Announcing Unichain | DeFi's Next Frontier?

Unichain Is Here! Joining us today is Hayden Adams of Uniswap and Karl Floersch of Optimism to explain the exciting new release and vision for the future of Ethereum and appchains. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-announcing-uni ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/76?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:05:51 Announcing Unichain! 00:11:51 How Will Unichain Work? 00:17:21 Superchain And Interoperability 00:19:38 Superchain Enhancements 00:26:12 Unichain User Experience 00:30:43 What About Other Superchains? 00:38:49 Unfragmenting The Fragmentation 00:43:58 Coordinating All Of Ethereum 00:49:08 UNI Token 00:52:47 Should DeFi Live On L1? 00:57:57 What Success Looks Like 01:01:15 The Path To Superchain 01:03:19 Release Dates ------ RESOURCES Unichain: https://unichain.org/ Hayden: https://x.com/haydenzadams Karl: https://x.com/karl_dot_tech ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we got a special announcement for you. The Unichain. This is Uniswap's chain. This was predicted for a very long time, and now it's coming to pass. We've got Hayden Adams from Uniswap, the founder of Uniswap. We also have Carl Florsch. He is a co-founder of Optimism, which maybe gives you a sense for what Layer 2 they're going to launch on.

• 0:26David Hoffman?

  Smash these two things together. Tell me what you get.

• 0:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you get a unicorn-looking chain. And so they are here to announce this and talk about it today. We get into the details. We also have some kind of like questions or pushback, right? Some current discussions in the Ethereum world of what do we do? Another chain? Does this result in more fragmentation? How is this good for either the asset? Where should DeFi live? Should it live on Layer 2s or Layer 1s? Anyway, Hayden and Carl give the context for that, what they're planning with this Unichain project, and answers to many of those questions.

• 1:00David Hoffman?

  I think this is going to start off a very big conversation in the Ethereum space, because this is not just another generalized Layer 2. This is not another Optimism, another Base, another Arbitrum. This is an application, getting a chain. And so you got to tip your hat to the Cosmos people, who always predicted that apps will one day become chains. And the biggest app, what is the biggest app on Ethereum? It's Uniswap. So of course, it's going to be the first one to get its own chain. But this is going to start a trend, because the Unichain is going to push the frontier on some very hard problems in the Ethereum space. Chain interoperability, chain abstraction, bridging without having to impose that choice upon users.

• 1:44David Hoffman?

  They are going to put a lot of research and investment and energy into abstracting the chains, carving a path for the next biggest app to follow suit. And then it will get its own app chain. And so I think this is kind of going to be a landmark moment in the Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap, when the largest app on the Layer 1 becomes a very prominent chain inside of the superchain. Huge win for Optimism. An inevitable conclusion. By Uniswap, predicted by many. Many have always said that apps will always be incented to get its own chain. Dan Alitzer, shout out to Dan Alitzer, who put the first formal words of Uniswap.

• 2:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  He may have known it before Hayden, that Uniswap is getting a chain.

• 2:24David Hoffman?

  The blog post said uni-chain is inevitable and here that day is finally here. Very big moment for both these teams, but also I think for the greater Ethereum ecosystem as a whole.

• 2:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think so. And I also think in the aftermath of this, it's going to cause further discussion from those in the Ethereum community who are like, wait a second. We still want some of the DeFi apps and liquidity on layer one. And how's this going to work if all of the liquidity goes into layer two?

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  If we push it all to the layer twos, if everything goes to the layer twos and they are also perfectly abstracted, then everything is just one massive network.

• 2:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  See, these are the types of conversations that are going on and, well, we won't spoil Hayden and Carl's take on it. It's a little bit of the best way out is through, but we'll get to that episode. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended exchange, the place where you can transition your fiat into the magical world of crypto, that is Kraken. Go create an account.

• 3:23David Hoffman?

