(Reuters) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has notified of potential enforcement action against Uniswap Labs, the main developer behind one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The reason for the SEC’s warning against Uniswap was not immediately clear from the blog post, but can be pegged to the regulator’s campaign to apply U.S. securities law to the digital asset-related companies like Coinbase.
The SEC declined to comment on the post.
The SEC’s battle with Coinbase, the world’s largest publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange, rests on one core debate: whether digital assets are investment contracts akin to stocks or bonds that should be regulated by the SEC.
“Taking into account the SEC’s ongoing lawsuits against Coinbase and others as well as their complete unwillingness to provide clarity or a path to registration to those operating lawfully within the U.S., we can only conclude that this is the latest political effort to target even the best actors building technology on blockchains,” the blog post read.
Uniswap is a crypto marketplace for decentralized finance or DeFi developers, traders and liquidity providers. DeFi is an open network and works on a peer-to-peer system, where transactions are not routed through a centralized system such as a bank or a brokerage.
(Reporting by Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)