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It's important to note that Uniswap is decentralized and anyone can "list" anything for trading without asking anyone or going through any process. This means t

by Sargos 4y ago

It's important to note that Uniswap is decentralized and anyone can "list" anything for trading without asking anyone or going through any process. This means there are thousands of tokens, probably millions in the future, available to trade. Users do not see these tokens unless they actively search them out. Uniswap uses the TokenList standard (https://tokenlists.org/ https://tokenlists.org/) and by default users only see tokens such as the top 100 projects on CoinGecko. There are many lists created by reputable players such as Aave and Gemini which cover the entire gamut of projects users want to trade without exposing end users to scam tokens. I believe this is a good system and has worked well as having any kind of listing process or even a DAO introduces subjectivity and provides points of capture for bad actors. With an open listing process and standards like TokenLists we can say that Uniswap is truly a public good and will be around as long as we need it which provides a guaranteed way to swap any asset for any other asset no matter who created it or how controversial it is which is a good primitive for humanity to be able to rely on.

platz 4y ago
do you dispute the OP title claim?
- Sargos 4y ago
  Why would I dispute it? At best the title is misleading though as most readers likely aren't aware of how Uniswap works and will think "97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use" which isn't true in the slightest.
  - pyrale 4y ago
    Yeah, people should remember that they have 2.3% chance of not getting scammed on uniswap. That's the definition of safe to use.
    - Sargos 4y ago
      Misconceptions like yours are why the title is misleading. If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed.
      - oarsinsync 4y ago
        > If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed If there's 100 tokens listed on the front page, and one of them is a scam, that may be near 0%, but it's equally near to 2%. I'd be pretty confident that there's a >1% chance of being scammed on a platform like this. FTT wasn't thought to be a scam until it was proven to be. Unless a token issuer does so with fully audited accounting with real assets backing their tokens, why should any token not be default assumed to be a scam, instead of default assumed to be valid? Popularity and usage doesn't change this point. USDT may be incredibly popular, but it also lacks credibility. Disclaimer: I still remain long BTC (lol@myself)
        saurik 4y ago
        > ...but it's equally near to 2%. Ignoring anything else you might have gotten wrong, the comment you are responding to didn't say a 2.3% chance of being scammed, it said a 2.3% chance of NOT being scammed, which is nowhere near 0% or 2%, as it comes from abusing the 97.7% figure from the paper.
        oarsinsync 4y ago
        As amused as I am to be roasted by the great cydia himself, ignoring all the other things I got wrong, I wasn’t actually responding to the 2.3% claim, but rather the original claim that the top 100 tokens on the front page weren’t scams. I think the majority of those top 100 tokens are not properly audited with tangible assets backing them. FTT remains the most recent glowing example.
      - pyrale 4y ago
        It's not misconceptions, it's accepting that the whole ecosystem is fraudulent, and that as an intermediation layer, uniswap fails to protect consumers. If any payment processor was letting 97.7% of its merchant users be fraudulent, they would be closed yesterday.
    - throwup 4y ago
      This is logically incoherent. It would only be true if you chose a token completely at random instead of choosing a widely-used token you wanted to use. Reminds me of "it either works or it doesn't, so there's a 50/50 chance"
      - socialismisok 4y ago
        Trusting all individuals to make safe decisions in a marketplace flooded with scams is just not scalable. You cannot educate every user in how to identify a scam. And excluding users who haven't gone through that education hardly seems like the democratization of finance that these services advertise.
        eswat 4y ago
        If we’re talking about Uniswap specifically, it actually does a decent job of adding guardrails (only listing curated tokens from the Token Lists standard) and warning about unsafe actions (confirmation prompts when you are adding an unlisted token to swap). So uneducated users would really have to go out of their way to get scammed through there. Like having to go out of their way to follow up on a solicitation from something caught in a Gmail spam filter.
        runnerup 4y ago
        As much as If genuinely like a marketplace for shitcoin/scamcoins that I can gamble on and hope to beat the exit dump crash, I admit that uneducated consumers protections probably should trump my desires to participate in this gambles.
  - synu 4y ago
    97% of the tokens are scams so it is safe to use? Or am I misunderstanding your point?
    - Sargos 4y ago
      If you go to Uniswap right now you won't see any of these tokens. You run no risk of getting scammed by using Uniswap unless you go out of your way and manually add them.
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        Which you have to do to use Uniswap, right?
