Stony Brook Mechanical Engineering & Layoff
Hayden Adams studied mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University before working at Siemens on automotive simulation. In 2017, he was laid off and was persuaded by his friend Karl Floersch to learn Ethereum smart contract programming.
Inventing Uniswap
Inspired by a Reddit post by Vitalik Buterin describing an automated market maker (AMM), Adams spent a year self-funding and writing Vyper smart contracts to build Uniswap, launching the protocol at Devcon 4 in Prague in 2018.
Trillion-Dollar Protocol Volume
Uniswap eliminated order books entirely using mathematical constant-product formulas (x * y = k), processing over $2 trillion in lifetime trading volume and establishing Adams as the central pioneer of decentralized finance (DeFi).