Uniswap

This video features Connor McEwen, Engineering Lead at Uniswap Labs

Introduce yourself and tell us about your company.

Connor McEwen: My name is Connor McEwen, and I'm an engineering lead at Uniswap Labs. Uniswap Labs is a company that helps to develop the Uniswap protocol, which is the largest decentralized exchange that runs on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain that allows people to run compute, which is like to run smart contracts and enables people to sort of build a lot of financial tools that are permissionless.

What Cloudflare products are you using?

We used DNS and then actually deployed to the IPFS network and then use the Cloudflare IPFS Gateway to serve the application to our users. So we use that and then sort of have a couple functions that run on Cloudflare Workers, that are sort of part of that interface.

Why did you start using IPFS Gateway and how does it help your organization?

I think as people working in the Web3 space, we're sort of always interested in technologies and tools that sort of embody the values we care about, which are sort of like, you know, decentralization and open accessibility and IPFS is a cool network that enables sort of this decentralized file storage and serving and so that aligned really well with how, you know, we wanted to build our application and also aligned well with our reliability and security goals.

It's just nice to have a company like Cloudflare sort of build a product that enable us to use IPFS and serve our front-end to our users. It's super important to us that our users feel secure using our product. And so, you know, for us the main goal is just every bit of code that gets committed to our GitHub repository gets served securely to our users, and they can sort of verify that security and they're using the Uniswap interface in a way that they feel safe.

Uniswap works in a way so we never have custody over people's funds, they always retain custody, they're always in control of what they want to do with their tokens and assets. And so I think that's really cool and we sort of take that base foundation and apply it to sort of the application layer as well. And in the way that we build our application to be sort of as decentralized as possible to have as, you know, a minimal amount of third party dependencies and then the way we serve our application users, which is through the IPFS Gateway.

What do you think about Cloudflare?

I'm excited about sort of the products that you all are building. I feel like having IPFS Gateway support running through Ethereum nodes, like to me that's exciting because even though I like being in sort of a hip, cutting edge area, I also care about reliable products and products that people can use and sometimes for that you need large organizations like Cloudflare with a great track record of keeping stuff running and the lights on. And so I'm excited that companies like Cloudflare are sort of entering this domain to partner with smaller companies like us.