        eswat 4y ago
        No. Uniswap will display the Uniswap Labs default list from Token Lists[0], which covers a lot of the legitmate tokens. Token Lists has additional lists from other protocols if you want to expand the listings. Unless a token is playing a long con (FTT I guess) it’s unlikely to be listed in these. If you want to trade an unlisted token by adding the contract address manually, sure you can do that. But then it’s on you if you get scammed, like if you follow through on a solicitation from a spam email. [0] https://tokenlists.org/ https://tokenlists.org/
      - synu 4y ago
        Looking at the paper abstract, it says the identified scams by looking at transactions. So it seems at least some people are manually adding them and getting scammed. Or are you saying anyone who does that is by definition using Uniswap wrong and shouldn’t be counted as being scammed on Uniswap?
        Sargos 4y ago
        The paper does not analyze the transactions directly unless I'm missing that piece. There are a number of reasons accounts would interact with the scam tokens such as the scamming group filling up the liquidity pool, creating fake volume to add legitimacy, and other steps to complete the scam. There's also the obvious case of the scammers getting a user to actually buy the token (perhaps through spam email or "pump groups" that give explicit instructions on how to perform the swap) which I'm not saying has never happened but I do claim is more rare. Even the obviously silly scam emails do have the occasional person click on them and lose their money. The upside is that getting scammed on Uniswap is actually harder as you need to manually bypass safety features.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    How is it misleading it's an accurate statement of the findings of an analysis. Your argument is they won't see those tokens cause they're gonna search out the one they like (and that one won't be a scam?) What they'll conclude reading this is "wow, crypto is full of scams" and be right.
    - Sargos 4y ago
      It's accurate in the sense that "97% of email is scams and phishing" which is a neat fact but doesn't indict email as a failure. Email and Uniswap are both useful tools that are safe to use for even non-technical users. In fact Uniswap is safer as spam filters aren't 100% reliable but Uniswap's lists nearly are.
      - dmak 4y ago
        Great analogy!
    - nuclearnice1 4y ago
      Sargos explained how it’s misleading. > “97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use" People are likely to draw the unsafe assumption. Sargos attempted to clarify that some safety is created with filtering via a trusted list.
      - kareemsabri 4y ago
        He explained his argument. I disagreed. My conclusion reading it was, crypto tokens are 98% scams. Uniswap is an exchange. It's a utility, using an open protocol. It's makeup reflects the makeup of the domain.
        nuclearnice1 4y ago
        You asked how it was misleading. I told you.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    97% of the things available in my vanguard or Charles Schwab aren't scams. It's preposterous to call a marketplace where less then 3% of the offerings are "legit" a safe market to use.
    - Sargos 4y ago
      This misconception is exactly why I made my comment. If you go to Uniswap right now you won't have access to any of these tokens. You are just about as safe as using Charles Schwab.
      - ahMath8 4y ago
      - bluedevil2k 4y ago
        My Schwab account has insurance and oversight…there’s no universe where Uniswap is anywhere close to as safe as Schwab.
        claudedopplr 4y ago
        Uniswap is open source, and if you use it as an exchange, it doesn't even hold your funds. I'd argue that since your funds are not there, then your funds are safer than with a custodian and insurance. Lehman was also insured, wasn't it?
    - z3c0 4y ago
      Yeah? You can't pick apples from an orange tree either. What do shares of a company/futures/fund have to do with this market in particular? Its a digital marketplace. The digital space is full of attempted scams that never come to fruition, and their presence is no indication of engagement. Is that really that hard to wrap your head around?
    - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
      What percentage of the internet consists of pornography and scams? I’m sure the AOL walled garden had much higher quality content than the internet at large.
- throwup 4y ago
  Any system that is open to the public will (sadly) have to deal with bad actors. 85% of all email is spam[1]. But that's not a value judgment on the technology--Humanity can still get value from email. Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. If you deal with other humans, you need a way to sift through that crap. In the case of email, that means use a spam filter. In the case of crypto, it means don't buy shitcoins. [1] https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/
  - feanaro 4y ago
    Judging by some of the kneejerky comments in this thread, we should definitely shut down email.
- legutierr 4y ago