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• 5:51David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I'm here with Carl Florsch, the chief optimist over at OP Labs, and also Hayden Adams, the chief unicorn officer over at Uniswap Labs. Carl and Hayden, welcome back to Bankless.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  So, why are the creators of, one, the OP Stack framework, and, two, the Uniswap AMM on the same podcast? What are you guys doing here?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  You know, just hanging out. Yeah, I mean, look, obviously, there's been a long, a lot of speculation about whether or not Uniswap eventually should have its own chain. And that's really what we're here to talk about and announce that and, you know, just talk about how it fits into our products and roadmaps and Ethereum's scaling future.

• 6:30David Hoffman?

  Okay, so dropping the uni-chain, I think, is a pretty big cannonball into the lake of Ethereum. Carl, can you talk about just like the significance of this? Like, what does this mean for the Ethereum rollup landscape? What does this mean for optimism? What does it mean? Like, what's your perspective here with just the impact here?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I think this is a major step towards maturing and realizing the Ethereum scalability vision. I think it's been a long time coming that Uniswap would eventually have a chain just for its scalability purposes. And it's super exciting that it's going to be, you know, joining the ranks of other L2s within the superchain. And, you know, now, more than ever, it's going to be important that we solve fragmentation and interoperability. But, you know, that's on us. We're working on it.

• 7:19David Hoffman?

  Hayden, maybe you can talk about what does a uni-chain actually look like? Why does Uniswap need a chain? We have a Uniswap. We have many Uniswaps on many different chains. Why are we creating a uni-chain?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think it has to start with like, how blockchains are going to scale generally and like then also how we approach building products and building protocols. And uni-chain is really just like the chain that we want to see in the world, particularly the L2, and one that's really built for Uniswap users and, you know, the needs of, you know, DeFi and the needs of, you know, the L2 ecosystem. And, you know, the way that I think about it is that we are on Ethereum for, you know, there's all this like debate about where should DeFi live? Should it be L1 or L2? There's that whole like can of worms on Twitter right now. And there's also just this concept of the rollup-centric roadmap,

• 8:09Speaker 03

  which is basically that like today Ethereum is being designed and built with, you know, essentially a layer two scaling vision in mind. And

• 8:21Speaker 03

  We at Uniswap tend to be very practical and very focused on our users, which is like, how do we, within that world, create the best user outcomes? How do we kind of like accelerate this vision for scaling blockchains, which we think is really exciting? And people talk about blockchain scaling. I think the really like, I like just like reducing things down for myself. And it's like, blockchains are kind of like servers with cool properties, right? If you need your server to never go offline, if you need your server, you might want to use one of these fancy blockchain servers that add on decentralization. If you want your server to not have operators that are stealing your money, et cetera. And so when you think about how servers scale, how do you scale servers? Do you just have more of them or beefier servers? And that's kind of what like the L2 vision is, is that we have like more chains and beefier chains.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  And the thing, the challenges that we face in that world is, you know, like when we were running every application on Ethereum on a single server, on the L1 mainnet, and again, it's not a decentralized cool blockchain server. I'm not saying it's just a server, but when you run it all on that, you get these really nice properties because everything can communicate. Like, your balances are the same across every application. Your, the user experience of moving between applications is very seamless because it's all running in the same environment. And so we were able to create these like very high quality user experiences. You know, people don't want to think about managing their assets across multiple networks. Users don't even want to think about pretty much anything. Users just want to like have an action they want to perform, and they want that to be as simple as humanly possible.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And then when you look at what has happened as we've started to scale into many L2s, you get this world where there's like, okay, we're scaling by paralyzing and by creating more of these things, but liquidity and user experience and interacting between the different systems is getting more and more complex. And today, that is being put on users, on end users. And what we are aiming with UniChain is how do we, you know, create systems where you get the, you know, Some of the user experience benefits we had when everything ran on one chain, how do we kind of create this seamless user experience, whatever chain you're on? But then also, and how do we reduce some of the fragmentation of liquidity?

• 10:33Speaker 03

  The fragmentation of user experience that's happening? And how do we kind of just like? And then with this opportunity, you know, part of the benefit of scaling and moving to layer two is there are also benefits. So how can we like use the unique benefits and landscape of layer two to further improve on that user experience beyond what we were ever able to do on L1, even when everything was running in the same place, to create like a very fast, very cheap, but still, you know, decentralized, still, you know, like having good trust properties version of Uniswap? So it's kind of aiming to be this like L2 kind of liquidity hub that is designed to have the properties that are most useful for DeFi and could be really like a home for

• 11:17Speaker 03

  DeFi and a, you know?

