# Unichain – an Ethereum L2 designed for DeFi Source: https://blog.uniswap.org/introducing-unichain Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Unichain-an-Ethereum-L2-designed-for-DeFi?index=0x67093c48754c34e9f09d7b68dacfc536bbc4eb0670434d854357d8e6cc4b6e6e8f1a84b9 Submitted by auditless.eth on 2024-10-11 UTC, 2 upvotes, 1 comment ## Summary Uniswap Labs announced Unichain, a fast, decentralized Superchain L2 built to serve as a home for DeFi and liquidity across chains. The company says Unichain will lower transaction costs by about 95% compared with Ethereum L1 in the short term, and launches with one-second block times, with 250ms "sub-blocks" planned. A block builder developed with Flashbots uses a trusted execution environment, and Unichain is partnering with OP Labs on native interoperability within the Optimism Superchain. The testnet goes live now, with mainnet due later this year, and the code is open source under the MIT license. ## Article 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. ## Comments **tim**: Nice! Whitepapers are back! Somehow that reminded me how we used to communicate technical break throughs :) It‘s interesting, so somehow they want to decrease perceived finality with this. But how does this work with being finalized on Ethereum L1? Can‘t someone still MEV the rollup sequencers eventually?