that uh unit swap still still hiring some people here and there um one thing that i i uh as listeners have paid attention i have made my way over to new york williamsburg so i actually got to take a peek around the office uh 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 uh worked on at union swap labs that uh we'll about to get into that announcement shortly um but just uh from

my perspective like unit swap labs is going in a handful of different directions not just not just one different direction and let's let's actually talk about unit swap labs uh you wanna say something go for it i just you know the i'd say that we are working on a number of different different things at once but it's always sort of a a clear unified you know vision and mission um and something that we're working towards and i i'd say as the different pieces come out it will sort of start to come together um uh yeah cool so we're getting some breadcrumbs we're getting some puzzle pieces we're gonna 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 bank list nation right now the last topic i want to get to before we get to the actual information they got released is unit swap labs versus unit swap protocol can you explain the difference between these two things uh who is leading the progress of the uniform the protocol and who is leading the progress of unit swap lapse because you're saying you've said a lot of wii right unit swap started at one person and then you swap v2 started at four people you swapped v3 had 12 people and now you're at 80 people you said would we a lot who's we and like how do we think about the differences between new swap labs and unit swap protocol that's a really good uh question uh and

i hope it will be very clarifying is um so uniform labs is a company we're a software development company uh product development company um and the university protocol is a decentralized protocol for exchanging uh you know tokens on ethereum and on other and other evm chains um so you know much the way that uh the ethereum foundation or consensus uh does not you know unilaterally control the ethereum network uh you know the use of protocol is decentralized uh where we're kind of like the satoshi or the vitalik of the uh of the us protocol and that you know we helped by me we me i mean myself and other people the company helped create the protocol uh but you know it's it's highly decentralized it runs on its own

it uh you know piggybacks off the decentralization of ethereum and other blockchains um and you know allows people to trade tokens with each other peer-to-peer um there's of course also the uni token and the units of governance system uh so you know way back in in d5 summer you know one of the the ideas and values that came out was community ownership and community participation um and and you know having giving you know communities and early participants uh almost like a say and and uh part of the direction of you know decentralized platforms and projects and so you know the uni token and uh the unifop governance system uh is is really you

know meant to be a a system that exists around the union swap protocol governing the use of protocol and you know overseeing its its direction um and you know maybe even when just when you speak about decentralization there's a lot of different types of decentralization um to me you know the the uh most decentralized thing right is something that is automated and autonomous and can run on its own without any governance required um and so that's why you know the vast majority of these protocols functionality and functions uh don't require any active governance um and so you know people can add liquidity and trade against each other and uh there's no sort of unilateral ability for governance to

prevent that or to control that um but when it comes to you know future growth and development and uh funding an ecosystem of projects uh around it uh you know having i'd say that like the next tier of decentralization is you know broader distribution than ownership and so you know when we uh did that you know the original uv airdrop right a big part of that was giving uh you know a lot of ownership uh to the early you know community members and users and so now you know the the there's further decentralization of that uh part of things so uniswap labs um and then you know out of the um governance system we've had a whole bunch of separate independent teams and projects spin up uh with direct funding

from from the government system and uh the report back to the governance system uh so you know the most popular or i'd say like the most successful uh initiative probably to come out of governance although there's been a whole bunch uh it's probably useful grants program uh which you know was led by uh ken who you know before used to lead the ethereum foundation uh grants program uh it was actually a funny story about ken he was on the grant committee that helped get unisoft its original grant uh from the ethereum foundation back in 201 in 2018. um and so now you know he's leading the uniform grants program uh since you know he put a proposal directly to the token holders and governance system um and received some funding and since then he's allocated out to a i believe a hundred and they

just put out a retrospective i believe 120 different uh projects in the ecosystem teams all around the world that are all building different interfaces education tools you know uh strategy liquidity strategies all these different things built on top of the us protocol um so unit swap labs uh you know and you can almost imagine if you look at the ethereum ecosystem the role of governance is similar to almost like the role of the ethereum foundation within ethereum um and then uh you know unit swap labs is actually a little bit more of something that looks like a little bit more like consensus in that we're building we you know consensus also has core development uh contributors um and and teams but uh in addition you know consensus is building a whole bunch of products that

