Crypto history
2018: Uniswap makes pooled liquidity a trading venue
Automated market makers changed who could create a market and where execution costs appeared.
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People & projects
Trading against a pool
Hayden Adams created Uniswap in 2018. Its automated-market-maker approach allowed users to trade against assets held by smart contracts instead of submitting every order to a conventional central matching engine. Liquidity providers supplied the inventory and received a share of trading economics under the protocol's rules.
This made it easier for a token to acquire a market without winning approval from an exchange listing team. It also meant that a public pool could exist for an asset whose issuer, transfer behaviour or distribution was dangerous. Permissionless market creation and careful asset evaluation are separate properties.
The new market maker
A liquidity provider is exposed to changes in the pool's inventory. Arbitrage traders trade against a stale pool price when the outside market moves. Fees may compensate for some of that exposure, but an advertised fee yield alone cannot describe the complete return.
The evolution from early pools to concentrated liquidity added more control over where capital participates. It also made a pool's total value less informative without its active range. The pool equation and divergence loss explain these mechanics before the ANSEM investigation applies them to actual market claims.