Uniswap taps Blockaid for new token warning system

Uniswap Labs, the development firm behind Ethereum’s largest decentralized exchange, has integrated Blockaid’s onchain detection and response technology as an added layer of user protection. Blockaid’s tool alerts users if they interact with tokens flagged as potentially malicious.  

The crypto ecosystem is littered with scams and fraud, partly due to problems of policing permissionless platforms that enable anyone to launch a token. This is often cited as a serious blocker to gaining long-term crypto users, and it’s become industry practice to install software that guides people away from these pitfalls. 

According to Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan, nearly 60% of the tokens created in 2024 were malicious. “In this environment, spotting these tokens is key to delivering on the promise of DeFi,” he said in a statement. 

“Token Warnings empower Uniswap App users to feel confident trading — they'll get more information about their tokens across all of our products at once,” Uniswap product manager Medha Kothari said in a statement.

The tool will be introduced across Uniswaps web, mobile and self-custody crypto wallet extensions. It uses a combination of static (i.e., comparing a contract’s source code to known viruses) and dynamic (i.e., using a virtual environment to prod a contract) validation heuristics and various machine learning functions to help prove whether a token is legit. 

In particular, Blockaid says it can determine common scams like celebrity impersonators and other phishing schemes. It can also uncover more technical scams that do not rely on social engineering, like the “100% sell fee” ploy where a seller sets his fee at the level of the purchase price, so a buyer does not receive the asset even if it is legitimate. 

Blockaid, founded in 2022, is a web3 security firm that actively scans for suspicious activity across various blockchains. Its software has been used by Coinbase, Stellar and Metamask, among others, and reportedly has prevented more than $4 billion in potential losses. 

Ribbit, Variant, Cyberstarts, Sequoia, and Greylock contributed to its $33 million combined seed and Series A funding rounds.