are built on top of uh ethereum that that are valuable for the ethereum ecosystem um you know mutually beneficial right they succeed if ethereum succeeds but you know ethereum also succeeds with uh you know the the addition of their products such as inferior metamask and all that um so very similarly you know you swap labs uh the company uh we have some you know smart contract developers but you know in addition we are also uh building a number of products on top of you know within the the broader web3 ecosystem um that you know we think are really important to the growth of the ecosystem and so yeah i mean i can pause if you have a follow-up questions can keep going um but that's kind of a rough breakdown

yeah right so we got the uniswap foundation which uh you know bankless listeners will remember we once uh ran right uh unit swap governance and grant programs right but uh oh excuse me uh unit swap yes right the the the governance system the unit uni grants whole and all that stuff bankless listeners will uh once upon a time remember the uniswap ad that we ran on banklist and we got that through the unit swap grants foundation or the is it grants foundation grants grants program grants program it's a grants program grants program right so they bring governance proposals directly to the government system right and so like that's and that's how like the ad the unit swap uh ad came on bank list but we didn't go to uni swap labs for that we went to

unisop grants for that and that was answered by the uni token holders the unit swap lab side of things kind of seems like um a product software layer on top of uniswap in the same way that you like 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 unit swap labs too as in there are many many many products being built by new swap labs that will surround you to swap the protocol how do you feel about this distinction yeah i'd say that um i think that that's right um with the added like i'd say that you know swap labs is you know uh

our primary product today is the unispot web app uh which is you know the the most popular interface uh it you know it does around 20 of trading through the protocol um and you know another you know eighty percent is done either directly with the smart contracts by arbitrage or bots by other interfaces um so you know that's our primary product today and it primarily serves as an on-ramp and gateway to the to the protocol um but i think that moving forward useful labs is really you know excited uh maybe one way like one way i approach even what we work on what we build what we want to do is we want to you know we're not working on defy 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 that 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 uh be better for society 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 um and you know there's still a lot of protocol development and research and stuff that we want to think about and uh but um i think that you know even when you look at the state of unit swap today the user protocol has something like 70 to 80 market share and decentralized exchange um and very few people will say like the the core blocker to further growth of web 3

and uh and d5 is you know efficiency of the unison protocol right uh the core blocker is you know um the the difficulty onboarding you know the difficulties in the user experience uh uh people not feeling like they understand the use cases or how they can apply it to their daily life like the all the things that connect uh these these core underlying protocols which i think do are extraordinarily valuable and useful um to their daily life and so i think that a lot of what we're working on today uh you know especially as we've grown as a team is things that take you know unispot and other web 3 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 one uses it um and so you know we're looking at serving both like a consumer user audience um people you know everyday people who want to use web3 as well as you know a developer audience make it easier to build on top of you know uniform and other protocols as well as a professional trading audience so there's a lot of different people uh 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 uh 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 unit swap v3 code the

units of v3 software that's put that's on ethereum and that in order to unlock that full potential we need some like web 2 styled or 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 uh just like retail access like professional tradings and like all these other like use cases that can be built out of the protocol around with other other utilities as well would that would that be a good summary uh yeah yeah basically you know unicef v3 but you know also ethereum and web3 more broadly um you know i'd say that not 100 of everything we'll ever do in the future will be entirely on on unitsoftv3 i think that there's like a

lot of other sort of uh ways that we can out value the ecosystem for what it's worth it's not our first time that we've done you know uh even like you know simple examples like the tokenlist project that we we released a while which you know today is like the canonical way that people uh 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 we 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 bank of this nation enough we've provided definitely enough context so hayden let's go ahead and go right into this actual announcement give me the deets give me the deets my man what's the

alpha what did what happened what did unit swap release what's going on yeah so i'm going to start with saying that you know today the the world of erc20 tokens and nfts are almost viewed as like two separate ecosystems people think of it like the nft community the the web3 community the defect community uh it's also viewed as like these two separate things um but uh you know in my view like i i view tokyo we need to start with just 22. like my really the thing that excited me about these 20 tokens is that they represent digital ownership um and you know there's sort of the you know there's almost like the file format for for digital value or something and

