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The SEC lets go of its grip on crypto: investigation into Uniswap closed
By Davide Grammatica
After doing the same with OpenSea and Robinhood, the SEC backtracks on Uniswap too, closing the investigation without coercive measures against the crypto industry
The SEC backtracks
The SEC of the new Trump era is no longer what it once was. It’s the exact opposite, so much so that at the beginning of 2025 it seems to be doing its utmost to retract everything it has done previously.
The SEC’s latest move is in fact the dismissal of the case against Uniswap, the Ethereum DEX that in 2024 had received a “Wells notice” accusing it of violating federal laws regulating financial assets. The same fate had befallen other key players in the sector, but now they seem to be freeing themselves from the agency’s grip one after the other (the same thing happened recently to OpenSea and Robinhood).
These are the effects of Gary Gensler‘s resignation as SEC chairman, which today is proving to be much more “lenient” than the application of regulations in the US, while waiting for the new administration to proceed with drawing up a dedicated and clearer regulatory framework. The SEC itself already has a role to play in this process, with a newly established crypto task force.
Uniswap's victory
“This investigation has taken over 3 years, forcing us to waste an incredible amount of time and millions of dollars,” Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap Labs, wrote on X. ‘It has also had a personal impact: federal investigations are stressful to the point that among lawyers it is said that ’investigation is the punishment’.”
The SEC (under the previous admin) tried to claim that Uniswap Labs operated an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency, and issued an unregistered security. Those claims have now been dropped.@Uniswap Labs is not a broker. The Uniswap Protocol is not an unregistered… https://t.co/uVPgkN35DT
— Hayden Adams 🦄 (@haydenzadams) February 25, 2025
Uniswap therefore emerges victorious from this legal dispute, reaffirming, according to Adams, that “decentralized technology and self-custody are intrinsically different from the centralized and intermediary systems they aim to replace”
Meanwhile, the price of UNI seems to have reacted positively, even in a context in which other tokens have suffered enormously from the market correction. In fact, in just a few hours, the token is approaching $8.50 again after collapsing during the day to around $7.50.
