Hayden Adams

Today @Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice from the SEC.

I’m not surprised. Just annoyed, disappointed, and ready to fight.

I am confident that the products we offer are legal and that our work is on the right side of history. But it’s been clear for a while that rather than working to create clear, informed rules, the SEC has decided to focus on attacking long-time good actors like Uniswap and Coinbase. All while letting bad actors like FTX slip by.

When I first set out to build Uniswap, the goal wasn’t to reimagine finance.

It was an experiment in radically decentralized, fully automated onchain markets. I didn’t know if it would work or if anyone would use it.

Fast forward to today, the Uniswap Protocol has processed over $2 trillion in volume. Many thousands of teams and developers have forked our code or built on top of it. We built entirely new financial infrastructure that is transparent, fair, secure, and accessible powering an entire industry.

The team at @Uniswap did all of this in the US from our office in New York City.

People often ask me why we stay in the US and my answer is simple: I believe that blockchain is incredibly powerful technology. Like the Internet, it’s here to stay. So someone needs to figure it out, and it might as well be us.

And that when you build technology that improves people’s lives – you don’t need to hide.

The @SEC’s mission is “protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.” This is a noble mission. I would argue @Uniswap does a far better job of this today than the SEC.

Yes, I’m frustrated that the SEC seems to be more concerned with protecting opaque systems than protecting consumers. And that we’ll have to fight a US government agency to protect our company and our industry.

This fight will take years, may go all the way to the Supreme Court, and the future of financial technology and our industry hangs in the balance. If we stand together we can win.

I think freedom is worth fighting for. I think DeFi is worth fighting for.

And of course, we won’t stop shipping. Stay tuned