The first decentralized token swap happened in March 2016 — two years before anyone coined the term 'DeFi'

The word "DeFi" was coined in 2018. The first decentralized token-to-token swap happened in March 2016.

Alex Van de Sande (avsa), then at the Ethereum Foundation, deployed a contract called the Unicorn Grinder. The mechanic: feed in a Unicorn token, get Unicorn Meat out. Irreversible. No intermediary. No counterparty. Just code and state.

Seven people used it. Seven anonymous transactions. That was the entire usage history.

But those seven transactions proved something: Ethereum could transform one token into another, trustlessly, permanently, with no bank or company or protocol operator in the middle.

That's the entire premise of Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, and every AMM that followed. The mechanism was proven in March 2016 with a contract that was designed as a joke, by people who had no idea they were building a proof-of-concept for a $100B industry.

Decentralized finance didn't start in 2018 when the term was coined. It started in 2016 when seven people fed unicorns into a grinder.