(Reuters) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has issued notice of possible enforcement action against Labs, the chief developer of 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 linked to the regulator’s campaign to apply US securities law to digital asset companies such as Coinbase (NASDAQ:).
The SEC declined to comment on this publication.
The SEC’s battle with Coinbase, the world’s largest publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange, centers on one key dispute: whether digital assets are investment contracts akin to stocks or bonds that should be regulated by the SEC.
“Given the ongoing SEC lawsuits against Coinbase and other companies, and their complete unwillingness to provide clarity or a path to registration for those operating legally in the US, we can only conclude that this is the latest political effort to target even the best actors creating technologies on blockchains,” the blog post said.
Uniswap is a cryptocurrency marketplace for decentralized finance or DeFi developers, traders and liquidity providers. DeFi is an open network that operates on a peer-to-peer system in which transactions are not routed through a centralized system such as a bank or brokerage firm.