In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with MC Lader and Marvin Ammori, who spent four years together helping build Uniswap into one of the most important companies in decentralized finance. MC was President and COO; Marvin served as Chief Legal Officer after a long career as one of the internet’s leading policy lawyers.

We traced their shared slow hunch that technology can shift power: first through the open internet, and later through open financial systems.

We also spoke about the parallels between the net neutrality battles of the 2000s and the present-day struggle over how crypto is regulated, the challenge of building in the face of policy headwinds, and why stablecoins, programmable markets, and open protocols are placed to be the next rails for global finance.

This was a fun conversation, recorded at a moment when the policy climate for crypto is starting to thaw.

Hope you enjoy!

Chapters:

00:00:00 Cold open - policy headwinds under Gary Gensler
00:05:50 Their shared slow hunch: technology as a force for redistributing power
00:14:47 Winning the net neutrality fight
00:18:36 First encounters with Bitcoin
00:21:14 Parallels between the open internet and DeF
00:22:58 Spotting early policy threats and forming the DeFi Education Fund
00:23:34 Marvin recruits MC to Uniswap Labs
00:29:27 Scaling Uniswap from a tiny team to a full-stack protocol
00:34:36 Navigating growth amid SEC opposition
00:39:11 Gary Gensler’s impact on US crypto entrepreneurship
00:40:45 Stablecoins as the “lily pad” for mainstream adoption
00:43:20 Shifting perceptions on Wall Street
00:46:12 What’s next: stablecoins, tokenized markets, and on-chain identity
00:47:00 Building open, permissionless financial infrastructure
00:51:52 Potential risks: fraud, systemic stability, surveillance
00:55:45 Stablecoins vs. the fragility of traditional banks
00:57:53 Privacy, regulation, and zero-knowledge proofs
01:00:00 From DeFi to AllFi: what moves on-chain first?
01:04:11 Building for consumers versus institutions
01:06:03 Making money feel more human
01:08:49 Access to capital as a pillar of opportunity

S06E19 Lopetegui Out