Yet another blockchain from a big brand is live. Uniswap Labs, the company that supports the popular decentralized finance application Uniswap, announced Tuesday that Unichain, its own blockchain, is open to the public. The company had initially launched a beta version of the blockchain in October.
“You think about the novel uses of blockchains, they all come back to DeFi,” Mary-Catherine Lader, COO of Uniswap Labs, told Fortune in an interview.
Unichain is a layer 2, a term that describes a blockchain built on top of another blockchain. Also known as L2s, most aim to speed up and reduce the cost of transactions on Ethereum, the biggest blockchain in crypto.
As more users have flooded Ethereum, the network has become slower and more expensive to use. To combat the congestion, companies have launched a flood of options over the past year. Especially as Wall Street experiments with products on blockchains, even crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken have piled into the L2 explosion.
“I’ve seen more inbound interest from true financial institutions, payments companies, fintech companies in using blockchains for their services in the past three months than the past three and a half years,” Lader said.
Unichain, built on top of Ethereum, is one of the more high-profile product launches to come from Uniswap Labs since the company’s founding in 2018.
The crypto firm is behind the most popular application in DeFi: Uniswap. Unlike centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase that match buy and sell orders through software the company controls, DeFi trading on Uniswap and other decentralized services takes place entirely through a set of algorithms that operate autonomously.
Since the decentralized exchange’s launch, it’s processed almost $2.6 trillion in trading volume, according to data from DefiLlama. The success of Uniswap has helped its corporate affiliate, Uniswap Labs, find favor with venture capitalists, who invested $165 million at a $1.66 billion valuation in 2022.
Unichain, the newest offering from the company, is designed for DeFi, where milliseconds can be the difference between winning or losing trades, Lader said.
In its initial public launch, Unichain will have one-second block times, she said. Block times are the amount of time it takes for a blockchain to process new transactions.
This is already better than most existing L2s on Ethereum, including Coinbase’s Base, according to data from Chainspect. Uniswap Labs plans to update Unichain to reduce its block time to 250 milliseconds, which would make Unichain the fastest L2 on the market.
That update will occur in the “next few months,” she added, but she declined to say when.
