Uniswap founder calls US approach to regulating cryptocurrencies 'sad and unfortunate'

Hayden Adams said that many countries in the world are taking steps to "research and understand DeFi", but the United States mainly uses it for "unfortunate political grandstanding".

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said it's "a bit sad and unfortunate" that the U.S. hasn't been "thoughtful or doing a good job" in regulating the crypto industry.

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

Many countries around the world are taking steps to "research and understand DeFi," but the U.S. is using it primarily for "unfortunate political grandstanding," he said.

Adams said the U.S. is “far behind” countries like France and the U.K., which are “thoughtful” about regulating and interacting with DeFi. Both countries are in the late stages of implementing new regulatory frameworks designed specifically for the crypto industry and its nuances.

The Uniswap founder said the firm has discussed setting up offices outside the United States amid growing regulatory uncertainty, but has no current plans to move abroad.

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-sourced initially, even though everyone is “a big fan of it.”

However, the code will eventually be fully open source in four years or less, similar to v3. Additionally, Uniswap token holders can open-source the code at any point in time through governance voting.

Earlier versions of Uniswap were fully open-source, and remain so, but the company's experience with code forks shows that more caution is warranted, he said.

Adams added that the philosophy of open source does not take into account that within a few days there will be "thousands of economically incentivized forks," often of low quality.

Adams said:

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