Layer 2 (L2) blockchains like Unichain are critical for driving blockchain adoption with crypto traders, digital assets creators and institutions alike.
Layer 2 (L2) blockchains are essential for driving blockchain adoption among crypto traders, digital assets creators, and institutions. They help alleviate congestion on Ethereum, enabling faster transactions, lower fees, and a seamless experience across blockchains. For everyday crypto users, this translates to cheaper and faster trading, access to integrated stablecoins like USDC, and improved cross-chain swapping.
“Unichain is built differently,” said Hayden Adams, Founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs. “We’re here to make DeFi faster, cheaper, more decentralized, which is why we launched Unichain to be permissionless from day one.”
Unichain will unlock the next generation of markets for both users and builders with one-second block times, eventually reaching 250 milliseconds, making Unichain the fastest chain in the industry. At launch, user benefits include:
Unichain is built on Ethereum’s core principles—open, permissionless, and decentralized. As the first L2 to launch as a Stage 1 rollup, this means that Unichain is fully decentralized from day one. Anyone can participate in maintaining the integrity of the chain with permissionless fault proofs—a feature that allows anyone to challenge transactions. Later this year, the Unichain Validation Network will enable anyone to verify blocks, further decentralizing the chain.
For crypto traders, high gas fees and slow transactions have been a pain point. With fast block times and low fees, Unichain is optimized for onchain markets, offering one-second blocks and gas that is 95% cheaper than Ethereum. In the coming months, Unichain will introduce advanced capabilities like Flashbot’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which leads to faster finality, a term used in DeFi to describe transaction settlements on Ethereum.
Finally, the experience for users moving crypto between different blockchains can be slow and difficult. Uniswap Labs is aiming to solve this problem with innovations like ERC-7683, a universal standard developed in partnership with Across that reduces friction when swapping or trading across chains.
Unichain is built on the Optimism Superchain, with a vision of creating a network of interoperable chains. The public can access Unichain via the Uniswap Interface and App. For more technical details, including the full list of applications deployed on Unichain, visit Unichain or the blog.
Uniswap Labs builds some of the most widely adopted DeFi products, including a self-custody mobile wallet, a trading API, and a web interface. Uniswap Labs is a software company founded in 2018 by Hayden Adams, who invented the Uniswap Protocol, a peer-to-peer system for swapping digital assets that has processed more than $2.75T in volume since its founding.