  The OP title is misleading because the relevant number to think about with regards to scams on Uniswap is the percentage of value traded, not the percentage of tokens launched. People can and do spam Uniswap with fake tokens, because it is wide open and anyone can interact with it. That doesn't necessarily mean that large amounts are being lost trading these scam tokens. I don't know the numbers myself, but if 99% percent of Uniswap trades are WBTC, ETH, LINK, USDC, DAI, and other big-name tokens, and 1% are scams, then the scale of the problem is not at all what is implied by the headline. If someone is serious about measuring fraud on UniSwap, they would look into the percentage of value traded accounted for by these scam tokens. This question matters from a policy perspective because headlines like this disparage one of the best things to emerge from crypto in recent years (DeFi) and deflect criticism away from where it is deserved (centralization). DeFi apps like Uniswap are safer than centralized exchanges because you can see everything that is happening on-chain, and maintain custody of your own tokens yourself. Most people who were relying of FTX have been screwed by the exchange itself, regardless of the market value of the token that they thought they owned. If you lose money on Uniswap it's not because the exchange did something wrong, but because the issuer of the token did something wrong, or simply because the token you purchased fell in value. If you are trading ETH, WBTC, LINK, USDC on Uniswap, you are better protected than if you are trading these same tokens on any of the centralized exchanges.
dsugarman 4y ago
>There are many lists created by reputable players such as Aave and Gemini which cover the entire gamut of projects users want to trade without exposing end users to scam tokens. Reputable how? like ftx a couple weeks ago? Gemini holds an F rating by the BBB and a massive amount of complaints on trust pilot.[1][2] This is their marketing message "Put your crypto to work. With Gemini Earn, you can receive up to 8.05% APY on your cryptocurrency." This is done by buying and holding stablecoins. Just curious how do you suppose they return such high APY on stablecoins without doing the exact same scam as FTX? [1]https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/cryptocurrency-exchange/gemini-trust-company-llc-0121-162263 https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/cryptocurrency-ex... [2]https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gemini.com https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gemini.com [edit] added quote for clarity
- joemazerino 4y ago
  BBB is an organization meant to scam companies. They provide no value or merit.
  - bluedevil2k 4y ago
    > an organization meant to scam…They provide no value or merit. I hope this irony was intended!
  - fortran77 4y ago
    You're mostly right about the "A+" ratings--businesses that pay can get their ratings cleaned up--but I'd certainly take an "F" rating as a datapoint.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- hailwren 4y ago
  Not sure what gemini has to do with this, but most people who actually think crypto is interesting will tell you that _any_ centralized exchange (to include coinbase, gemini, the NYSE, even the ones in the future that haven’t been made yet) is against the ethos of crypto. Uniswap is an entirely different class of thing. The only scams possible in the _logic_ of Uniswap are those which would be considered bugs in the code. Obviously, as this article points out — that’s not a panacea for _all_ scams. But I am surprised that people on a forum about hacking can’t see why eliminating an entire class of bugs could be useful.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I get your point, and it's worth pointing out. It's just neutral infrastructure. Trying to think of an analogy, I thought... "It would be like saying 98% of transactions in $USD are scams, that wouldn't mean $USD are unsafe to use." But once i said that in my head... it would definitely say something about a traditional currency if 98% of transactions were scams. (I know uniswap isn't a currency, that just came out of my attempt at an analogy). Something not good. About something. Maybe it doesn't mean uniswap is unsafe to use, but wow, it means something is a mess. If it just means that there are a crazy ton of people trying scams with tokens, that sure seems like something to be aware of.
- Sargos 4y ago
  It's important to note that this paper is discussing listings and not transactions/volume. Almost no one used or bought these tokens and 99% of Uniswap's volume is normal safe things like ETH, DAI, etc. If 98% of Uniswap trades were scams then I definitely wouldn't be here discussing it.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  No, because the number of tokens doesn't matter, the trade volume does. It's not the case that 98% of trade volume/value is scams. The same applies to your USD analogy. It doesn't matter if 98% of transactions are scams if these 98% are worth a few dollars only. A scammer could make a million transaction worth a cent each. That's very different from a trillion dollars being used in a few big scam transactions.
headsoup 4y ago
How are you evaluating which tokens are legitimate here?
- Sargos 4y ago
  I'm not. One of the points is that I don't have to as TokenLists provides a distributed way of curating legitimate tokens which means you can choose who you personally trust to determine what is legitimate.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
"which provides a guaranteed way to swap any asset for any other asset no matter who created it or how controversial it is which is a good primitive for humanity to be able to rely on." Finally, somewhere I can sell my slaves easily!

