No.048
Uniswap UNI
Connect a wallet, pick two tokens, hit swap. That's the whole experience.
๐ญ A wizard unicorn you meet through a website, not an app store. No sign-up, no password. Your wallet is your account, and the swap happens the second you approve it.
๐ฌ โNo account needed. Just plug your wallet in, tell me which two tokens, and I'll quote you a price on the spot. You'll see exactly what you're getting before you tap yes. โจ๐ฆโ
- Using it feels like a website, not a company: connect a wallet and swap, with no sign-up and nobody holding your coins.
- The price you're quoted comes from a shared token pool and a math formula (xยทy=k), not from buyers and sellers haggling on an order book.
- Buying the UNI token doesn't get you fee discounts. It's a voting chip for how the exchange is run.
๐ The Story
Open Uniswap and there's no log-in screen waiting for you. You click "Connect wallet," approve the pop-up, and you're in. Pick a token to spend, pick a token to receive, and the page instantly shows the rate. Tap swap, confirm in your wallet, wait a few seconds for Ethereum to settle it, and the new token lands in the same wallet you arrived with. Nobody ever held your coins for you. That whole flow is what Hayden Adams set loose on Ethereum's mainnet on November 2, 2018, he'd been a mechanical engineer, got laid off, taught himself to code, and built this after a friend pointed him at a Vitalik Buterin blog post.
Here's the part that trips up newcomers: the price isn't coming from other traders. It's coming from a jar. Two tokens sit in a shared pool, and the rule is that their amounts multiplied together stay fixed (xยทy=k). So when you buy the side you want, you're draining it from the jar, and each extra coin you pull out costs a little more than the last. On a big, deep pool you'll barely notice. On a thin one, your own trade visibly moves the price against you. That's "slippage," and Uniswap shows you the number before you commit.
If you'd used it even once before September 2020, you got a surprise. Uniswap reached back through its own history and dropped 400 UNI into every wallet that had ever made a swap, free. People who'd paid a couple of dollars in gas months earlier woke up to tokens worth thousands. Holding UNI today is mostly a vote: it lets you weigh in on how the protocol runs, like the late-2025 decision to start using fees to burn the supply. It won't make your swaps cheaper.
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
People drop token A and token B together into one pool (a jar). The people who supply those tokens are called liquidity providers (LPs), and in return they share in the trading fees. When someone wants to swap A for B, they don't wait around for a match on an order book, they swap straight against the pool. The price is set automatically so that the two amounts multiplied together always stay the same (xยทy=k). The more A you buy, the less A is left in the pool, so its price climbs.
๐ Light & Shadow
- No account, no KYC, nobody custodying your coins. Your wallet is your login, and you keep control the whole time
- You can trade tokens that just launched an hour ago. If someone made a pool for it, you can swap it, long before any big exchange lists it
- Want to earn instead of trade? Drop two tokens into a pool as a liquidity provider (LP) and you collect a cut of everyone's swap fees (this is the original AMM, so the pattern is everywhere now)
- Every swap costs Ethereum gas on top of the trade. When the network is quiet it's cheap; when it's busy, a small swap can cost more in fees than it's worth
- The freedom to list any token cuts both ways. Scam tokens and fake copies show up in the same search box as real ones, so the contract address is on you to check
- Becoming an LP isn't free money. If the two token prices drift apart you can end up worse off than if you'd just held them, an effect with the confusing name "impermanent loss"
- UNI itself has no supply cap (roughly 2% yearly inflation was planned after year four, though a fee-based burn was voted in during 2025)
๐งฌ Evolution line
Uniswap isn't a fork of another coin, and it has no siblings. It's its own protocol running on top of Ethereum, so Ethereum is its 'parent,' while several exchanges like SushiSwap that forked Uniswap's code are its 'children.'
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What is Uniswap?
- It's a 'decentralized exchange (DEX)' that runs on Ethereum. With no company and no order book in the middle, it uses tokens that people have pooled together to set prices automatically and swap your coins. This style is called an automated market maker (AMM). UNI is the governance token used to help run (vote on) the protocol.
- Are 'Uniswap' and 'UNI' the same thing?
- 'Uniswap' is the name of the exchange (protocol) that swaps your coins, while 'UNI' is the token you use to help vote on how that exchange is run. Uniswap has no blockchain of its own, UNI is an ERC-20 token that lives on top of Ethereum.
- If there's no order book, how is the price decided?
- Two tokens are pooled together, and the price is set automatically so that the two amounts multiplied together always stay the same (xยทy=k). Buy a lot of one token and it shrinks in the pool, so its price goes up. Instead of people shouting bids, a 'math formula' sets the price.
- Where can I buy it?
- The UNI token is listed on most crypto exchanges, you can find it on major platforms like Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance. (This is general information, not a recommendation of any exchange or an invitation to invest.)
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK ยท 2026-06-04).