you know to me ifts represent a video the same thing right it's just two different types of ownership um and they're both you know really powerful uh and you know the idea of ownership uh is really important to me i think that um you know there's so much value that exists in the world that to me is almost like uh like potential value it's like you know people you know the value of a community or uh the value of something someone creates um you know but because of the way that like value exists today in that like uh 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 um create an entire financial system for it and

different asset classes have completely different infrastructure um i guess i'm still teasing uh but i think that's okay um so different asset classes have you know 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 uh and and um you know some types of assets don't have any infrastructure at all right um and so you know to me what's so exciting about your c20 tokens is that they help unlock you know the the ability to create new assets uh represent ownership uh you know with the universe protocol create markets for that ownership so 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 um ford's worth our

mission statement at used labs is unlocked universal ownership in exchange um 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 uh universal to me means for everyone and everything in a standard way um you know ownership uh to me like so much wealth uh in the world accrues to people who own things and people who uh are able to create uh and represent the ownership of things and you know historically i think that a lot of um value has accrued disproportionate to people who have early access to owning something um and so you know unlocking sort of a more universal form of ownership and exchange uh to me will help you know

uh lower barriers of entry uh 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 um and uh to our values and so okay i i think i'm teasing enough uh with that in mind you know nfts are a big part of digital ownership um a lot of value can't easily be divided and that's that's you know you know where nfts come in uh and i think we're only in the the very early days of them and we're very early in the days of just like the interplay between your c20 tokens and nfts um so that's why we're

so so incredibly excited um to you know announce that unisop labs has a choir genie uh genie for people who don't know is the first uh or was the first nft marketplace aggregator so i think most people know you know about openc and uh other nft marketplaces that let you buy and sell uh you know and discover nfts um genie basically lets you buy and sell and you know and uh discover nfts across all the different marketplaces so you know uh in addition to open c looks rare uh coinbase nft um variable uh you know all the different uh nft marketplaces and so you know we acquired their team um they're they were a team of around 15

people um they're gonna be joining us and we're gonna be working on uh unifying our two products and building in a full nft uh experience directly into the unisoft web app um i think you know in parallel we're going to be working to improve the experience for all our existing users uh token holders or token uh you know people who want to trade tokens and access to kodi pools and work towards you know a much more unified um experience across the two and and essentially become you know a marketplace for for all digital value as opposed to just your c20 tokens and so hayden you didn't just see what i was showing on the screen but i was just showing the unit the genie front end uh you weren't able to see that in zoom uh and so the viewers were able to get a

tease for that uh and so i i think the the going back to like the statement the vision of unifop 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's just things that erc 20s erc721s erc-1155s doesn't matter if it's just a token that you own unisop labs is focused on democratizing access to ownership and it's using its genie by acquiring it to spread that power all across the internet is that the kind of the high level of summary here that that is said perfectly probably better than i said it um and i'll add that you know

we as a team are bringing a huge amount of expertise and knowledge from the from the uh erc20 space i think the nft space is well it's been around for a while it's still a little bit younger in its earlier stages than the d5 space um both of which are pretty new uh things um and you know it's also not our first foray into nfts for what it's worth um unisox we got one here um unisox was a project we launched in spring 2019 uh and was i think the first instance of nft liquidity pools um you know uh uh basically nfts that are backed by real world assets uh in this case physical socks um and in nfts that can be kind of exchanged for here's my tokens i think

some people might realize they're on bank list um and uh and yeah so the union stocks have been around for a long time and it is uh also one of the first instances of crypto fashion and then in addition at the unit swap z3 launch uh we had two two things that came out with for nfts um one was the uniswap v3 launch video uh we launched as an nft um with with uh people pleaser and that actually spawned pleaser dao and a whole bunch of things that came out of that um and then the uh the uniform v3 lp positions were also nfts and uh we're basically the first or one of the first instances of on-chain generative sdg uh art um and so i think that we're definitely

bringing with us a lot of experience in the smart contract space um a lot of kind of you know i think we're also known for just uh 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 unit swap was like the first time that that for them you know crypto or web free felt like usable um and so we we're trying to bring you know everything we brought to the the c20 space and bring it with us to the nft space um so we're really excited um gm i guess gmgm yeah i'm about to play a video but just a real quick um when we when uniswap launched v1 uh it was