by Sargos 4y ago

platz 4y ago

do you dispute the OP title claim?

Sargos 4y ago
Why would I dispute it? At best the title is misleading though as most readers likely aren't aware of how Uniswap works and will think "97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use" which isn't true in the slightest.
- pyrale 4y ago
  Yeah, people should remember that they have 2.3% chance of not getting scammed on uniswap. That's the definition of safe to use.
  - Sargos 4y ago
    Misconceptions like yours are why the title is misleading. If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed.
    - oarsinsync 4y ago
      > If you go to Uniswap right now you will not see any of these tokens and have a near 0% chance of being scammed If there's 100 tokens listed on the front page, and one of them is a scam, that may be near 0%, but it's equally near to 2%. I'd be pretty confident that there's a >1% chance of being scammed on a platform like this. FTT wasn't thought to be a scam until it was proven to be. Unless a token issuer does so with fully audited accounting with real assets backing their tokens, why should any token not be default assumed to be a scam, instead of default assumed to be valid? Popularity and usage doesn't change this point. USDT may be incredibly popular, but it also lacks credibility. Disclaimer: I still remain long BTC (lol@myself)
      - saurik 4y ago
        > ...but it's equally near to 2%. Ignoring anything else you might have gotten wrong, the comment you are responding to didn't say a 2.3% chance of being scammed, it said a 2.3% chance of NOT being scammed, which is nowhere near 0% or 2%, as it comes from abusing the 97.7% figure from the paper.
        oarsinsync 4y ago
        As amused as I am to be roasted by the great cydia himself, ignoring all the other things I got wrong, I wasn’t actually responding to the 2.3% claim, but rather the original claim that the top 100 tokens on the front page weren’t scams. I think the majority of those top 100 tokens are not properly audited with tangible assets backing them. FTT remains the most recent glowing example.
    - pyrale 4y ago
      It's not misconceptions, it's accepting that the whole ecosystem is fraudulent, and that as an intermediation layer, uniswap fails to protect consumers. If any payment processor was letting 97.7% of its merchant users be fraudulent, they would be closed yesterday.
  - throwup 4y ago
    This is logically incoherent. It would only be true if you chose a token completely at random instead of choosing a widely-used token you wanted to use. Reminds me of "it either works or it doesn't, so there's a 50/50 chance"
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Trusting all individuals to make safe decisions in a marketplace flooded with scams is just not scalable. You cannot educate every user in how to identify a scam. And excluding users who haven't gone through that education hardly seems like the democratization of finance that these services advertise.
      - eswat 4y ago
        If we’re talking about Uniswap specifically, it actually does a decent job of adding guardrails (only listing curated tokens from the Token Lists standard) and warning about unsafe actions (confirmation prompts when you are adding an unlisted token to swap). So uneducated users would really have to go out of their way to get scammed through there. Like having to go out of their way to follow up on a solicitation from something caught in a Gmail spam filter.
      - runnerup 4y ago
        As much as If genuinely like a marketplace for shitcoin/scamcoins that I can gamble on and hope to beat the exit dump crash, I admit that uneducated consumers protections probably should trump my desires to participate in this gambles.
- synu 4y ago
  97% of the tokens are scams so it is safe to use? Or am I misunderstanding your point?
  - Sargos 4y ago
    If you go to Uniswap right now you won't see any of these tokens. You run no risk of getting scammed by using Uniswap unless you go out of your way and manually add them.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Which you have to do to use Uniswap, right?
      - eswat 4y ago
        No. Uniswap will display the Uniswap Labs default list from Token Lists[0], which covers a lot of the legitmate tokens. Token Lists has additional lists from other protocols if you want to expand the listings. Unless a token is playing a long con (FTT I guess) it’s unlikely to be listed in these. If you want to trade an unlisted token by adding the contract address manually, sure you can do that. But then it’s on you if you get scammed, like if you follow through on a solicitation from a spam email. [0] https://tokenlists.org/ https://tokenlists.org/
    - synu 4y ago
      Looking at the paper abstract, it says the identified scams by looking at transactions. So it seems at least some people are manually adding them and getting scammed. Or are you saying anyone who does that is by definition using Uniswap wrong and shouldn’t be counted as being scammed on Uniswap?
      - Sargos 4y ago
