In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with MC Lader and Marvin Ammori, who spent four years together helping build Uniswap into one of the most important companies in decentralized finance. MC was President and COO; Marvin served as Chief Legal Officer after a long career as one of the internet’s leading policy lawyers.
We traced their shared slow hunch that technology can shift power: first through the open internet, and later through open financial systems.
We also spoke about the parallels between the net neutrality battles of the 2000s and the present-day struggle over how crypto is regulated, the challenge of building in the face of policy headwinds, and why stablecoins, programmable markets, and open protocols are placed to be the next rails for global finance.
This was a fun conversation, recorded at a moment when the policy climate for crypto is starting to thaw.
Hope you enjoy!
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 Cold open - policy headwinds under Gary Gensler
- 00:05:50 Their shared slow hunch: technology as a force for redistributing power
- 00:14:47 Winning the net neutrality fight
- 00:18:36 First encounters with Bitcoin
- 00:21:14 Parallels between the open internet and DeF
- 00:22:58 Spotting early policy threats and forming the DeFi Education Fund
- 00:23:34 Marvin recruits MC to Uniswap Labs
- 00:29:27 Scaling Uniswap from a tiny team to a full-stack protocol
- 00:34:36 Navigating growth amid SEC opposition
- 00:39:11 Gary Gensler’s impact on US crypto entrepreneurship
- 00:40:45 Stablecoins as the “lily pad” for mainstream adoption
- 00:43:20 Shifting perceptions on Wall Street
- 00:46:12 What’s next: stablecoins, tokenized markets, and on-chain identity
- 00:47:00 Building open, permissionless financial infrastructure
- 00:51:52 Potential risks: fraud, systemic stability, surveillance
- 00:55:45 Stablecoins vs. the fragility of traditional banks
- 00:57:53 Privacy, regulation, and zero-knowledge proofs
- 01:00:00 From DeFi to AllFi: what moves on-chain first?
- 01:04:11 Building for consumers versus institutions
- 01:06:03 Making money feel more human
- 01:08:49 Access to capital as a pillar of opportunity
