UNI Rallies as Federal Court Ends Investor Case Against Uniswap Labs

• Uniswap Labs won a full dismissal with prejudice, ending the investor lawsuit over scam-token losses and barring plaintiffs from refiling the same claims.
• UNI rose about 6% to around $3.92 after the ruling, as traders reacted to the case being permanently closed.

UNI price rose about 6% to $3.92 after a U.S. federal judge dismissed the remaining investor claims against Uniswap Labs with prejudice. The ruling by Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York officially ended the legal battle. It closes the final state-law claims in a 2022 lawsuit seeking to hold Uniswap Labs liable for losses tied to scam tokens, including alleged rug pulls and pump-and-dump schemes.

Investors argued that Uniswap Labs should share responsibility because the protocol enabled trading and collected fees for tokens later linked to fraud. In addition, they claimed the platform violated state consumer protection laws.

However, Judge Failla said the plaintiffs did not prove Uniswap Labs knew about specific frauds in advance. The court also found the filings did not show that the decentralized platform provided substantial assistance to unidentified third-party token issuers.

Most recently, CNF reported that Uniswap proposed a tier-based v3OpenFeeAdapter to apply fees across v3 pools beyond Ethereum, including Arbitrum, Base, Celo, and Worldchain. The update would extend the fee framework to additional networks where Uniswap v3 is deployed.

Uniswap Court Ruling Ends Remaining State-Law Claims

Judge Failla dismissed the second amended complaint with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile the same claims. The court said the plaintiffs had multiple opportunities to revise their allegations but still failed to state a viable claim under the state-law causes of action that remained after earlier federal claims were dismissed.

The case previously included federal securities allegations that were thrown out in 2023, and that earlier decision was later affirmed on appeal, leaving the district court to address the remaining state law counts. With Monday’s order, the litigation has now been fully concluded, removing a long-running legal overhang for the company and its founder, Hayden Adams, who was also named in the suit.

In late January, Uniswap Labs launched Continuous Clearing Auctions on Arbitrum One. CNF reported that the feature supports onchain token auctions, price discovery, and automatic Uniswap v4 liquidity seeding.

Late last year, Uniswap executed an on-chain burn of 100 million UNI, valued at about $596 million, sending the tokens to a permanent burn address. CNF highlighted that the move followed a governance vote tied to the UNIfication proposal and set up a model that uses future protocol fees for ongoing UNI buybacks and burns.

Consequently, the market reacted quickly, with UNI price surging 3% in the last 24 hours and stabilizing around $3.90 after the decision. 24-hour trading volume rallied over 30% to $306.54 million.

The move placed UNI among the day’s stronger large-cap DeFi performers as traders adjusted positions following the court’s final dismissal.