• 11:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Home for DeFi, L2 liquidity hub. Hayden, I just have a bunch of rapid fire, just general questions.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this thing is called the Unichain. When is it launching?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  You know, drop the cleaner, but it's, you know, when is this launching? It's actually launching very, very soon. I think that, you know, it's basically with this announcement, it's going to, we're going to have a test set out.

• 11:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  You know, right away and then it will be launching, you know, imminent to leave very soon this year.

• 11:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. And then, so we have an, congrats on that. We have an optimism, an OP chain, basically. So this implies kind of like EVM, running on the OP stack, that sort of thing. And is this, is the plan to like take Uniswap, the protocol and deploy it on this chain? Or are we like, are we migrating anything from the existing? You know, the home for Uniswap is sort of on the Ethereum L1. Will Ethereum remain, the L1 remain the home of Uniswap? And like what, what, what will actually be Uniswap about the Unichain? And will it also be a home to other DeFi apps? Like, so when we think about a DeFi chain, L2 chain, we sort of think of something like

• 12:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  optimism itself, or something like Base, let's say, or something like Arbitrum. And it's kind of general purpose across all sorts of different DeFi. Is it like that? Give us some more color here.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. Let's just go through it all. And I can even start to talk about some of like the technical changes and improvements or enhancements that we've been thinking about for our specific version. Look, at its core, it's funny when you talk about like even optimizing for a specific use case, you still generally end up wanting to support the general class of use cases. So it is a like base, like optimism, it is a general purpose roll up. But we've parameterized it and kind of built systems around it that are really optimized for DeFi and for things that we've learned in the course of developing Uniswap as well as our products that are built around Uniswap.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  And so it's really like designed for DeFi in mind and designed for like the specific needs and use cases, but it's still like a general purpose roll up and can have all sorts of applications built on top of it. I will say that like one thing, when you kind of compare like what is mainnet's role and how does this fit next to mainnet? I'll say that like the world of like mainnet being the central hub. And by mainnet, you mean the L1, yes? Sorry, Ethereum L1, Ethereum mainnet, being this like sort of a starting point that people onboard. Right now, what we have, and it's actually one of the core reasons that everything feels so broken, and I can come back to that. Ethereum is being built, and I think it's a, I actually think Ethereum's roadmap is

• 14:15Speaker 03

  like pretty good. Ethereum is being built entirely with the mind of like L2, like an L2 centric vision, where most people, where most users, most applications are living on L2 and they're ultimately like settling on, and you have proving systems on L1 and you have data availability on L1, and it's like ultimately settling there. But like the, you know, when you talk about like what users actually need, they need like something that's like much lower, like Ethereum's optimizing for this like very extreme level of decentralization and censorship resistance, which is like suitable for like being this like world settlement layer. And I think there's like a lot of value to that. But like when it comes to like your average user, they need transactions to happen, even like a second is too slow, right?

• 14:57Speaker 03

  You need like subs, you need like millisecond kind of, not one millisecond, but you need like very fast blocks, right? And so we're aiming for 200 to 250 millisecond blocks. And we can come back to how we're aiming to accomplish that. But.

• 15:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  That sounds like NASDAQ on chain, Hayden.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  No, I think that it's still like, you know, using this like decentralized blockchain technology to do very cool decentralized things that NASDAQ would never, never dream of. But, and I also think it's still like, you know, a general purpose thing. People can build, you know, permissionlessly build all sorts of cool things on top of it. But, so just to jump back to your actual question, because I feel like I didn't quite get through that, is that, you know, part of the fragmented, broken experience we have today is that L1 is going to be the most expensive place. So if L1 is a hub, if L1 is the starting place, then everything is subject to that most, like the most expensive of the chain. Like, L1 should be the most expensive chain. If L1 is the most expensive chain, then, and we start every user there, and every token

