Digital assets astound

The phrases "mid-May" and "mayday" did a kind of mash-up earlier this year as Bitcoin began to sink and numerous altcoins waved bye-bye to their all-time highs quicker than you could say, wow it's June already. (July, much too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget).

One day, we'll hear someone effortlessly brandish the term "late August slash early September" and immediately it'll connote all kinds of crypto warm-fuzziness: Bitcoin challenging $51,000 (for the first time since mid-May), Ethereum smashing $4,000, Solana smashing records, technical signals screaming bullishly, and U.S. economic data billboarding a slowdown, quashing taper talk, and instead prompting more fiat currency printing – all boding well for crypto.

The world's biggest decentralized exchange, Uniswap (UNI), which gained 35% in 30 days as of the start of Labor Day weekend, could come under some duress as the the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission takes aim at decentralized finance, or "DeFi."

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the SEC is investigating Uniswap Labs.

Enforcement attorneys are seeking information about how investors use Uniswap and how it is marketed, per the WSJ report, citing anonymous sources.

UNI was $29 and starting to fall when the bombshell article surfaced on Friday.

On August 6, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler fired his first regulatory shot at the DeFi realm, with the agency charging two Florida men and their Cayman Islands company for unregistered sales of more than $30 million of securities using smart contracts, and for misleading investors about the viability of their "DeFi Money Market" operation.

Last week, the SEC replaced its starter's pistol with a large-caliber rifle, bringing an action against BitConnect, an online crypto lending platform, and its founder, Satish Kumbhani, alleging that they defrauded retail investors out of $2 billion back during the height of the last crypto bull market.

The SEC said investors in a BitConnect "lending program" were told BitConnect would use a "volatility software trading bot" that could generate returns of 40% per month, and were given fictitious returns showing gains of about 3,700% per year. In reality, BitConnect investors got torched after the price of BitConnect Coin sank 92% on Jan. 16, 2018.

According to Forbes.com, Blockchain analytics firm AnChain.AI just signed a deal with the SEC to help monitor the DeFi industry in the coming years.

Reports regarding a possible probe of Uniswap would seem to underscore the growing sense that DeFi is squarely in the regulator's crosshairs.

Victor Fang, CEO of AnChain.AI, said “the SEC is very keen on understanding what is happening in the world of smart contract-based digital assets … we are providing them with technology to analyze and trace smart contracts.”