📣 Uniswap Shakes Up the Crypto Market with a New L2 Blockchain

posted  10 Oct 2024
Photo - Uniswap Shakes Up the Crypto Market with a New L2 Blockchain
Uniswap, the decentralized exchange, has revealed its proprietary L2 blockchain, Unichain, developed using the OP Stack from Optimism. According to the development team, this initiative is part of a strategy to enhance Ethereum’s scalability, leading to a major increase in payment efficiency.
Transaction fees on Unichain have been reduced by an impressive 95%, and block confirmation times now clock in at under one second. These improvements were made possible by collaborating with Flashbots, who also worked on securing the code and minimizing the profitability of MEV bot activities.

One of the key features of Unichain will be its ability to facilitate token swaps across multiple Optimism Superchain networks without the need to manually switch chains. The Uniswap team plans to extend this functionality to other blockchains (including Polygon and zkSync) by implementing the ERC-7683 standard.
People actually want things to feel instant,
said Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams in a statement about the new blockchain.

The testnet is expected to launch within the next few hours, with the mainnet rollout anticipated by the end of 2024. Unichain will be fully open-source under the MIT license, allowing third-party developers to integrate freely. Uniswap Labs has also become the official developer of the OP Stack.

Launching their own L2 blockchain was a necessary step for Uniswap to scale Ethereum effectively, as the protocol has processed over $2.4 trillion through 500 million trades over the last six years, often struggling with network congestion and slow transaction speeds.