The US Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its investigation of Uniswap Labs, the company said Tuesday.
Uniswap Labs is the developer of Uniswap, the largest decentralised exchange on Ethereum, as well as a suite of other crypto software, including a digital wallet and a layer 2 blockchain called Unchain.
Uniswap’s UNI token jumped 4.6% to $8.24 Tuesday despite a broader market rout that saw Bitcoin fall below $90,000 for the first time since November.
“In April, the SEC issued a Wells notice claiming that Uniswap Labs operated as an unregistered broker, operated an exchange, and issued an unregistered security,” Uniswap Labs said in a Tuesday statement shared on X.
“As of yesterday, that investigation has officially been closed, and the SEC is taking no enforcement action.”
The SEC declined to comment.
The regulator became the bane of the crypto industry during the chairmanship of Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive appointed by president Joe Biden.
Gensler maintained most crypto tokens were securities analogous to stocks and bonds. The SEC sued scores of crypto companies, alleging they were breaking the law by selling unregistered securities.
But the agency has rushed to drop many of those cases since Gensler resigned January 20.
Retail trading platform Robinhood and crypto exchange Coinbase are among the companies to celebrate the closure of SEC investigations in recent days.
A crypto-friendly commissioner, Mary Uyeda, is running the SEC on an interim basis until the Senate can approve president Donald Trump’s nominee, Paul Atkins. Uyeda appointed another industry ally, Commissioner Hester Peirce, to lead a new “crypto task force” within the SEC charged with creating bespoke regulations for digital assets.
“The rush is because they have to dismiss the cases before any filing deadlines,” former SEC attorney and crypto critic John Reed Stark told DL News after Coinbase said the SEC would drop its lawsuit against the company.
“Otherwise, the SEC would have to state in a court pleading that digital assets are securities, which is anathema to the ethos of Uyeda and Peirce.”
Industry groups cheered the SEC’s decision to drop the case.
“This is undoubtedly the right outcome, and one that corrects the mistakes of previous SEC leadership,” Amanda Tuminelli, chief legal officer at crypto advocacy firm DeFi Education Fund, said in a statement shared with DL News.
“It gives DeFi companies additional comfort to pivot from defending to embracing our right to build decentralised tech.”
The three-year investigation cost Uniswap Labs “incredible amounts of time and millions of dollars,” Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said following the announcement.
The end of the SEC’s investigation “reaffirms what we’ve said all along: that decentralised technology and self-custody are inherently different from the centralised, intermediated systems they aim to replace.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News' New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