• 15:55Speaker 03

  is created there, and every application is created there, and then you have to move into L2s, and then to move between L2s, you go through L1, then you have this thing where every single user ends up paying L1 costs all the time. You need to start users in an L2, and then they need to move between L2s directly. And it needs to be very fast, and it needs to be very cheap. And when you do that, you can create like, you know, when we think about like, every transaction needs to happen in under a second, and it needs to happen with, for under, you know, one cent, right? Like, that's what we think about when we think about the products we're building for our users. And you can't do that when mainnet is like the place that everyone is. And I don't think that we should try to build mainnet in a way that that is the case. I think we should just like, you know, figure out how can we, you know, use the benefits

• 16:39Speaker 03

  of mainnet to kind of enhance the decentralization of faster, more scalable L2s that can interoperate with each other, that you can, you know, very quickly move funds in between, very quickly bridge between them. So we have all these like, technical enhancements and things that we're building around Unichain that will create the like, basically the user outcomes that we're aiming for, and the user experiences we're aiming for. And ultimately, we see this as like, an acceleration of Ethereum scaling roadmap, kind of a, you know, as well as like a Kind of acceleration even of the superchain and Carl's vision and kind of this sort of like advancement of how we scale layer twos and create good user experiences on top of them.

• 17:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, let's bring in the the superchain. I think the user user experience that no one wants is that I have my assets on some other layer two and now I have to bridge them over to the uni chain. I have to make my swap and then I have to bridge them back. Carl, maybe you can kind of talk to us about the role of the superchain here and the interop puzzle pieces that are bringing to the table with this whole uni chain thing.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Totally. So the superchain is exactly here to address that kind of network switching and, you know, high latency interoperability pain points. And so that comes in the form of a couple of things. One, it comes in most, most importantly, shared standards. So the OP stack, shared standard across all of the chains within the superchain. This gives developers the ability to build their application and rely on each one of those chains working and functioning in roughly the same way. That is like the core primitive that is most important. And so it's actually, by the way, super exciting to see uni swap building out all of these

• 18:26Speaker 02

  extensions and improvements to the OP stack, to the superchain, because that is going to, as Hayden said, increase or improve the scalability story and the interoperability story for all of Ethereum. So what we're really trying to do to kind of like nail in or drill into the interoperability stuff is we have kind of, one, we have Ethereum wide interoperability standards that we are pushing forward, things like cross-chain intense, things like, you know, chain specific addresses. There's a huge amount of stuff we can do to unify all of Ethereum and defragment it and provide, you know, shared liquidity. And then there are things that we can do also within the superchain, within the chains

• 19:06Speaker 02

  that have shared standards, such as really low latency interoperability and, you know, really low, you know, zero slippage, you know, token transfers, et cetera, et cetera. And so I I'm actually super excited for Uniswap, both contributing to the kind of cross-chain intents and like bridging the broader Ethereum ecosystem, because yeah, Uniswap is on all of these different chains. And also for being, you know, a key member of the superchain and sharing the OP stack and improving it together.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might help if I talk a little bit about like even the, we keep alluding to these like improvements or enhancements or extensions to the superchain that we were building and how it like relates to these are properties. It might make sense for me to just explain what they are.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  And what we're actually talking about here.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  We'll also add that in addition to like protocol level standards, even like interface standards. One of the reasons it's like a really exciting collaboration is that we've always been very user focused and and front-end focused in addition to the protocol level thinking that we do. And we kind of try to like bridge, we try to be a bridge between like understanding users, understanding application development, understanding protocol development, understanding chain development and kind of like span the full tech stack and thinking there. So just want to add that even like interface standards. When you talk about like how wallets interface with chains and even like display balances, et cetera, et cetera. Like removing the network switcher, all that stuff is like, is like part of this. And so it's, we just want to like build the user experiences and like work through each problem iteratively.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  But when it comes to the technical enhancements, there's basically like two main areas that we're, so at its core, we still have this like, you know, sequencer roll-up model that is, you know, used and adopted by Optimism and Base. And then what we have, we have basically like two components that we've built on top of it.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Which, you know, we're pretty excited about. One is basically like a builder and one is basically like a, you know, a verification service. So the builder kind of comes before transactions, you know, go into the sequencer. And then the verification service actually happens after the sequencer, but before they're finalized on L1. So we have these like additional layers. At its core, you still get the like the experience and the scalability benefits of the single sequencer. But at the builder level, we're able to Essentially create, you know, we have these things we are basically calling flash blocks and we're even partnering with a flash box team on building this is, you know, a system where we basically can do, you know, there's sort of these like fundamental

