Community Update

Go and give it up for Devin. Hello. Thank you guys for being here. This is so wild. I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience.

And for those who I have not met yet, thank you for being here. And I am so excited to meet you later today hopefully. I am Devon, I am the executive director of the Uniswap Foundation and one of its co-founders as well. And today I am excited to talk about a few different things with all of you. I am going to talk a little bit about what today, Uni Day, the second technically but really our largest and craziest Uni Day yet, and why it is important to me, why it kind of is full circle as part of my crypto journey.

I'm going to talk about some of what the community has accomplished over the last year. I'm going to talk about why today's Uni Day really comes at a, as Bita mentioned, critical inflection point for Uniswap and DeFi as a whole. And I will talk about a little bit what is to come, what lies ahead of us over the next months and years. Now, first off, what does today mean to me? This moment, as I mentioned, kind of brings me full circle in my crypto journey.

Now, first off, what does today mean to me? This moment, as I mentioned, kind of brings me full circle in my crypto journey. This is my fourth DevCon. My first DevCon was back in 2017. This is post ICO era Ethereum, just to kind of situate in your minds what was going on in Ethereum at that point in time.

I was a grad student intern at ConsenSys, and I was invited to a team off-site in Cancun following the Cancun DevCon. I remember being a little blown away that an entire industry basically deceived the world into going on spring break with one another at a resort in Mexico, but went there and really had an incredible experience. We worked hard during the day, ate really amazing quesadillas for dinner, and then closed the night with karaoke. And I remember leaving that week a little hungover, but also excited and literally feeling like I was buzzing from energy, from the energy of that week, of our team coming together, like living together, literally living and breathing all that we wanted to accomplish on Ethereum and build together in the coming months and years. And following that, I went to Prague in 2018 and more recently, Bogota in 2022.

And when Ken, my co-founder and I, were creating the Uniswap Foundation back in 2022, right before Bogota, we talked about some of the North stars for the foundation and what we wanted the foundation to achieve. Now, for anyone who has ever manifested anything, you know, one of the key ingredients in a successful manifestation is getting very clear and specific, getting very detailed about what the manifestation is. And amongst other goals, me and Ken kept coming back to this idea of creating a DevCon for the Uniswap community. There's something about DevCon that has always energized me and really excited me. DevCon represents thousands, or really tens of thousands, of people from all walks of life, all ages, from all lifestyles, from dozens, maybe hundreds of countries, coming together from around the world, in some cases 10 to 20-hour flights, to learn new things, meet new people, to hack, and really celebrate this new era of the internet that we are all building together.

I've always left DevCon feeling energized and uniquely optimistic about the future. And sometimes being in crypto, it can be hard to be optimistic. It can be pretty brutal at times. We've been through bear markets, we've been through pretty tough regulatory regimes, and the emotional roller coasters of crypto Twitter and the Uniswap governance forum. Sometimes it feels like we've been through wars together.

DevCon represents a week of celebration and community, where even though we may have our differences, we literally and metaphorically physically unite. We chat, we hang out, we side event, we rave. I wanted to harness this energy and create something like this for Uniswap and our DeFi community. It kind of blows my mind that we have hopefully achieved some version of that this year with Uni Day. Now, let me talk a little bit about myself and the Uniswap Foundation.

The UF has played a leading role in setting up this event alongside the Unichain team, folks from Uniswap Labs and Flashbots. Let's give them a quick round of applause, recognize them. I created the foundation a little bit over two years ago with Ken to support and grow the Uniswap community. So what exactly does that mean and what exactly do we do? We have worked with some of the industry's leading developer education companies to onboard and educate experienced Solidity developers on how to build on and work with Uniswap.

We've developed an industry leading and first of its kind DeFi research conference and fellowship, which is led by some of the most recognized thinkers in the space. And while our DAO is one of the oldest relatively in the space, we work to support our delegates in growing and professionalizing, grappling head on with some of the challenges that come with effectively scaling and evolving decentralized protocol in DAO. We also create forums like this, like today, to support our community, to hopefully connect you with one another. The foundation is a separate and independent organization from Uniswap Labs, which is a wonderful and well and duly recognized company within the crypto space, founded by Hayden Adams, which is a core contributor to the Uniswap protocol, and newly Unichain. We're also a separate and distinct organization from Uniswap governance.

The DAO and its delegates who govern the Uniswap treasury and set core parameters on the protocol. I'll get a bit more into what we've done and what lies ahead. But first I want to introduce the foundation team. Literally. So can folks on the foundation please raise your hands around the room?