like groundbreaking because we were all used to order book exchanges and now like going back and looking at unit swap v1 like fast forwarding four years or three years or however long it's been three years uh looking back to unit swap 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 hidden it's made great strides um but like now i'm 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 wanted you to think about that question while i play this cool awesome promo vid that you guys threw to me a little bit before the show that kind of will help i think

illustrate uh uniswap and nfts in the intersection of these things podcast listeners sorry you're going to just hear the music but here we go [Music] all right so there was that uh so yeah

nft is gonna get built into app.uniswap.uh i can't remember the url it just auto-populates in my browser but the main usernewshop front-end owned by the labs uh and so it is eventually like uh not only am i gonna go to the unit swap page to swap my erc20 tokens but also to swap my nfts is that kind of the idea yeah exactly um and i think that's just a starting point but uh and also by eventually i think you should think like fairly soon um i don't want to promise a date but um you know it's it's definitely not something that we're um 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 uh you know people who are diligent watching the video might have seen there are other new tabs as well um but you know adding a new tab for nfts you you can explore nfts across all the marketplaces you'll be able to you know uh uh you know buy them from directly within the site um you'll be able to list them as well bid on them uh so yeah we hope for you know people who want to come into the space buy an nft uh you don't want to think about you know which marketplace has has the liquidity that you want um so you know you can come straight to eating a stop beautiful beautiful now hayden there is an air drop in this conversation uh and so i want to pick your brain on that uh

but before we do that that is just perfect tease to tell the bankless nation all about there's an airdrop coming so we're gonna talk about that in the second half of the show right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible there is a brand new staking feature in the ledger live app today we all like staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms tezos solana and of course ethereum with ledger live you can take money from your bank account buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network all inside the ledger live app through a partnership with figment ledger also lets you choose which validator you want to stake your assets with and ledger is running its own

validating nodes offering a convenient way to participate in network validation and it even comes with slashing insurance ledger live is truly becoming the battle station for the bankless world so go download ledger live if you have a ledger already you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets the layer 2 era is upon us ethereum's layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day and we need bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life across is the fastest cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge with across you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets to the chain of your choice assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously across bridges are powered by uma's optimistic oracle to securely transfer tokens from layer 2 back to ethereum a token proposal is

being deliberated as we speak in the across forum where community members will decide on the token distribution you can have your part of across the story by joining the discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair fair launch of a cross if you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely go to across.to to bridge your assets between ethereum optimism arbitram or boba networks the era of proof of stake is upon us and lido is bringing proof of stake to everyone lido is a decentralized staking protocol that allows users to stake their proof of stake assets using lido's distributed network of nodes don't choose between staking your assets or using them as collateral in defy with lido you can have both using lido you can stick any amount of your eth to the

lido validating network and receive st eth in return ses can be traded used as collateral for lending and borrowing or leverage on your favorite d5 protocols all this without giving up your eats to centralize staking services or exchanges lido now supports solana kusama and polygon staking whatever your preferred proof-of-stake asset is lido is here to take away the complexities of staking while enabling you to get liquidity on your steak if you want to stake your east soul or matic and get liquidity on your steak go to lydo.fi to get started that's l-i-d-o-f-i to get started all right bank of this nation we are back for the second half of the show hayden there's an airdrop coming can you talk about the details of the airdrop associated with genie uh i can lightly talk about the details

um so yes one airdrop and you guys definitely succeeded in teasing that one um so i'd say you know something that we even actually saw recently um with with other acquisitions that have happened um you know i think that 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 of you know rewarding and sharing with the early community members um and participants in 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 you know doing a as part of the as part of the um acquisition uh we allocated a bunch of

money to basically airdrop to historical uh historical genie users uh so the the uh their job is gonna be in ustc um i think it's gonna be everyone who's used genie uh more than once um it's gonna get at least uh some usdc and then uh yeah and then they had an nfp uh that they had released a while ago and some people who own their nfts we'll get a little bit more um but you know full details will be announced soon you can't farm this airdrop we have a you know we we checkpointed it to before we made the decision to do it just like with the uh the uni launch and so um you know no way to farm it um but you know all the early users of me will

