Uniswap Labs Responds to Wells Notice, Criticizing SEC’s Weak and Erroneous Legal Theory

Uniswap Labs today responded to the Wells notice issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating that the SEC’s legal theories are weak and incorrect. The SEC accuses Uniswap DEX of acting as an unregistered securities exchange and unregistered securities broker-dealer for Uniswap Labs. Uniswap Labs stated, “These allegations assume that value represented in a specific digital file format is a security, and that the SEC can unilaterally expand the definitions of exchanges, brokers, and contracts to a meaningless extent. Tokens are a file format, similar to a PDF. The protocol is a general-purpose computer program that anyone can use and integrate, like TCP/IP. Hundreds of thousands of users who received UNI tokens early on through participation in the protocol received them for free, with no contract and no expectation of profit solely from the efforts of Uniswap Labs.”