Great. Mostly they've congregated in the back over there. So I want you, our guests, to look around and identify one person on the foundation team you'll go up and introduce yourself to later. We want to meet you and we want to learn about what brings you here today. And we also want to chat about how we can support you.

Okay. You guys can sit now. Thanks. Okay. Now I want to learn about all of you.

How many of you, raise your hands, are building on top of Uniswap in some capacity? A hook, an app, a protocol? How many of you have participated in a hackathon, a Uniswap hackathon, or the hook incubator? Do we have any of our hook incubator alumni here? Awesome!

Woo! . Where are our delegates? Where are our delegates? Where are our delegates?

Woo! . And how many of you have conducted some DeFi research? Digging into the data, digging into the code. Love it.

Woo! Give them some love. So excited to have all of you here today. As I said, today comes at an inflection point for Uniswap. The last two years have been big and exciting for the Uniswap community.

The foundation has, thankfully, been able to develop many programs and initiatives to cultivate the community. Over the last year through our work with Atrium Academy and the Uniswap hook incubator we have onboarded and trained 450 experienced developers on how to build Uniswap hooks. These developers come from more than 50 countries around the world and some some groups have gone on to raise VC funding, like Semantic Layer, which we've been very excited to see pre-V4 even launching on mainnet. We've supported and worked with more than 100 delegates, creating forums for them to learn, discuss the issues and difficulties facing the protocol in DAO today, and providing resources to support their problem solving. In fact, just last night, we hosted a dinner for more than 40 delegates, one of several that we've hosted this year.

And we also created TLDR, the latest in DeFi research. First of its kind conference and fellowship, which last year was hosted at Columbia University, 250 attendees and a long wait list. I'm very excited to see how it grows and evolves over the next year. With all that work behind us, we're laser focused on what lies ahead with V4 and Juni Chain which was newly announced a month ago. In addition to representing a massive step technologically.

These deployments represent a prioritization and celebration of the community's builders. They literally make our developers first-class citizens within Uniswap. We're building the future of Uniswap together. Today, you'll notice that the lineup is not just the Uniswap Foundation and Uniswap Labs, but new core contributors, leaders across the DeFi space who are now collaborating with Uniswap, new grassroots builders, and more. I want to talk about a few of them before we kick off.

After seeing more than 100 contributions from builders outside of labs to v4, we're excited to welcome two core contributors to speak to us today Who are specifically working on uni-chain? we have flash bots who as I mentioned is also a partner in putting on today's event and Optimism and they're going to talk about their work on uni-chain how their work is helping to improve swapper and LP experience Through MEV alignment interoperability to scale aetherium and more We'll hear from some defFi leaders, some of our OGs, new and mighty innovators, DAO representation as well from friends with benefits and more. I'll be speaking with Stani from Aave later this morning on how collaboration amongst protocols is really the way forward for the future of DeFi. We'll have Circle DevRel lead Elton Tay give us a demo on how to build on Unichain with Circle's developer toolkit and Circle's chief economist Gordon Liao will talk through his thoughts on how to scale DeFi for global finance. We've got Cirella, we've got Morpho, we've got FWB, we've got Crypto the Game, we've got all the hits.

We've got Cirella, we've got Morpho, we've got FWB, we've got Crypto the Game, we've got all the hits. We've got all the hits that are coming later today. We'll also highlight our builders. So Bomeek from Atrium Academy is going to talk through his learnings building the Hook incubator over the last year. We've got Sauce, our resident protocol engineer, doing a workshop for our hook developers, a governance workshop for our delegates to highlight some of the committee's work over the last few months.

And lastly, but not least, of course, we have folks from Uniswap Labs who will talk through some of their roadmap for v4 and Unichain over the coming months. Now, there is still a lot more for us to do after today. In many ways, B4 and Unichain only represent the beginning of this next era for Uniswap. My team at the foundation is excited to continue to support our wonderful grantee partners, to continue to work through the hard problems with Uniswap's delegates, to kick off a new set of grants programs specifically focused on Unichain, which you can learn about from talking to our team today or from going to unichain.org.

And we're excited to collaborate with other talented teams in the space. So if you are one of those teams, please find one of us to speak with today. Now, as I said when I came up here, when I founded the foundation, it was one of our goals to create an event like DevCon for the Unispop community to recover from some of our collective trauma and to harness our collective energy. I hope today comes close to that. My wish for all of you today is to meet someone new, to learn something new, and to leave energized and excited about the future of Unispop and building together.

We're still in the early innings of all of this, and while I'm excited for today, I'm also excited and unique