Uniswap Labs, the first developer behind one of many largest decentralized exchanges (DEX), Uniswap, shared Tuesday that its long-awaited layer-2 community, Unichain, is now stay.
Powered by Optimism’s OP stack, Unichain—like different layer-2s on Ethereum—affords quicker and cheaper transactions in comparison with Ethereum’s mainnet. Builders can deploy apps onto the community, which has been optimized particularly for decentralized finance (DeFi) and goals to function “the house for liquidity throughout chains,” based on Uniswap Labs.
For Uniswap Labs, the advantage of launching a layer-2 is twofold: it should present a greater expertise for customers of Uniswap and related platforms, and it’ll create a brand new income alternative within the type of community charges. A consultant for Uniswap Labs informed CoinDesk that “round 20%” of the chain’s income will go on to the corporate.
Unichain has been in testing since October 2024 and is labeled by Uniswap Labs as a “stage-1” rollup, that means it has components of decentralization however retains some centrally-controlled safeguards at this early section.
The community is constructed on the OP Stack, a modular framework that lets builders construct interoperable layer-2 chains based mostly on Optimism’s optimistic rollup know-how. A number of well-known groups have come out with their very own OP Stack-based layer-2’s, together with Coinbase’s ‘Base’, Kraken’s ‘Ink,’ World’s ‘World chain,’ and Sony’s ‘Soneium.’
What makes Unichain totally different?
Dozens of layer-2 chains have popped up over the previous couple of years, and Uniswap co-founder Hayden Adams believes that the majority of them will finally be used for particular use circumstances moderately than function general-purpose blockchains. “We’re anticipating a world of many, many various use circumstances, of which buying and selling is a small subset,” Adams informed CoinDesk in an interview.
In collaboration with Ethereum analysis and improvement agency Flashbots, the Uniswap crew mentioned it has created a Trusted Execution Surroundings (TEE) on Unichain. The TEE is a safe space for extra delicate transactions and is supposed to optimize the chain for DeFi by permitting for extra superior trades and quicker transaction finality.
“Primarily, we would like Unichain to be a sequence that’s good for liquidity creation, good for buying and selling, good for purposes that should be co-located with them, after which good for purposes that primarily need entry to liquidity however shouldn’t be co-located,” Adams mentioned.
Constructing on Optimism
As a part of its integration with Optimism’s “Superchain” ecosystem, Uniswap Labs has agreed to offer 2.5% of Unichain’s gross income—or 15% of Unichain’s internet income, whichever is larger—to the Optimism Collective, a consortium of individuals and corporations that steward Optimism’s rollup tech. Most of the chains within the Optimism Superchain ecosystem have agreed to related setups, together with Coinbase and Kraken.
In change for constructing on Optimism, each Coinbase and Kraken obtained grants of Optimism’s OP governance tokens from the Optimism Basis, which controls a treasury of tokens earmarked to assist develop the ecosystem. Coinbase agreed to obtain as much as 118 million OP tokens, whereas Kraken agreed to 25 million. Uniswap Labs declined to touch upon whether or not it had its personal take care of the Optimism Basis.
Forward of Unichain’s mainnet launch, Uniswap Labs introduced that 65% of the chain’s internet income will go to the Unichain Validation Community—a bunch of validators and stakers securing the blockchain.
UVN will act as “one other layer of transparency and validation of the community,” Adams mentioned.
“A part of the individuality about us as a mission that has at all times been decentralized first, is that we are literally lowering the function and the ability of sequencer relative to different issues which can be working extra centralized sequencers,” Adams added.
Learn extra: Uniswap Developer Unveils Personal Layer-2 Community, Unichain, Constructed on Optimism Tech
