Unichain – an Ethereum L2 Designed for DeFi

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.

Full article: https://blog.uniswap.org/introducing-unichain

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