• 21:46Speaker 03

  like limits you run into like how like long does it take to markalize the state and that and that, you know, leads to slower block times. That's why you sometimes have like rollups that has these like, yes, it's fast, it's faster than L1, which is 12 seconds, but it's still like two-ish seconds or one-ish seconds. And so we're, we've created these flash blocks, which are these like sub blocks that we're aiming for 200 to 250 millisecond at release, which by the way will be, by release, I mean, release of this upgrade, this will be our enhancement. This will be not, the very first version of the main net will just be like the sequencer model and we'll have this coming soon after and we'll have a test net for it and all of that. And these are, these are very like new technical innovations, but we're basically aiming for 200 to 250 millisecond flash blocks,

• 22:30Speaker 03

  which are essentially, it's running inside a trusted execution environment, TEE. It's a, that's a whole hot topic on Twitter at times. I think I can like break down how I think about that. But essentially what that allows you to do is enhance, the way I think about TEE is, is you can take things that are fully, that are more centralized today and you can add additional properties and improvements on it. It's not like a replacement for decentralized consensus or decentralized nodes. It's more like where you can improve on the trust properties of things like sequencers and add cool new, you know, trust guarantees and cool things. And so what we're doing within the TEE is basically like a kind of a, you know, building these smaller blocks that are ultimately being laddered up into

• 23:13Speaker 03

  these bigger blocks that the sequencer is posting and also emitting like these like these state updates so that people can, from like the perspective of someone's, for example, doing, you know, arbitrage between a centralized exchange and a decentralized exchange, you will be able to, you know, do these arbitrage trades at these 200 to 250 millisecond flash block increments. You don't have to wait for the full one to two seconds. From a user's perspective, making a swap, your transaction will feel confirmed because You have this sort of like, it's been built within a block in the TEE, which will then be passed to the sequencer who will post it to the chain. So you sort of, it's kind of like a proposer. It's inspired by proposer builder separation. And it's building that proposer system or builder system

• 23:57Speaker 03

  within a trusted execution environment to improve on the trust properties. Another thing that's kind of very interesting with Flashbots and TEs is that we are also able to kind of enforce priority ordering. This is kind of a, I'm a little nervous to go super technical and deep here, but I think I should for a second. Just it is that like, you know, I don't, there's this blog post from Dan at Paradigm called Priority is All You Need, which is a whole kind of words in and of itself. But essentially what it is saying is you can go a long way when it comes to Mav reduction and minimization, you know, using prior, when you have very strong guarantees around the priority,

• 24:38Speaker 03

  around basically transactions being ordered in a fair priority gas auction. And I can talk about why, but essentially we are within the TE. We are kind of enforcing that transactions are ordered in a fair priority gas auction, which will, which we can then use to basically enhance how we do trades through things like Uniswap X to have a really, really clean, nice trade off space of like transaction inclusion speed and reducing the value that is today extracted from end users of Uniswap. It's about a billion dollars a year in the form of like, you know, sandwich attacks and Mav and whatever. I can go deeper on that.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  It's, I also feel like I just went deep on that. But so anyway, that's the TE. I can also get to the verification service, which comes after. But essentially that's, that's sort of the builder thing. Okay. I kind of want to just finish the one, the last little piece there.

• 25:38David Hoffman?

