Comprehensive editor: Felix, PANews
Uniswap developer Uniswap Labs announced the launch of its own Layer2 network Unichain on Ethereum and released a white paper. The network is built on OP Stack technology, with a test line going live on October 11 and the mainnet launching later this year. Uniswap said the chain is expected to provide faster, cheaper transactions and enhance interoperability across blockchain networks.
Developed in partnership with Uniswap Foundation, Optimism and Flashbots, Unichain will introduce a number of technological innovations, including a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for block construction, and a community verification network. TEE is expected to reduce block generation time to 200-250 milliseconds. Perhaps affected by this news, UNI exceeded $8, with a 24-hour increase of more than 12%, the highest level in three months.
technical details
Low cost while further achieving decentralization
Decentralization is the foundation of DeFi. Ethereum is highly decentralized, which requires compromises on the speed and affordability of L1 transactions. In an effort to maintain a decentralized approach to scaling Ethereum, Ethereum started providing cheap data to L2s earlier this year as part of a rollup-centric roadmap.
Unichain aims to leverage and accelerate Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, moving execution to L2. In practical terms, this means that Unichain will reduce transaction costs by approximately 95% in the short term and even more in the future compared to Ethereum L1.
Unichain will launch a decentralized verification network that allows nodes to verify blocks. This adds an extra layer of finality and reduces the risk of conflicting or invalid blocks. The community verification network will launch in 2025. It is designed to help achieve decentralization "by allowing full nodes to help verify blocks by staking UNI." To become a validator of the Unichain virtual machine, node operators must stake UNI tokens on the Ethereum mainnet.
Fast, near-instant transactions
To bring the next generation of markets on-chain, DeFi needs to be faster. The current block time of the Ethereum mainnet is 12 seconds, and that of most L2 networks is 2 seconds. Unichain's initial block generation time is 1 second, and "sub-blocks" will be launched in the future, with plans to shorten the block generation time to less than 250 milliseconds. Instantly, faster blocks increase market efficiency and reduce the value of MEV losses.
This improvement is achieved through a block builder developed in partnership with Flashbots that uses a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). In addition to improving speed, TEE also aims to increase transparency in transaction ordering and prevent transaction failures.
While TEE cannot replace decentralized consensus, it can significantly enhance trust and security compared to other block constructors.
Seamless multi-chain transactions
As Ethereum's scaling roadmap is implemented, there will be many L2s. While the new L2 helped reduce costs, it dispersed liquidity and created a poor user experience. Unichain is built to enable seamless deposit and withdrawal transactions, regardless of which chain the user is on.
As part of the Optimism superchain, Unichain is working with OP Labs to implement native interoperability, which will enable single-block cross-chain messaging between superchain L2s. Hyperchain is an interoperable L2 expansion solution network constructed using Optimism technology stack. Other superchain networks include Base and SNAXchain, which manages Synthetix’s decentralized perpetual exchange. For chains other than the super chain, Unichain will improve the interoperability between all chains through projects such as ERC-7683.
It will have a greater impact when users have a simple, intuitive interface to access cross-chain liquidity. Shortly after the launch of Unichain, cross-chain transactions will be introduced in the Uniswap interface and Uniswap wallet.
Currently, Uniswap has chosen Pyth Network to provide instant data to Unichain. Pyth Network's 500+ real-time price feeds and low-latency data are updated every 400 milliseconds, ensuring Unichain developers have instant access to DeFi data.
Is there any point in Unichain being late?
While the launch of Unichain gained some market attention and boosted the performance of the UNI token, the crypto industry has been flooded with L2 solutions over the past year, which market experts believe has led to network fragmentation. However, Uniswap Labs CEO Hayden Adams explained the importance of multiple L2 chains for Ethereum scaling, stating that "the value network cannot run on a single chain."
But it wasn't all acclaim. As early as September 2022, Vitalik stated that he did not understand the significance of Uniswap's chain. He believes that the core value of Uniswap is that users can complete transactions quickly, and the Uniswap chain or Rollup does not provide additional advantages in this regard. Replicating Uniswap's pattern on each Rollup makes more sense because cross-chain bridging has inherent friction and time delays that cannot be fully abstracted. In addition, wealthy users can use automated tools to split transactions into multiple rollups to reduce the risk of slippage.
Related reading: Uniswap launches L2 chain, will UNI finally get out of the "governance token dilemma"?
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"What is different about the Layer2 launched by Uniswap - "Unichain"? "This article was first published on (Block Guest).
