The firm behind Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume, has entered into the Ethereum L2 race, focused on the needs of users in the decentralized finance space.
Called Unichain, the nascent scaling solution is built by Uniswap Labs on Optimism’s Superchain, referring to the unified network of layer 2 blockchains built using the OP Stack.
Uniswap Labs CEO Hayden Adams told Unchained, “One of the biggest benefits of Optimism is just that I think it’s a standard a lot of people can converge around… We’re excited for their vision of interoperability and being able to partner with Optimism, partner with Base, and really prove out the Ethereum roadmap of interoperable L2s.” Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Coinbase-incubated Base are in the Superchain ecosystem.
The new network, which is live on a private testnet and is expected to roll out in the next few months, has two key features – verifiable block building and a validation network – according to its whitepaper written by a number of people such as Adams, Flashbots strategy lead Hasu, OP Labs CEO Karl Floersch, and Paradigm general partner Dan Robinson.
Created in collaboration with Flashbots, a research and development firm known for its focus on maximal extractable value (MEV), verifiable block building is ideally designed to help Unichain have 200-250 millisecond block times.
An Already Crowded L2 Ecosystem
Uniswap Labs unveiling Unichain marks an additional entrant into the already populated L2 arena. At presstime, the number of L2 protocols attempting to help scale Ethereum currently stands at 105 with Arbitrum, Base, and OP Mainnet taking the top three ranks by total value locked, per Ethereum scaling solution analytics platform L2Beat.
As to why Uniswap Labs is introducing yet another L2, Adams told Unchained he wants Unichain to improve the fragmented user experience of DeFi in which liquidity on each network is siloed from capital on the others. The company intends to do that by making it easy for users and developers to access liquidity across the Superchain.
“We want to create a chain where other chains can interoperate with [each other] very easily,” Adams said. “If you have a token on one chain and you want to buy another token, that trade might execute on Unichain.”
Although Unichain will start with single-block, cross-chain messaging among all Superchain L2s, the company will also work on creating interoperability for all chains, not just ones in the Superchain ecosystem, by working on Ethereum Improvement Proposals, such as one around “cross chain intents,” an interface that will allow users to easily transact across chains.
Unichain’s Sequencer Versus Others
Unichain, like all, or at least the vast majority of L2s, depends on a single sequencer, a critical piece of rollup infrastructure charged with ordering and bundling transactions from the L2 before posting them to Ethereum’s base layer. Unichain’s validation network is expected to address the centralization risks associated with single-sequencer architectures.
“While Unichain leverages a single sequencer for efficiency, it introduces further decentralization by allowing full nodes to help verify blocks by staking UNI,” the Uniswap’s blog post stated. “This approach reduces the risk of sequencers proposing conflicting or invalid blocks, which could delay transaction finality or expose users to financial risks from interacting with unfinalized blocks.”
Read More: What Are Sequencers in Layer 2 Protocols Such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base?
Most L2 sequencers are controlled by a single entity. For example, Base’s sequencer is dictated by Coinbase, which earns 100% of the fees generated by the sequencer. But Unichain has more than one party, namely Uniswap Labs and Flashbots, involved in its sequencer, plus the UNI stakers who act as a second layer of security. By participating in Unichain’s validation network, UNI stakers verify each block of transactions the sequencer builds.
As a result, the fees Unichain garners from users transacting on the blockchain will be divided up amongst the various actors contributing to the network. “Sequencer will earn some fees for being a sequencer [and] the validation network will earn fees for being a validation network. These are two different roles within the ecosystem,” Adams said.
UPDATE (Oct. 10 09:58 a.m. ET): A previous version of this story said “Optimism, aka OP Mainnet” which has since been revised to “Optimism’s OP Mainnet” for clarity. Optimism is the Collective, and the home of the Superchain, while OP Mainnet is a single blockchain.
