Uniswap COO Sees The Future of Finance Decentralized

- Mary-Catherine Lader jumps to DeFi
- Lader sees the future of finance decentralied.

Mary-Catherine Lader Uniswap COO is bullish on crypto despite the market downturn. The Chief Operating Officer at Uniswap Labs is optimistic and sees great value in decentralized protocols specifically. Uniswap is the company behind the development of the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum.

According to Mary-Catherine, not all products within the crypto space are created equal, and that has been seen throughout the ongoing period of market cooling. In May Terra stablecoin collapsed and this made many centralized projects and lenders deteriorated and this led to investors loosing and market sentiment panicky.

A representative case by Catherine is, despite a decline in crypto VC investment Uniswap Labs announced a $165 million Series B funding round which values the company at $1.66 billion. Another thing that makes Uniswap stand out is the technology behind it. Unlike a centralized exchange Uniswap operates as a fully noncustodial, permissionless, and self-executing entity through the use of smart contracts and collections of a code that runs on a blockchain.

This technology can transform markets at a much greater scale and are more transparent, and when done right, have reduced risk of operating errors, and lower barriers to access.

This belief is what drove Lader to leave her Wall Street career behind, noting that “automated market-making and decentralized exchanges have huge potential in capital markets—well beyond its use in crypto today.”

Lader has held other several leadership positions at Goldman Sachs and Blackrock before Uniswap. She took an interest in crypto very early unlike most of her peers. This started at a seminar she attended in 2011 and she kept blockchain technology in mind throughout her career.

During a company-wide town hall in 2015 when she was working at BlackRock CEO Larry Fink responded to a few questions from employees, Lader recalled One question was about blockchain, and, according to Lader, Fink seemed to express that he viewed the technology as being mostly used for money laundering. She disagreed and in her opinion the opportunity BlackRock would regrettably miss by dismissing the potential of the technology.