A Manhattan federal judge has dismissed a four-year class-action lawsuit against Uniswap Labs and founder Hayden Adams, ruling the platform cannot be held liable for scam tokens created and traded by unknown third parties. Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the case with prejudice on Monday, finding the plaintiffs failed to show Uniswap bore responsibility for misconduct by outside token issuers.
The suit, led by plaintiff Nessa Risley, had been amended in May to emphasize state consumer-protection claims, alleging that Uniswap enabled “rug pulls” and pump-and-dump schemes. The original complaint, filed in April 2022, named Uniswap, Adams and several venture firms — Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. That complaint was previously dismissed in August 2023, and that dismissal was later affirmed on appeal.
In her ruling, Judge Polk Failla said the plaintiffs did not plausibly allege that Uniswap had knowledge of the fraud or that it substantially assisted in carrying out the scams. She wrote that merely creating a platform where fraud can occur is different from taking affirmative steps that substantially facilitate wrongdoing. The opinion compared the situation to banks or messaging services that are not deemed to have substantially assisted criminals solely because bad actors use those neutral services.
Hayden Adams responded on X, calling the decision “a good, sensible outcome” and arguing that open-source developers should not be held liable when others misuse their code. Legal observers say the ruling reinforces a precedent that providers of neutral, general-purpose platforms are not automatically responsible for illicit third-party uses of their systems.
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