another major area where uniswap wins is through a powerful brand. a lot of newer chains have DEXs from anonymous teams, and rug pulls have become very common across a lot of these chains,
I note that recent court case in UK suggest that exchanges be interpreted as constructive trustee. Whilst onboarding new deployments is a short-term subsidy, the long-term is to create legitimacy that underpins trust that LPs and users will get a fair bite of the cherry (balanced treatment)
Jahangir Piroozzadeh v Persons Unknown & Others [2023] EWHC 1024 (Ch)
Victims of crypto fraud have so far been bringing claims against fraudsters (who are typically identified as a group of “persons unknown”) and including crypto exchanges as defendants. This is done to seek disclosure of account information from the crypto exchange but also to impose a role of constructive trustee on the crypto exchange to help preserve any crypto that remains in wallets held on the crypto exchange.
The above judgment demonstrates that the proposition of crypto exchanges being constructive trustees cannot be taken for granted. It will be fact dependent and needs careful consideration. Also, there will need to be good reason for why crypto exchanges are added as defendants, particularly where applications are being made without notice to them. This judgment could help streamline the process between victims and crypto exchanges by encouraging greater pre-action communication and limiting the scope of the orders being sought against crypto exchanges. The goal being to build an ecosystem in which victims of crypto fraud can recover their crypto at minimal cost and without having to put the crypto exchanges off-side.