        The paper does not analyze the transactions directly unless I'm missing that piece. There are a number of reasons accounts would interact with the scam tokens such as the scamming group filling up the liquidity pool, creating fake volume to add legitimacy, and other steps to complete the scam. There's also the obvious case of the scammers getting a user to actually buy the token (perhaps through spam email or "pump groups" that give explicit instructions on how to perform the swap) which I'm not saying has never happened but I do claim is more rare. Even the obviously silly scam emails do have the occasional person click on them and lose their money. The upside is that getting scammed on Uniswap is actually harder as you need to manually bypass safety features.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  How is it misleading it's an accurate statement of the findings of an analysis. Your argument is they won't see those tokens cause they're gonna search out the one they like (and that one won't be a scam?) What they'll conclude reading this is "wow, crypto is full of scams" and be right.
  - Sargos 4y ago
    It's accurate in the sense that "97% of email is scams and phishing" which is a neat fact but doesn't indict email as a failure. Email and Uniswap are both useful tools that are safe to use for even non-technical users. In fact Uniswap is safer as spam filters aren't 100% reliable but Uniswap's lists nearly are.
    - dmak 4y ago
      Great analogy!
  - nuclearnice1 4y ago
    Sargos explained how it’s misleading. > “97% of the tokens are scams so Uniswap is unsafe to use" People are likely to draw the unsafe assumption. Sargos attempted to clarify that some safety is created with filtering via a trusted list.
    - kareemsabri 4y ago
      He explained his argument. I disagreed. My conclusion reading it was, crypto tokens are 98% scams. Uniswap is an exchange. It's a utility, using an open protocol. It's makeup reflects the makeup of the domain.
      - nuclearnice1 4y ago
        You asked how it was misleading. I told you.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  97% of the things available in my vanguard or Charles Schwab aren't scams. It's preposterous to call a marketplace where less then 3% of the offerings are "legit" a safe market to use.
  - Sargos 4y ago
    This misconception is exactly why I made my comment. If you go to Uniswap right now you won't have access to any of these tokens. You are just about as safe as using Charles Schwab.
    - ahMath8 4y ago
    - bluedevil2k 4y ago
      My Schwab account has insurance and oversight…there’s no universe where Uniswap is anywhere close to as safe as Schwab.
      - claudedopplr 4y ago
        Uniswap is open source, and if you use it as an exchange, it doesn't even hold your funds. I'd argue that since your funds are not there, then your funds are safer than with a custodian and insurance. Lehman was also insured, wasn't it?
  - z3c0 4y ago
    Yeah? You can't pick apples from an orange tree either. What do shares of a company/futures/fund have to do with this market in particular? Its a digital marketplace. The digital space is full of attempted scams that never come to fruition, and their presence is no indication of engagement. Is that really that hard to wrap your head around?
  - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
    What percentage of the internet consists of pornography and scams? I’m sure the AOL walled garden had much higher quality content than the internet at large.
throwup 4y ago
Any system that is open to the public will (sadly) have to deal with bad actors. 85% of all email is spam[1]. But that's not a value judgment on the technology--Humanity can still get value from email. Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap. If you deal with other humans, you need a way to sift through that crap. In the case of email, that means use a spam filter. In the case of crypto, it means don't buy shitcoins. [1] https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/
- feanaro 4y ago
  Judging by some of the kneejerky comments in this thread, we should definitely shut down email.
legutierr 4y ago
The OP title is misleading because the relevant number to think about with regards to scams on Uniswap is the percentage of value traded, not the percentage of tokens launched. People can and do spam Uniswap with fake tokens, because it is wide open and anyone can interact with it. That doesn't necessarily mean that large amounts are being lost trading these scam tokens. I don't know the numbers myself, but if 99% percent of Uniswap trades are WBTC, ETH, LINK, USDC, DAI, and other big-name tokens, and 1% are scams, then the scale of the problem is not at all what is implied by the headline. If someone is serious about measuring fraud on UniSwap, they would look into the percentage of value traded accounted for by these scam tokens. This question matters from a policy perspective because headlines like this disparage one of the best things to emerge from crypto in recent years (DeFi) and deflect criticism away from where it is deserved (centralization). DeFi apps like Uniswap are safer than centralized exchanges because you can see everything that is happening on-chain, and maintain custody of your own tokens yourself. Most people who were relying of FTX have been screwed by the exchange itself, regardless of the market value of the token that they thought they owned. If you lose money on Uniswap it's not because the exchange did something wrong, but because the issuer of the token did something wrong, or simply because the token you purchased fell in value. If you are trading ETH, WBTC, LINK, USDC on Uniswap, you are better protected than if you are trading these same tokens on any of the centralized exchanges.

