Uniswap COO Mary-Catherine Lader on the future of crypto and DeFi

As COO of Uniswap Labs, the company behind the development of the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, Lader sees great value in specifically decentralized protocols.

For her, not all products in the space are created equal, and that has been seen through the ongoing Crypto Winter. After the Terra stablecoin collapse in May, countless centralized projects and lenders soured, leaving investors with losses and market sentiment very scared. But, even “leading DeFi protocols like Uniswap are succeeding in these tough markets because the technology is fundamentally better than today’s rails,” Lader, known as “MC,” says. Fortune.

Her example, at least when it comes to Uniswap: Despite a general decline in crypto VC investments, Uniswap Labs just announced a $165 million Series B funding round, valuing the company at $1.66 billion.

Apart from the fresh valuation, what sets Uniswap apart is the technology behind it, according to Lader. Unlike a centralized exchange, the Uniswap protocol operates as a completely non-custodial, permissionless and self-executing entity through the use of smart contracts – or collections of code that run on a blockchain.

“This technology can transform markets on a much larger scale,” Lader said, adding that her protocols like Uniswap are “more transparent and, when done right, have a reduced risk of operational failure and lower barriers to access.”

This belief is what drove Lader to leave his Wall Street career, noting that “automated market making and decentralized exchanges have great potential in the capital markets – far beyond their use in crypto today.”

“Basic Technology”

Before Uniswap, Lader held several management positions at BlackRock, and at Goldman Sachs before that. Unlike most of her peers at the time, Lader became interested in crypto very early, starting at a seminar she attended in 2011. From then on, she kept blockchain technology in mind throughout her career.

One such time happened to be just two weeks after working at BlackRock. During a company-wide town hall in 2015, CEO Larry Fink answered some questions from employees, Lader recalled. One question was about blockchain, and according to Lader, Fink seemed to express that he saw the technology as mostly used for money laundering. (Fink has since expressed a different opinion.)

Lader disagreed, and after the town hall she sent a memo to the head of her group outlining the opportunity she believed BlackRock would be sadly missing by dismissing the technology’s potential. Her memo was forwarded to the C-suite, Lader said, and to her surprise, it was well received. In return, Lader was given leadership in the firm’s first blockchain working group.

She went on to become the COO of the company’s digital wealth business, and then the global head of the sustainability business, all the while, “I paid attention to crypto and felt that there would come a day when I worked in it full-time, but I wanted to make sure that I joined a company that was at the application level—with a product people could use, a basic, foundational technology—because I was always interested in how this technology touches real people’s lives.”

Lader felt she found this intersection at Uniswap, which she joined in June 2021 after nearly six years at BlackRock.

Some may view this move – away from the stability of traditional finance and into highly non-traditional finance – as a leap of faith. Not Lader, who said it would have been “riskier” to stay.

“One of the things I love about DeFi is that the technology has the potential to reinvent financial services, which means you have an opportunity to change where the impact points are. You have an opportunity to change and think differently about who you serve, she said. “Most of today’s financial services are designed by a somewhat homogenous group of people.”

Obviously, DeFi is far from perfect, with countless problems surrounding, among other things, crime. But Lader sees the potential in what the future of “safe and secure DeFi” could bring as it develops, citing the openness of the technology and the possibility of a new regulatory framework coming into place.

“DeFi teams need to prioritize security and user safety to grow,” she said.

Lader also notes that she has seen more TradFi interest – even after the Terra collapse – than ever before, which signals something potentially positive as the crypto market in general continues to struggle.

“The clean-up that we’re going through now is increasing the interest of people in TradFi and finance,” she said. “We’ve had a bunch of people contact us who just want to see how this works.”