will be uh rewarded um and share and share in the value so what's the uh this is the first airdrop that i've heard that is of a stable coin rather than like a brand new native token so like there's literally just uh not a valueless governance token being hair dropped straight up like cash can you talk about a little bit about that choice yeah i think that like you know um historical genie users can choose what what they want to do right if they want to you know cash it out to their bank account um if they want to you know buy eth to reimburse for the gas that they spend in the early days if they want to buy uni if they want to whatever they want to do um they can do it um and so i think it's just about you

know giving the the recipients uh you know a choice it definitely made some of the accounting easier in terms of our uh on our end um and yeah we really just wanted to you know reward the early genie users and then they can choose um because there's no uh you know like the the genie protocol is more of a routing protocol it's not a liquidity protocol itself and they didn't have their own tokens so um doing it in usdc uh seemed to make the most sense but why do an airdrop at all uh if this was like a private acquisition of uniswap labs from another private company like why why pay the community any money at all uh because again you know uh where did the value in genie uh come from where did where did uh you know how did genie uh get to where it was it was off it's

you know it was it was because of its early users early community members and supporters and so you know when we acquired genie we wanted to reward the early users and supporters of genie rather than you know seemed like obviously the the gdp members and and uh founder and stuff got you know uh were rewarded uh but we also wanted to make sure that that some some of the the value was a set aside for the early community members who who uh you know used it as well and um you know if they if they uh you know come along and become the know uniform nft uh community members and we're very happy and i would love to have them is there still i'm gonna go ahead and guess you're not able to answer this question but i'm gonna go ahead and ask it

anyways is there still the possibility of a genie token on the table um i think that is highly uh unlikely um okay so i i don't think people should uh speculate on that or or um yeah that is highly highly unlikely okay so you you said you've acquired not just genie the product but also the team i think you alluded to like 12 people have they uh now that they are a part of unit swap it's more like 15. 15. okay well congratulations so to all of them i think joining uniform labs is a pretty awesome opportunity especially if you guys are growing and growing all your resources are they are you a ceo of unisop 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 we're fully integrating and merging our teams um and by the way i just want to shout out like you know one of the re like working with them uh uh on acquire on this position over the past you know month or two has been really um you know it's been really great to work with them um you know we wouldn't have done it if if we hadn't uh clearly aligned on on the vision and the values and the mission um you know there's uh throughout all of it there their founder scott has been and the rest of their team has been really you know awesome to work with um so you know their whole team is now working towards what we're calling the unification

um and and so soon you know soon we'll be you know hour like it will all be one unified team um and you know that's really you know basically merging the two products so building their features and functionality directly into the unit swap web app um and that's where we're gonna start uh and so there's definitely some work to do to get to that um and to get to sort of a feature parody with them today in in our experience but then from there you know we're going to work together on a unified unified roadmap across you know tokens and nfts um there's gonna be one team and we're gonna we're gonna work towards a vision for for the uh for the app well as somebody who always ends up going to uni swap to swap

my tokens uh 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 uh i'm also interested to see how the pricing dynamics work out and it's also i think important to note that genie is not an nft marketplace it's an nfc 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 um i think that we're really excited to take our all of our knowledge and experience when it comes to trade routing and aggregation like uh routing and uh trade execution smart contracts uh and really optimize and improve on what already exists in

the nft space um so i think that yeah there's definitely a lot of you know and uh beyond that getting to a world where you can swap any token for any nft sell any nft for every any token and have it uh be a really seamless experience um so yeah yeah i think that that's definitely something to you know to look forward to um yeah what else can we glean from this so you know i don't think anyone woke up this morning thinking that uni-swap labs was going to acquire an nft marketplace aggregator uh so like how what lesson should we should we learn from this is like what else unit swap labs is getting up to like what else is going on in the future road map of unisop labs yeah i i don't you know i don't know if i can make more than one announcement

