Uniswap Labs announced that it is developing a new layer-2 network that is scheduled to launch on the testnet on Thursday. This project was built using Optimism’s blockchain infrastructure called OP Stack, which was previously used by crypto exchange Coinbase and electronics giant Sony.

As the largest decentralized exchange running on Ethereum, Uniswap aims to speed up transactions and reduce costs with this new network. It also aims to improve user experience by increasing liquidity. This new network, called “Unichain”, was first planned to become operational on a private testnet on Thursday.

Technical development is led by Uniswap Labs and leverages Optimism’s OP Stack technology. Unichain will join the federation called “Superchain”, formed by Optimism-related networks. Members of this federation include Coinbase’s own layer-2 blockchain, Base.

Hayden Adams, the inventor of Uniswap and CEO of Uniswap Labs, explained the motivation of the project and stated that users want transactions to occur instantly. In the world of Ethereum scaling, the trend of major crypto exchanges building their own layer-2 networks had accelerated by the end of 2023.

For example, Coinbase created its network called Base using OP Stack, while OKX launched its layer-2 network called X Layer.

Despite the rapid spread of this trend, concerns have been raised among some industry experts about fatigue and fragmentation due to the increase in the number of networks. Some experts state that thousands of layer-2 networks may emerge in the coming years and that layer-3 networks operating on top of layer-2 networks have begun to be built.

But Adams argues that this fatigue stems from the fact that there are too many platforms focused on infrastructure, but not enough developers for those infrastructures.

Adams suggests that Unichain could be a decentralized finance (DeFi) hub for many chains, just as Uniswap is a liquidity hub on the Ethereum network. This network will be integrated into Optimism’s Superchain ecosystem.

The Uniswap Labs team plans to bring some unique technological features to Unichain together with the Ethereum research and development team Flashbots. These features include a trusted execution environment (TEE) for block creation and a secure computational domain that ensures transactions and code are not modified.

TEE aims to bring transparency to transaction ordering and creates blocks in as little as 200-250 milliseconds. On the Ethereum mainnet, this time is currently 12 seconds, and on other layer-2 networks it is two seconds. Adams stated that this speed is quite impressive in terms of user experience.

Additionally, faster block generation can also reduce maximal extractable value (MEV) opportunities. MEV is known as a situation where automated trading bots can front-run transactions before they are processed on-chain.

The community verification network, planned to arrive in 2025, aims to increase the decentralization of the network. This verification network will allow full nodes to verify blocks by staking UNI tokens.