United StatesHayden Adams
Hayden Adams graduated from Stony Brook University in 2016 with a degree in mechanical engineering and took his first job at Siemens designing systems for the energy sector. After being laid off about a year later, a friend in the Ethereum community encouraged him to learn Solidity, and he began building an on-chain automated market maker based on a constant-product formula that Vitalik Buterin had described. With no formal programming background, no team, and an early $65,000 grant from the Ethereum Foundation, he deployed the first public version of Uniswap on November 2, 2018. He went on to found Uniswap Labs, the company that builds the protocol's interfaces and the Unichain Layer-2, growing Uniswap into one of the most-used decentralized exchanges in crypto.