I sat down with Getty Hill, co-founder of GFX Labs, to discuss his journey from traditional prop trading to becoming a key builder in the Uniswap ecosystem. Our conversation explored how his trading background shaped GFX Labs' approach to DeFi, the evolution of their Oku interface, and his vision for making DeFi more accessible while preserving its sophisticated capabilities.

How did you first get involved in the Uniswap ecosystem?
My journey began in 2020, shortly after the UNI token launch. Back then, the Uniswap Foundation didn't exist, and even the Uniswap grants program was just getting started. The governance landscape was very different – the first proposal was actually about lowering the quorum because it was nearly impossible to get proposals through. VCs were trying to figure out how to inject tokens into the community just to hit quorum.

The concept of delegates was completely new. There was no framework for paid delegates or professional delegates. The slate was wide open in terms of what a delegate could do or be. Today, we have around 20 active participants in the DAO, which is a significant improvement, but there's still ongoing discussion about the role and duties of delegates.

What's been your most impactful contribution to the Uniswap ecosystem?
One of our proudest achievements was championing the one basis point pool. When we first proposed it, it wasn't a consensus opinion – even some prominent ecosystem members were skeptical. But we saw that Curve was dominating stablecoin trading onchain, and we knew from our trading background that Uniswap's fees were too high for these pairs. We argued that lower fees would actually enable more economic activity, similar to what centralized exchanges charge for stablecoin trading.

This proposal stands out as one of the better examples of protocol governance working effectively. Despite initial skepticism from founding members, voters supported it, and it turned out to be the right decision, creating immense value for the protocol. It's a testament to how DAOs can work when the process functions as intended.

Tell us about GFX Labs and Oku – what problems are you trying to solve?
GFX Labs emerged from our experience as active DeFi users. Before governance tokens, we'd often see things that needed improvement but had no way to affect change. When governance tokens arrived, we finally had a voice. Our working model became simple: when we see something that needs to be done, we first hope someone else does it. If not and we feel strongly enough about it, we do it ourselves.

Oku, our largest project to date, was born from observing that while there was tremendous innovation happening in protocols and infrastructure, user experience was being neglected. We wanted to create a single interface that could connect all these wonderful protocol innovations in a way that's actually nice and easy to use.

What's been your approach to building Oku's interface?
You need the old people to like you and get the new people to grow.This is especially crucial for Oku as a self-funded project. Without massive VC backing, we need existing users to fund development while attracting new users for growth. Our initial MVP launched in July 2023 took a radically different approach from Uniswap's interface – we tried to build something that would feel familiar to Binance users, with an order book trading view and professional trading features.

We learned we'd gone too far in that direction, as many DeFi users weren't ready for such a professional interface. Since then, we've been working to find the right balance, adding features like our aggregator in March, which marked our first real inflection point in adoption. We're always trying to build something distinctly different from the Uniswap Labs interface while maintaining our own niche.

You've mentioned that many people don't understand the full power of Uniswap v3. Can you elaborate on that?
It's surprising how many people still don't grasp the full potential of v3. We regularly get users in our Discord asking about creating full range positions, and we have to explain why that might not be the best approach. I often walk them through a simple exercise: "What's the absolute maximum price you think this asset will ever reach? It's not infinity – Bitcoin isn't going to hit a trillion dollars per coin. And what's the lowest it could go?" Just by setting these realistic bounds, you've created a concentrated liquidity position that earns significantly more fees than a full range position.

There are also clever ways to use liquidity positions for trading. Some users leverage our Uniswap v3 limit order system to place orders at the front of the book, avoiding the pool fee entirely. These are the kinds of creative optimizations that I wish more people knew about. I believe the Foundation could have a high impact by funding more education around these concepts – supporting LPs is supporting the core business of the DAO.

What excites you about Uniswap v4 and its potential?
I'm particularly interested in seeing what specialized hooks emerge. Projects like Flaunch in the memecoin space are worth watching. Instead of having the generalized protocol we had with v3, it'll be fascinating to see what creative use cases developers build with v4's hooks.

I'd love to see someone develop a hook for DCA orders. While new advanced order types will cover many needs, we won't have DCAs. There's also potential for innovation in the borrowing space – I've been following InstaDapp's Fluid protocol closely, and I think someone clever could recreate similar functionality using v4 hooks. That would be particularly interesting since Fluid represents a meaningful competitive challenge to the protocol's core business.

At the very least, the gas optimization in v4 is a welcome improvement for everyone. But the real potential lies in how developers will leverage these new capabilities to create specialized solutions we haven't even imagined yet.

What advice do you have for other builders in the ecosystem?
Control your destiny. You don't need permission to build – just go do things. You can't really mess up too much, so move faster rather than slower, and don't try to be perfect. There's still so much opportunity for innovation, especially with v4 hooks. I'd love to see someone tackle DCA orders through hooks, or perhaps create a competitive response to protocols like Fluid that could represent meaningful competition to Uniswap's core business.

The ecosystem needs more focus on supporting liquidity providers through education and better tooling. When LPs are well-supported, liquidity improves for traders, leading to increased swap volume. Everything else tends to sort itself out downstream from there.