Uniswap Labs, the developer behind the highly regarded decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap, announced that it has built a new layer 2 network, which was set to launch on testnet on Thursday.
The new project is built using Optimism’s OP Stack, a blockchain blueprint that has also been used by crypto exchange Coinbase and electronics giant Sony to build layer-2 networks.
The main developer behind Uniswap, the largest decentralized crypto exchange, plans to launch its own blockchain as a layer 2 network on top of Ethereum – part of an effort to make transactions faster and cheaper while improving liquidity.
Unichain, as the new network is known, would go live on a private test network on Thursday, according to a press release.
The technical development of the project is led by Uniswap Labs, using technology borrowed from Optimism’s Ethereum Layer-2 team OP pile. As such, Unichain will become part of the Superchain, a federation of Optimism-affiliated networks that includes US crypto exchange Coinbase’s own layer-2 blockchain, Base.
“People actually want things to feel instant,” Hayden Adams, the inventor of Uniswap and CEO of Uniswap Labs, said in an interview with CoinDesk, when asked about the motivation for the initiative.
The news is in line with the ongoing trend that has hit the Ethereum scaling world since late 2023: giant and well-known crypto exchanges launching their own Layer-2 networks. Coinbase famously created the Base with OP Stack, while OKX has X Layer and uses technology from the team behind another layer 2 project, Polygon.
Another layer 2 is coming
Over the past year, layer 2 systems have been popping up everywhere, and some in the industry have argued that there is increasing fatigue and fragmentation due to these networks. Some experts have argued that there could be thousands of layer 2 networks within a few years, and that teams are already building layer 3 networks that can run on top of the layer 2 networks.
Adams argues that the fatigue is due to the fact that “there are many more people focused on infrastructure than there are people focused on use cases for that infrastructure. And so it leads to there being a million platforms looking for developers, and not that many developers looking for a platform.”
His argument for Unichain is that, just as Uniswap is a liquidity hub on the Ethereum network, Unichain could be a DeFi hub for many chains. as part of several chains connected to Optimism’s Superchain ecosystem.
“We think this could ultimately lead to products and user experiences that are more like the real world, things that don’t feel like you have to learn something entirely new to use them,” Adams told CoinDesk.
Technical details
As part of the unveiling, the Uniswap Labs team plans to add unique technology features to the chain, built with Ethereum research and development team Flashbots, including a trusted execution environment (TEE) for block building and a secure computing area that transactions and code guarantees. It cannot be tampered with, as well as a community validation network.
The TEE should provide transparency when ordering transactions, building blocks between 200-250 milliseconds, the team shared in a press release. That amounts to one-fifth to one-fourth of a second, compared to twelve seconds now on the Ethereum mainnet and two seconds on most layer 2 networks.
“Going from two seconds to 250 milliseconds for the experience a user will have is actually extremely impactful,” Adams said.
Faster blocks can also reduce maximum extractable value (MEV) capabilities, where automated trading bots can execute transactions in a blockchain’s queue before they can be processed.
The community validation network, coming in 2025, should help with decentralization “by allowing full nodes to help verify blocks by staking UNI,” the Uniswap team wrote in the press release.
“This approach reduces the risk that sequencers will propose conflicting or invalid blocks, which could delay the finality of the transaction or expose users to financial risk from interacting with uncompleted blocks.”
Read more: Optimism pushes for ‘interoperability’ between connected blockchains