U.S. judge tosses Bancor patent suit against Uniswap, calling the claims “abstract ideas”

The patent fight between Bancor-linked entities and Uniswap has been running since spring 2025. At its core, the plaintiffs were challenging a mechanism used by many decentralized exchanges that don’t rely on a traditional order book.

In the plaintiffs’ telling, Uniswap used their patented approach to automated pricing in liquidity pools (an AMM, or automated market maker). The idea works like this: a user swaps token A for token B not by matching with another trader, but by trading against a shared pool that already holds both assets. The swap rate is calculated by an algorithm using the pool’s current balances (for example, the constant-product model often written as x·y=k). Each trade changes the pool’s token ratios, and the algorithm immediately recalculates the price for the next swap. The plaintiffs argued that this method of computing exchange rates is what two U.S. patents cover, and that Uniswap should have licensed the technology or paid for its use.

On Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York granted the defendants’ motion and dismissed the lawsuit against Universal Navigation Inc. (Uniswap Labs) and the Uniswap Foundation.

The court said the asserted patents, in substance, describe an “abstract idea” of calculating exchange rates for transactions. The decision noted that currency exchange is a basic economic practice, and that computing price information is itself an abstract concept under U.S. patent law. In the judge’s view, moving a formula into a smart-contract environment doesn’t automatically make it patent-eligible, because blockchain and smart contracts are being used in a predictable way that doesn’t add an inventive step.

Beyond patent eligibility, the judge also pointed to problems with how the complaint was pleaded. Among other issues, the plaintiffs didn’t convincingly show how Uniswap’s open-source code contains a key parameter referenced by the patents. The court also rejected the allegations of induced and willful infringement, saying the complaint didn’t establish that the defendants knew about the patents before the lawsuit was filed.

For now, the ruling is procedural. The case was dismissed without prejudice, and the plaintiffs have 21 days to submit an amended complaint. If they don’t, the dismissal becomes final. After the decision, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams reacted on X, writing: “A lawyer just told me we won.”