Testnet
Published October 10, 2024
Today, we’re thrilled to announce Unichain. After years of building and scaling DeFi products at Uniswap Labs, we’ve seen where DeFi needs to improve and what’s required to continue advancing Ethereum’s scaling roadmap. That’s why we’re launching Unichain – a fast, decentralized Superchain L2 that’s built to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains.
Solving DeFi’s challenges
Decentralized protocols have pioneered an entirely new financial system. The Uniswap Protocol is the most popular example. Over the last six years, it has processed $2.4T in volume, scaled to millions of users, and has totaled almost half a billion lifetime trades. While the Uniswap Protocol and other DeFi protocols have made great progress, DeFi on Ethereum still faces challenges. Unichain is our contribution to fixing these problems – it’s built to be:
Low cost, while furthering decentralization
Decentralization is fundamental to DeFi. Ethereum is highly decentralized, which has required compromising on speed and affordability for L1 transactions. As part of the effort to scale Ethereum in a way that maintains decentralization, Ethereum began providing cheap data to L2s as part of the rollup-centric roadmap earlier this year.
Unichain is designed to leverage and accelerate Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, moving execution to an L2. In practice, this means Unichain will lower transaction costs by ~95% compared to Ethereum L1 in the short term, and even more over time.
Unichain will soon introduce a decentralized validation network that allows nodes to verify blocks. This adds an additional layer of finality and reduces the risk of conflicting or invalid blocks.
Fast, with near-instant transactions
To bring the next generation of markets onchain, DeFi needs to be faster. Unichain will launch with one-second block times, and will soon introduce 250ms “sub-blocks” that will make user experiences feel instant. Faster blocks also boost market efficiency and lower value lost to MEV.
This improvement is made possible through a block builder developed in collaboration with Flashbots, that uses a trusted execution environment (TEE). In addition to improving speed, the TEE is designed to improve the transparency of transaction ordering and prevent failed transactions.
While TEEs are not a replacement for decentralized consensus, they can offer significant enhancements to trust and security relative to other block builders.
Seamless multi-chain swapping
As Ethereum’s scaling roadmap comes to fruition, there will be many L2s. This is already underway, and while new L2s have helped lower costs, they have fragmented liquidity and created poor user experiences. Unichain is built to enable seamless access to swapping, no matter which chain users are on.
As part of the Optimism Superchain, we’re partnering with OP Labs to implement native interoperability, which will enable single-block, cross-chain message passing among Superchain L2s. For chains outside the Superchain, we’re working to make interoperability between all chains better through initiatives like ERC-7683, so users won’t have to worry about which chains they’re using – it will just work.
Cross-chain liquidity will have an even bigger impact when users have simple, intuitive interfaces to access it. Shortly after Unichain’s launch, we’ll introduce cross-chain swapping into the Uniswap Interface and Uniswap Wallet.
To read more about Unichain’s architecture, read the Unichain whitepaper.
Scaling Ethereum together
This is just the start. Unichain is built to be modular – which means features like the TEE-based builder and validation network can be extended to incorporate powerful new functionality aimed at further decentralization, improving user experience, and more.
Unichain, including the block builder and node software, is open source (MIT licensed) and available for other chains to adopt. Uniswap Labs is also becoming a core developer on the OP Stack, contributing to scaling Ethereum.
Build on Unichain
We’re excited to invite the broader community into the fold. The Unichain testnet goes live today, with mainnet coming later this year. Developers now have access to a full suite of resources in the Unichain Builder Toolkit. The Uniswap Foundation is leading developer engagement, providing grants and programming to support developers building on Unichain.
To get involved:
- Learn more and dive into developer docs on unichain.org
- Start deploying on Testnet
- Complete the Builder Open Call form to apply for developer grants from the Uniswap Foundation
- Bridge assets into Unichain testnet and swap on the Uniswap Interface
- Contribute to the repositories linked in the Unichain whitepaper
To stay up-to-date on Unichain, follow @Unichain on Twitter or join the #unichain channel in the Discord.