DeFi Sunday: Have Uniswap just made a mistake?

Delisting of stock tokens

Only few days ago, Uniswap Labs tweeted that it has restricted an access to a number of tokens through app.uniswap.org. The official statement, which you can read here specifies that this was done due to the evolving regulatory landscape. Uniswap Labs have reassured that the Uniswap is still permissionless, immutable and autonomous.

List of all the affected tokens can be found here . These are mostly synthetic tokens or stocks that were only a small portion of volume of Uniswap Protocol. Gold Tether, Grump Cat or mirrored Amazon and mirrored Tesla were amongst the delisted tokens. Uniswap Labs perceives this step as a necessary step in the right direction of evolution of regulations connected to DeFi interfaces. The statement reiterated that users of Uniswap Protocol do not have to worry about safety or decentralized nature of the protocol.

“Importantly, the Uniswap Protocol – unlike the interface – is set of autonomous, decentralized and immutable smart contracts. It provides unrestricted access to anyone with an Internet connection. Similarly, this action has no impact on the Uniswap Interface code, which remains open source, or the many other portals or locally run instances used to access the Uniswap Protocol.” Uniswap Labs

Yet, concerns might arise as to how far Uniswap Labs might go in the future to support the rising restrictions. Gary Gensler, Chairman of the SEC, has only recently stated that all platforms are implicated by the securities laws and must work within securities regime that the SEC states.

“Make no mistake: It does not matter whether it is a stock token, a stable value token backed by securities or any other virtual product that provides synthetic exposure to underlying securities.” Gary Gensler, Chairman of SEC

The pressure from the side of regulators will therefore continue and only then can the cryptocurrency world see, which platforms or solutions are truly decentralized and will remain unaffected by it, and which will abide to the new rules.