Uniswap Removes Stock Tokens

They have removed a number of currencies too, like sEUR, as well as synthetic cryptos like sBNB with Uniswap stating:

“We monitor the evolving regulatory landscape. Today, consistent with actions taken by other DeFi interfaces, we have taken the decision to restrict access to certain tokens through app.uniswap.org.”

It’s not clear what regulatory landscape they’re referring to exactly, with some suggesting synthetic stocks that track the price of spot stocks are to be treated the same as spot stocks.

This action has given rise to some debate with speculations Uniswap Labs, the company behind Uniswap, may have been reached out by the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC).

Others speculate this is maybe more the VCs behind Uniswap trying to hamper a competitor by not giving them a market on the orderless exchange.

Sushiswap however, Uniswap’s fork, has not taken such action. In addition the synth pairs are accessible at the smart contract level, so one could put up a new interface that does not censor tokens.

With this decision so making a clear distinction between the frontend interface, fully controlled by Uniswap Labs, and the smart contract open source protocol that can be forked.

One project is now trying to move their tokens to Sushiswap, but unless we get frontend uncensored mirrors perhaps running on IPFS, it’s not clear why eventually the same might not occur on Sushiswap.

Following this move, there have been calls to open source the frontend as well so that anyone can run it, with defi now seemingly facing a resilience test in front of some pressure.