dsugarman 4y ago

>There are many lists created by reputable players such as Aave and Gemini which cover the entire gamut of projects users want to trade without exposing end users to scam tokens. Reputable how? like ftx a couple weeks ago? Gemini holds an F rating by the BBB and a massive amount of complaints on trust pilot.[1][2] This is their marketing message "Put your crypto to work. With Gemini Earn, you can receive up to 8.05% APY on your cryptocurrency." This is done by buying and holding stablecoins. Just curious how do you suppose they return such high APY on stablecoins without doing the exact same scam as FTX? [1]https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/cryptocurrency-exchange/gemini-trust-company-llc-0121-162263 https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/cryptocurrency-ex... [2]https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gemini.com https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gemini.com [edit] added quote for clarity

joemazerino 4y ago
BBB is an organization meant to scam companies. They provide no value or merit.
- bluedevil2k 4y ago
  > an organization meant to scam…They provide no value or merit. I hope this irony was intended!
- fortran77 4y ago
  You're mostly right about the "A+" ratings--businesses that pay can get their ratings cleaned up--but I'd certainly take an "F" rating as a datapoint.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
hailwren 4y ago
Not sure what gemini has to do with this, but most people who actually think crypto is interesting will tell you that _any_ centralized exchange (to include coinbase, gemini, the NYSE, even the ones in the future that haven’t been made yet) is against the ethos of crypto. Uniswap is an entirely different class of thing. The only scams possible in the _logic_ of Uniswap are those which would be considered bugs in the code. Obviously, as this article points out — that’s not a panacea for _all_ scams. But I am surprised that people on a forum about hacking can’t see why eliminating an entire class of bugs could be useful.

jrochkind1 4y ago

I get your point, and it's worth pointing out. It's just neutral infrastructure. Trying to think of an analogy, I thought... "It would be like saying 98% of transactions in $USD are scams, that wouldn't mean $USD are unsafe to use." But once i said that in my head... it would definitely say something about a traditional currency if 98% of transactions were scams. (I know uniswap isn't a currency, that just came out of my attempt at an analogy). Something not good. About something. Maybe it doesn't mean uniswap is unsafe to use, but wow, it means something is a mess. If it just means that there are a crazy ton of people trying scams with tokens, that sure seems like something to be aware of.

Sargos 4y ago
It's important to note that this paper is discussing listings and not transactions/volume. Almost no one used or bought these tokens and 99% of Uniswap's volume is normal safe things like ETH, DAI, etc. If 98% of Uniswap trades were scams then I definitely wouldn't be here discussing it.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
No, because the number of tokens doesn't matter, the trade volume does. It's not the case that 98% of trade volume/value is scams. The same applies to your USD analogy. It doesn't matter if 98% of transactions are scams if these 98% are worth a few dollars only. A scammer could make a million transaction worth a cent each. That's very different from a trillion dollars being used in a few big scam transactions.

headsoup 4y ago

How are you evaluating which tokens are legitimate here?

Sargos 4y ago
I'm not. One of the points is that I don't have to as TokenLists provides a distributed way of curating legitimate tokens which means you can choose who you personally trust to determine what is legitimate.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

"which provides a guaranteed way to swap any asset for any other asset no matter who created it or how controversial it is which is a good primitive for humanity to be able to rely on." Finally, somewhere I can sell my slaves easily!