Good luck with that....
“If a lot of money is moving across your platform, regulators could have serious problems if you’re not asking even basic questions to know who’s involved in those transactions and where they’re located,” said Mr. Ebersole, who is now a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP.
There is evidence of criminals using decentralized exchanges. After the September theft of $281 million from KuCoin, an overseas crypto exchange, the thieves used Uniswap to trade $10.5 million of stolen coins for ether, a key step in their effort to launder the proceeds of the heist, according to Elliptic, a blockchain-analytics firm.
Another analytics firm, Chainalysis, has linked the KuCoin theft to a criminal syndicate working on behalf of the North Korean government.
Mr. Adams, the creator of Uniswap, said in an interview that he was “no fan” of hackers or scammers. But he stressed that Uniswap was simply a protocol—a way for computers to talk to each other—that could be used for good or evil.
“It is like the internet,” he said. “There are good things that happen on the internet, and there are bad things that happen on the internet. The internet is this neutral infrastructure.”
Moreover, because there isn’t a central set of servers that runs Uniswap, it can’t be shut down. It is also unclear how the government could require any entity to act as a gatekeeper and identity people using the protocol. Mr. Adams leads Uniswap Labs, a firm that has developed much of Uniswap, but his team has handed governance of the protocol to a broad community of users that can vote on policy changes. |
