Uniswap founder calls US’ approach to regulating crypto ‘sad and unfortunate’

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said the U.S. has not been “very thoughtful or very good” in its approach to regulating the crypto industry, which is “a little bit sad and unfortunate.”

Adams made the comments during an appearance on the Unchained podcast on June 20.

He said that many countries in the world are taking steps to “study DeFi and understand it” but the U.S. is mostly using it for “political grandstanding, unfortunately.”

Adams said the U.S. is falling “way behind” countries like France and the U.K. which are “thoughtful” in their approach to regulating and interacting with DeFi. Both countries are at advanced stages of implementing new regulatory frameworks designed specifically for the crypto industry and its nuances.

The Uniswap founder said the company has discussed setting up offices outside the U.S. amid the growing regulatory uncertainty but there are no plans to move outside the country for now.

Uniswap v4 will not be open source initially

Adams spoke in-depth about the upcoming Uniswap v4 update and why it won’t be open source initially, despite everyone being “massive fans of it.”

However, the code will eventually become fully open source within four years or less — similar to v3. Additionally, Uniswap token holders can vote via governance to make the code open source at any point in time.

He said that prior versions of Uniswap were completely open source and remain so but the company’s experience with forks of the code has shown that a higher level of prudence is necessary.

Adams added that the philosophy of open source did not account that there would be “thousands of economically incentivized forks” within days which are often very low quality.

Adams said:

“There was a time when there were 20 forks of Uniswap in a day and they were all creating incentives.”