/ Legal Articles / A Brief Guide to DeFi lending, Uniswap and other Automated Market Makers
Author: Syedur Rahman
30 March 2021
3 min read
Uniswap is an automated market maker (AMM) that is said to be the leading decentralised exchange. But to fully appreciate Uniswap, AMMs and decentralised finance (DeFi), it helps to first understand how traditional trading works using services such as Vanguard or Coinbase.
When you buy a share (let’s say Apple) on Vanguard or a digital token (let’s say Bitcoin) on Coinbase, you are "hiring" Vanguard and Coinbase as a middleman. They take your money and buy the given asset off an exchange order book - a list of buyers and sellers. The price you get for the share or the digital token is the price another party has pre-agreed to sell or buy it at.
Traditional trading generally has these characteristics:
AMMs allow digital tokens to be traded without the middleman. They are a financial tool unique to Ethereum and DeFi. They use mathematical formulas and liquidity pools to set the price of a digital token (which is explained in more detail below) instead of relying on the traditional market of buyers and sellers. Uniswap is the most popular AMM on the Ethereum ecosystem. Like most AMMs, Uniswap facilitates trading between a particular pair of assets by holding reserves of both.
Uniswap differs from traditional trading as:
Instead of relying on buyers and sellers who pre-agree on prices to form an order book, AMMs like Uniswap incentivise investors (also known as liquidity providers) to pool their Ethereum-based assets into Uniswap smart contracts in exchange for a share of the transaction fees. When using Uniswap, investors receive 0.3% per transaction. These invested Ethereum-based assets are allocated to trades automatically by smart contracts based on the rules of the AMM protocol. As more trades are made, the investors accrue more transaction fees.
The exchange price of tokens in the Uniswap platform is determined by the ratio of funds deposited in a certain pool. In contrast, traditional exchanges determine the price of tokens based on supply and demand. Supply and demand is shown in the order book.
Every trading pair on an AMM has a liquidity pool – and anyone in the world can create AMM trading pairs or provide liquidity to them without permission. One of the most popular trading pairs on Uniswap is USDC-ETH. To become an investor in the USDC-ETH liquidity pool you must contribute an equal ratio of both assets into the pool: to invest $1,000 you would need to contribute $500 in USDC and $500 in ETH.
Investors are willing to pool their assets in AMMs, like Uniswap, because there is the financial incentive of gaining a share of the transaction fees. When investors want to cash out of a given pool, they simply trade in their Uniswap token and are given assets from the pool, according to their ownership percentage. Because of the accumulation of fees, the amount of assets you receive should be greater than what you put in.
There has been an increasing amount of comment on the issue of DeFi lending being vulnerable to fraud, as there is no middleman to monitor or regulate.
Custodial exchanges hold huge sums of assets on behalf of users and are, therefore, susceptible to attack. When these attacks succeed, customers holding their assets at the exchange are often left powerless.
Uniswap, as a decentralised exchange, does not require you to give up control of your assets to trade. You can trade on Uniswap via Ethereum from the comfort of your own wallet. Yet it does lack verification. In August 2020, there was a copycat app on Google store which duped investors into entering their private keys. There is also a risk of fake tokens being traded on Uniswap exchange. Anyone can list a token on Uniswap, and its decentralised nature means there is no review process. This makes it easy to create a token with a name similar to a popular DeFi platform, and trick users into purchasing worthless tokens.
In the last year, we have seen the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) attempting to regulate the more traditional digital assets on the blockchain, as it has taken on the role of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing supervisor for UK cryptoassets companies. It is clear from its work here, however, that the regimes in place at the moment are out-dated and ill-suited to the more traditional cryptoassets. So it is hard to imagine that the FCA would even begin to comprehend, let alone regulate, DeFi lending and the likes of Uniswap.
That said, there are clear similarities between the activities of Uniswap and the likes of peer-to-peer or margin lending. If a project facilitates loans or interest payments to users, then it most likely qualifies as engaging in lending activity. Therefore, the FCA is likely to try to regulate DeFi lending at some point.
Partner
syedur.rahman@rahmanravelli.co.uk
+44 (0)203 910 4566 vCard
Syedur Rahman is known for his in-depth experience of serious fraud, white-collar crime and serious crime cases, as well as his expertise in worldwide asset tracing and recovery, civil recovery, cryptocurrency and high-stakes commercial disputes.