On today’s Talking Tokens episode, Jacquelyn sat down with Mary-Catherine “MC” Lader, President and COO of Uniswap Labs. Uniswap is behind the world’s largest decentralized exchange and recently launched Unichain, a new layer-2 blockchain built to optimize trading and liquidity.

They discuss Mary’s journey from Goldman Sachs to BlackRock, where she founded the digital assets division in 2015 and led early innovation in tokenization. Now at Uniswap, MC shares her vision for simplifying DeFi, why the team launched Unichain, how the Uniswap API is unlocking new use cases, and what’s needed to bring institutional capital and new users on-chain.

TIMESTAMPS:

(0:00) - Why DeFi is here to stay

(1:02) - MC’s journey from BlackRock to Uniswap

(6:50) - First impressions and joining a 10-person team

(9:55) - Why institutions are now entering DeFi

(11:05) - What Unichain solves that other L2s don’t

(13:30) - The UX problem in crypto

(15:55) - Uniswap V4 as a developer platform

(16:50) - The power of the new Uniswap API

(18:50) - The rise of tokenization and stablecoins

(21:00) - Why Uniswap is betting on self-custody

(26:00) - How Uniswap thinks about compliance and privacy

(34:15) - MC’s mission: making finance universally accessible

(42:00) - Final advice: stay aligned with users, ignore price noise

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