Group items tagged

Crypto trading platform ShapeShift will begin winding down its operations as a formal company, and hand over its legacy to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) controlled by holders of its FOX token. Currently employing 65 people, ShapeShift will have no employees, no bank accounts and no CEO in somewhere between 4 and 12 months' time.

Decentralized non-custodial crypto trading platform ShapeShift will sunset its 6+ year business of trading directly with customers and now route orders through decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to get rid of know-your-customer (KYC) requirements. These multiple decentralized exchanges (DEX) will include Uniswap, Balancer, Curve, Bancor, Kyber, 0x, mStable among about a dozen others. DEXs, which operate as trading systems on top of blockchains, such as Ethereum, have eaten into centralized exchange volumes over 2020. For example, Uniswap cites itself as the fifth-largest spot-trading crypto exchange. https://erikvoorhees.medium.com/no-more-kyc-with-shapeshift-6d95a3e63ddf

The ShapeShift platform allows users to buy, sell, trade and track multiple cryptocurrencies in a single place, with over 50 digital assets currently supported. It requires a connected hardware wallet, like Trezor or KeepKey, to eliminate counterparty risk.

Preston Byrne, a partner at law firm Anderson Kill: "Generally speaking, incorporating DeFi into a web application with the intent that the SaaS provider become a pass-through for the decentralized backend is fraught with legal and compliance issues. Because DeFi tries to replicate financial services, and financial services is regulated, providing services to interact with DeFi is likely to be captured by financial services regulation." For example, decentralized exchange providers such as EtherDelta have run afoul of the Exchange Act "arising from the use of a DeFi platform to trade coins which in the SEC's view were not coins but rather 'digital asset securities.'"