Forked DEX On Binance Chain Tests Uniswap & Legal Limits

Major decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI) has been put to another test, as the crypto industry is waiting how the platform will react to its copy that has appeared on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

“Holaswap is 100% fork of Uniswap V3 on BSC that's 100% community owned and governed,” the new player said.

According to the project, it has USD 10,990 total value locked (TVL) as of 7:43 UTC on Monday, with a 24h volume of USD 1,400.

Uniswap v3, or the third version, has been deployed to the Ethereum mainnet on May 5. The team behind the project stressed that “Uniswap v3 Core will launch under the Business Source License 1.1—effectively a time-delayed GPL-2.0-or-later license. The license limits use of the v3 source code in a commercial or production setting for up to two years, at which point it will convert to a GPL [General Public License] license into perpetuity.”

Therefore, the Cryptoverse is now waiting to see how Uniswap responds to this, given that that response “is going to set a precedent for years to come,” as Nansen analyst Ling Young Loon said.

How would Uniswap stop an anonymous project from copying it, and what are the legal implications for both those who copy it and those who hold the token of such a potentially unlawful project - are just some of the questions debated and waiting for answers in this nascent industry.

Others are focused on decentralization and how licenses such as Uniswap's fit in that concept.

“We love Uniswap V3,” said the alleged team behind Holaswap four days ago. Providing liquidity on V3 is “fun and profitable, but its only for whales,” they argued, while the rising gas fees on Ethereum, combined with the growth in ETH price, “kills the deal for average [decentralized finance] DeFi users (like us).”

There are no investors, team share, token sales, or protocol fees, said the post, while its creators “take no ownership of the protocols.”

Stating that they are not whales, the team said that their goal is making DeFi more affordable to average users, and creating a chance for everyone “to benefit from true open DeFi protocols without fretting over gas fees.”

Holaswap allows users to swap tokens, create pools and dynamically optimize their position, with low gas fees on BSC - some USD 0.25 for a “typical swap” compared to c. USD 30 on Ethereum, they claim. However, yesterday, the median fee on Ethereum was USD 1.6.

Cryptonews.com reached to Uniswap Labs for comment.

Ranked 6th per DeFi Pulse, TVL in Uniswap is USD 6.67bn.

Ranked 10th by market capitalization, UNI is currently trading at USD 26. It's unchanged in a day and is up 2% in a week. It's also down 42% from its May 3 all-time high of USD 44.92 (per Coingecko).