Uniswap Labs, the development team behind the largest Ethereum-based decentralized exchange, has launched its Layer 2. The move marks the second major product release in two weeks, coming on the heels of its highly anticipated V4.

Unichain, which debuted in testnet last fall, is Uniswap’s way of employing its years of building consumer-facing products to the world of Ethereum infrastructure development, which can sometimes feel hostile to users. 

“For us, just having the most used on-chain protocol and one of the most popular front-end interfaces, I think that over the years we've learned a lot,” Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, told The Block. 

The idea is not just to give Uniswap, which has nearly $5 billion in total value locked across 30-chains, a dedicated chain, but to also help solve some of the fragmentation that’s occurred since Ethereum doubled down on scaling through its so-called “rollup-centric roadmap.”

“We're entering a cross-chain world. How do we make that feel cohesive to users? How do we make it feel really good?,” Adams said. “What we're really looking at doing is accelerating Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap and building towards something that will have really good outcomes for our users.”

Adams noted that there’s a certain irony in Unichain being pitched as “the DeFi chain” among this universe of chains, given that like other general purpose L2s, it will support any use case. But there are certain technical developments under the hood that gear it towards supporting Uniswap and “DeFi more broadly.”

For one, Unichain will introduce a new block building system developed together with Flashbots called Rollup-Boost to enable sub-second block times. The tool won’t be available at launch, but is expected to roll out in the coming months. (Though Unichain is coming out of the gates with 1-2 second block times, putting it on par with the fastest other Optimism-based chain, Ink, built by Kraken.) 

Rollup-Boost is middleware that moves much of the transaction sequencing responsibilities that would typically be performed by a centralized sequencer into a “trusted execution environment,” or TEE, that lives on physical chip hardware. The tool will split Unichain blocks into four, allowing for 250-millisecond sub-blocks.

This will be “hugely beneficial for liquidity providers and swappers,” Adams said, by enabling new forms of arbitrage and limiting the amount of negative maximal extractable value where validators can snipe value from users by reordering transactions. “The longer you have a gap, the longer the block times, the more MEV builds up,” he said. 

Unichain is also introducing a “fair priority” model for its gas auctions inside the TEE, which helps guarantee that user transactions are not being reordered to steal value from them, as well as a unique chain validation network with permissionless fault proofs — at launch — that will enable anyone to challenge fraudulent or malicious transactions.

The Unichain Validation Network is a system where people can stake UNI and run nodes within the system to verify the state of the network as a “step beyond the sequencer,” Adams said. 

Adams noted that these innovations all help reduce the role of Unichain’s centralized sequencer. “People sometimes have this hand-waved concept of ‘the sequencer is centralized, we need to decentralize the sequencer,’ but they aren't composing that into a real solution,” he said. “They’re thinking about it in the abstract.”

Centralized sequencers are a controversial topic in the Ethereum scaling debate, despite being a necessary reality for Optimism chains until a full technological solution is found. In short, sequencers capture all transaction fees, which could otherwise be distributed among a network of decentralized nodes, while also reintroducing the problems associated with MEV transaction ordering — in that users have to trust the sequencer operator to act honestly.

“If someone doesn't want to trust a sequencer, they can also wait for the validation network to sign off on it as well,” Adams said. “There's different levels of finality, right? If all you care about is the builder, you can wait two-to-three milliseconds, and if all you care about is the builder plus the sequencer, you can wait one second. If you want even additional economic security, you can wait another couple seconds to get the validation network to sign off on it.”

“You can almost imagine a world where, in the future, the builder and validation network are so successful and working so well that maybe at that point the role of the sequencer has become redundant or so small that it doesn't matter,” he said. 

While Adams said the UNI token will essentially function as “more of a network token” due to its role in the validation process, he declined to comment on whether Unichain has any bearing on the longstanding “fee switch” debate to direct a portion of protocol revenues to holders. 

“It still has its role as a governance token, but there's aspects of this that look more like a network token,” he said. “The fee switch exists within a governance system, and so I think it's really up to that ecosystem. That's not something that, you know, Uniswap Labs focuses on.”

This is not the only UNI-token-related controversy that has sprung up around Unichain. Some users felt spurned by Uniswap Labs, the corporate face of a decentralized protocol, when it made the unilateral decision to spend resources developing the system without consulting token holders. 

One user, who asked for anonymity, brought up the real “conflict of interest between value accrual to equity holders versus value accrual to token holders” in part given that “many people bought the token expecting fee switch to be turned on."

That said, 65% of Unichain net chain revenue will be earned by UVN validators and stakers once the program goes live later this year.

While adding yet another blockchain layer to the already fragmented crypto experience may be complicated for users, Adams argued that there is upside in doing so, as Unichain could eventually become a generalized liquidity layer for L2s.

“In my mind, a lot of different applications should kind of exist across different chains, right?” Adams. “If any single app could benefit from having its own chain, it’s Uniswap.”

He noted that the lack of standardization has led to a fragmentation of users, applications and liquidity across Ethereum, but the ubiquity of Uniswap could help address this. 

“We're kind of aiming to, with this work, both at the chain level but also front-end level within our products, lean into being a cross-chain liquidity hub,” Adams said. “In the long run, you'll be able to quickly bridge in and out from Unichain to really any other chain and build user experiences on top of it that feel like you're using just one chain.”

While many have been waiting years for this kind of “abstracted DeFi layer,” as one user put it, Adams said UX improvements will be steadily rolled out throughout the year that will make some of the most annoying aspects of chain hopping invisible to users.

“Unichain can be, like, a bit of a spearhead for interop within Ethereum,” he said. “If by the end of the year, the L2 experience within our products feels like it feels today, then we will have completely failed.”

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