Uniswap’s Hayden Adams pitches AMMs as engine of $34.6B tokenized markets

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has presented his own argument for why automated market makers (AMMs) should be at the center of the tokenization wave that has taken over global finance as markets continue to shift to meet the demand for always-on infrastructure. 

Hayden’s comments land as Uniswap has gone all out in its own push to claim major share in the tokenized stocks sweepstakes, which in itself is only a slice of the onchain real-world asset deposits approaching $4 billion, per Cryptopolitan reporting.

Why Uniswap’s founder says AMMs are better for tokenized markets 

Adams’ big pitch for blockchain tech and tokenized rails rests on how blockchains separately manage execution, custody, and settlement as separate layers while traditional market makers just bundle them together. 

So instead of concentrating participation among a few established firms that can manage all the vertical integration involved, Adams says blockchain tech lowers the barrier to entry.

In the scenario that Adams painted, AMMs are perfectly positioned because they favor closely related asset pairs, where passive liquidity carries lower inventory risk while still offering costs that compare favorably with big-time professional desks. 

Adams expects the onchain migration of assets to persist into the future, which will naturally reorganize trading around related pairs plus a handful of cross-chain routes and expand market access. The Uniswap founder also expects passive AMM strategies to start to operate in the same lane as index funds.

Adams’ tokenized push for AMMs follows on his January disagreement with AMM critics who called the undercompensation of liquidity providers a structural flaw. As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, the founder pointed to Uniswap’s pool growth as evidence that AMM liquidity is easier to reuse as collateral than the alternatives.

The tokenized market has exploded 

Hayden Adams’ case for AMMs comes around RWA deposit stakes that have exploded roughly sixfold in twelve months from $650.88 million to around $3.98 billion per DeFiLlama data cited by Cryptopolitan on August 18. 

Total tokenized issuance across the sector reached $34.55 billion.

Uniswap itself has been active in the new global, self-custodial, and 24/7 market, touting support for more than 190 Robinhood stock tokens across its protocol, apps, and API as of August 13. A single tokenized SPY pair booked $33 million in trades over 12 days.

Uniswap has also courted regulated issuers directly: in July it introduced Permissioned Pools, a v4 hook that restricts trading to wallets on an issuer’s approved list, with tokenization firms Securitize, Superstate, and Dowgo named as launch partners.

UNI itself has not tracked the optimism. CoinMarketCap listed the token near $3.25 on the day of Adams’ post, with a market cap around $2.03 billion, well off levels seen earlier in the year.