today but um i guess what i'll say is that and you know i don't know if i can make all the effort but like i guess um first off you know there's a lot coming for our existing users as well uh there's a lot we're gonna do to kind of improve the experience um and we really want to sort of you know a lot of people as you said use both nfts and your c20 tokens and we want to really work uh to support you know both of our user types um as well as you know start to to better support again our early days we're all about the protocol today we're all about you know making it up more accessible and so um you know i think historically i guess this is some some alpha i'd say historically you know the uni swap web app has done a

really good job splitting the difference between a lot of different types of users um what i mean by that is like creating new token pairs like providing providing liquidity uh with with a lot of capital efficiency providing liquidity with little capital efficiency uh you know swapping tokens day trading there's like a lot of different users for the um web app and i think part of this because this really simple easy experience um 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 um for like the 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 just support uh you know our consumer uh our consumers our swappers our nft users but also our our you know lps um the you know the the liquidity providers the professional traders and just make sure that we're like building things for everyone um and improving the experience for everyone and so uh i guess you know maybe something to glean is that there's a lot more coming um both on across all of that as well as developers um and uh a few other things that we think about is just like um again maybe even further out uh when i'm thinking like years out

um to me the 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 democratized you know information and access to information and the ability to spread and share information um and it did a lot of it on the backs of standardized information sharing protocols um you know smtp for for uh emails and you know https for websites and even like you know whatever the 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 web 3 is about adding in you know ownership across different

forms of value exchange across different form of forms of value um you know and all that and a whole economy um you know built directly into the internet um and i think uh i guess some other thoughts i have here are like so first off like that's that's what we're working towards but then i think that um to bring it to the values that we have again the internet can be used for good and for bad um but i think everyone thinks knows that like the internet has been democratizing in many ways and it's increased access to information and so i think similarly like uh we want to build towards the positive use cases of web 3. um i think ultimately you know the same way that the internet was very um

very uh it's community-oriented uh very social um you know culture is really important uh these are all you know immensely important to web three and i think that like it's gonna you know you're gonna start to see like a convergence today there's like very a lot of separation between like the social platforms the cultural centers and and the um financial institutions and and i think here we're going to start to see like culture and ownership and community and so here we're gonna start to see like ownership and value um you know brought much closer to culture and and social

interaction and uh it's all gonna kind of swirl together and um 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 um to start to make um you know again like ownership and value a lot more accessible a lot more like culturally present and relevant and and a lot more social community oriented um and so that to me is like a really exciting front frontier and to be honest like uh having you know fungible and unfungible value feels like an important having both of those feel like a really important stepping stone to getting into this like broader uh world of cool

things that are gonna be built and they're not all gonna be built by us they're gonna be built by a whole world and community um there's a lot of you know something that we didn't really touch on uh is like competition and competitors and um the thing they'll say that there is like so much value to be built uh we don't necessarily view that what we're doing here i was like strictly like isn't that like that strongly or to the extent that it's competitive with something it might still really be positive some um 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 some uh with unit swap and ultimately a lot of value uh you know okay empty swap from it and i think similarly we're gonna see that

in the nft space while there's a lot of different teams and they're gonna all have different users and and uh maybe even be competing or not competing uh in general you know it's going to be really positive there's going to be a huge amount of value that's going to get built out of all of it um and you know there's there's just like a lot of value and cool things to go around and so um we're really excited to also just like collaborate um really closely with with other people in the nft community and world um yeah and build towards a better future i think if there's one thing that i really uh took away from this interview hayden is that there is 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 uh i did not i did not have on my 2022 bingo card uniswap labs acquiring an nft marketplace aggregator but after you've explained it to me it totally makes sense especially in in the context of democratizing asset ownership uh and so hayden i am excited to see what else unit swap labs has up its sleeve and also really just what the unit what the whole entire industry has up its sleeve as well uh 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 uh next time unisop labs uh does something cool you make sure to hit me up and we will bring you back on to talk about it then uh thanks for coming on my

man yeah thank you so much thanks so much for having me it's been really great talking to you uh and so we will get all the links and uh for checking air drops and claiming air drops into the show notes shortly after this so thank you everyone for tuning in to this a special episode of me flying solo uh but i got hayden adams here to do it with me uh 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 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 uh risk and disclaimers for everyone of course eth is risky crypto is risky nft yield

aggregators are probably 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 but