Uniswap Labs Officially Launches Layer-2 ‘Unichain’

1 month ago

Uniswap Labs, the superior developer down 1 of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEX), Uniswap, shared Tuesday that its long-awaited layer-2 network, Unichain, is present live.

Powered by Optimism's OP stack, Unichain—like different layer-2s connected Ethereum—offers faster and cheaper transactions compared to Ethereum's mainnet. Developers tin deploy apps onto the network, which has been optimized specifically for decentralized concern (DeFi) and aims to service arsenic "the location for liquidity crossed chains," according to Uniswap Labs.

For Uniswap Labs, the payment of launching a layer-2 is twofold: it volition supply a amended acquisition for users of Uniswap and akin platforms, and it volition make a caller gross accidental successful the signifier of web fees. A typical for Uniswap Labs told CoinDesk that "around 20%" of the chain's gross volition spell straight to the company.

Unichain has been successful testing since October 2024 and is classified by Uniswap Labs arsenic a "stage-1" rollup, meaning it has elements of decentralization but retains immoderate centrally-controlled safeguards astatine this aboriginal phase.

The web is built connected the OP Stack, a modular framework that lets developers physique interoperable layer-2 chains based connected Optimism’s optimistic rollup technology. Several well-known teams person travel retired with their ain OP Stack-based layer-2’s, including Coinbase's ‘Base’, Kraken’s ‘Ink,’ World’s ‘World chain,’ and Sony’s ‘Soneium.’

What makes Unichain different?

Dozens of layer-2 chains person popped up implicit the past fewer years, and Uniswap co-founder Hayden Adams believes that astir of them volition yet beryllium utilized for circumstantial usage cases alternatively than service arsenic general-purpose blockchains. “We are anticipating a satellite of many, galore antithetic usage cases, of which trading is simply a tiny subset,” Adams told CoinDesk successful an interview.

In collaboration with Ethereum probe and improvement steadfast Flashbots, the Uniswap squad said it has created a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) connected Unichain. The TEE is simply a unafraid country for much delicate transactions and is meant to optimize the concatenation for DeFi by allowing for much precocious trades and faster transaction finality.

“Essentially, we privation Unichain to beryllium a concatenation that is bully for liquidity creation, bully for trading, bully for applications that request to beryllium co-located with them, and past bully for applications that fundamentally privation entree to liquidity but should not beryllium co-located,” Adams said.

Building connected Optimism

As portion of its integration with Optimism’s "Superchain" ecosystem, Uniswap Labs has agreed to springiness 2.5% of Unichain’s gross revenue—or 15% of Unichain’s nett revenue, whichever is greater—to the Optimism Collective, a consortium of radical and companies that steward Optimism's rollup tech. Many of the chains successful the Optimism Superchain ecosystem person agreed to akin setups, including Coinbase and Kraken.

In speech for gathering connected Optimism, some Coinbase and Kraken received grants of Optimism's OP governance tokens from the Optimism Foundation, which controls a treasury of tokens earmarked to assistance turn the ecosystem. Coinbase agreed to person up to 118 cardinal OP tokens, portion Kraken agreed to 25 million. Uniswap Labs declined to remark connected whether it had its ain woody with the Optimism Foundation.

Ahead of Unichain’s mainnet launch, Uniswap Labs announced that 65% of the chain’s nett gross volition spell to the Unichain Validation Network—a radical of validators and stakers securing the blockchain.

UVN volition enactment arsenic “another furniture of transparency and validation of the network,” Adams said.

“Part of the uniqueness astir america arsenic a task that has ever been decentralized first, is that we are really reducing the relation and the powerfulness of sequencer comparative to different things that are moving much centralized sequencers,” Adams added.

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