Uniswap Labs has officially rolled out the mainnet of its layer-2 network [L2], Unichain.
Background
- Unichain is built on the Optimism Superchain
- The team has designed the chain to take speed, efficiency, and cross-chain liquidity to the "next level"
- Users and developers processed over 88 million test transactions and rolled out 12 million test smart contracts on Unichain’s testnet, which had been operational since Q4 2024
Why should you pay attention?
- Unichain aims to serve as "the home for liquidity across chains"
- 80+ apps and infrastructure providers are already building on Unichain
- Uniswap Labs has waived all interface fees for swaps on Unichain for the initial few months
- The chain current has a one-second block time
- The team plans to bring that down to 250 milliseconds eventually
- Anyone can participate in maintaining the integrity of the chain, thanks to permissionless fault proofs
- The team claims that Unichain is the first L2 to launch as a Stage 1 rollup, underlining their commitment to decentralization
- Later this year, the Unichain Validation Network will enable anyone to verify blocks, further decentralizing the chain
Who said what?
- Hayden Adams, Founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, emphasized,
“Unichain is built differently. We’re here to make DeFi faster, cheaper, more decentralized, which is why we launched Unichain to be permissionless from day one”
- Chalking out what to expect going forward, the team highlighted,
“In the coming months, Unichain will introduce advanced capabilities like Flashbot’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which leads to faster finality, a term used in DeFi to describe transaction settlements on Ethereum”
Zooming out
- More often than not, moving crypto between different blockchains is slow and cumbersome
- This is where Uniswap Labs’ ERC-7683, a universal standard developed in partnership with Across, reduces friction when swapping or trading across chains, comes to the rescue and helps solve the problem