  For Bankless listeners who want to go down this trouble hole, we did an episode with Shay from Flashbots a lot on TEs and this very subject. And like, well, there's, there's two things that, two parts of this whole uni chain thing that really impacts Ethereum. There's the under. The hood, technical tech stack, the MEV supply chain, how that's going to be impacted. And that's kind of what Hayden was introducing. And then there's also just like the users who don't care. And I just have tokens on some chain and I might want to swap them. I think we could do, listeners, maybe we can try and help simulate that experience. And what that is actually like for them.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  I think when it comes to the, the, the users, when it, when it comes to everything I just said. It's like, it's basically shows up in two forms. It's faster and it's cheaper. Like I, you know, like the 250 millisecond block, like right now, when you make a trade on mainnet, the user waits 12 seconds. And they also, also, you know, oftentimes they get a worse price than they could have gotten. Because either because it took 12 seconds and the price moved, or because, you know, because you don't know what the price will do in 12 seconds. You actually have to set this wider slippage tolerance. So people, it creates more MEV opportunities. So people can essentially like put trades in front of them to make the, you know, and then the price won't be as good as they were expecting. And so they have to like, you have to sort of set these wide slippage parameters.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Generally, you know, what we're aiming for is transactions that are fast enough that, you know, it feels instant to the human eye, right? That's what you want when you're building a user facing application.

• 27:07David Hoffman?

  The big question I have Hayden is like, it's great that this is an improvement from mainnet, but like also how do I access it? Like, do I have to be inside of the optimism super chain to be able to access this? If I'm on base, do I have to swap over to uni chain or to, can I swap from base? Like, what is kind of the, the user experience of this whole process?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that like, some of these things are going to be like, generally there's like, one thing that I want to push on is like this, the cross chain intense trading system. So we, when we, we had, you know, announced Uniswap X back in the day. And then we talked about this like future cross chain Uniswap X version. Essentially, we, we were like, well, we want it to be a true standard. More and more people can adopt. We just call it cross chain Uniswap X, you know? And so we started, we wanted to work with other partners on how do we abstract it into a thing that is useful for more people. Essentially, the way that you think about crossing yourself X is it's aiming to create this like seamless experience of moving assets. If, you know, I have an asset, I want to buy another asset. It doesn't matter what chain it's on. Let's have, let's like, let the marketplace figure it out.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Let's let sophisticated actors behind the scenes figure out how to make that order happen in a way to feel seamless for the user.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  The important thing, I think the really important thing here is that like that is like the abstraction layer. Under the hood, the people that are making those orders happen, the fillers, et cetera, are using the best systems for rebalancing assets between chains available to them. And so the better bridging happens under the hood, the faster the bridging, et cetera, the higher quality of the bridging, the better that system becomes. We're essentially have built a marketplace where people can express an intent. I want to have an asset. I want to buy an asset. It doesn't matter what, it can be on this chain or that chain. And then you've created a system by which other people can match that intent.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  But then those people have, the better systems available to them. So when it comes to things like superchain interop, right? That is, in my mind, just basically building very, very, like any chain within the superchain, you get very, very fast bridging. And so what that looks like is, it looks like much cheaper, more liquid kind of settlement of these orders. We will still be able to create these same interoperable systems to some degree against other chains outside of the superchain, right? We have your soft deployments on all these different chains. They're going to continue to exist. But the bridges underneath them, moving assets between a non-superchain chain and a superchain chain, the fundamental underlying bridges that are used are just going to be

• 29:45Speaker 03

  more expensive or slower or have more risk associated. So we're aiming to create a user experience kind of holistically, no matter what chain you're on, no matter where you are, that really does just like completely abstract away chains, more or less. I think that it will be easier to do. It will be like more liquid. It will be easy to build these like settlement connectors and it'll be much, like within the superchain, it will be extremely easy as we start to work with other chain, or try to get other chains. And to like, when someone wants to buy an asset on another chain, like it's going to be slower and harder to figure out. Like each new, like everything within the superchain, the whole idea of standards is that it's like consistent and easy to interface with because you've had, you have like, and we deal with this all the time, right?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  We're building a user interface, new chains launched, there's new deployments. And every time we add a new chain, if it's, if it's an entirely new proprietary system, it's like takes way longer for us to add support than if it's like a well-understood, well-known chain that is standardized with similar to other chains.

• 30:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to ask that, just the high level question, like on the user side. So there will be haters, believe me. There are haters out there. I don't know if you guys are aware of this.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  I've never had a hater.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  No one's ever gotten mad at me on Twitter for anything.

• 30:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  There are haters out there who will hear this and they'll say, okay, so Ethereum's solution to fixing the L2 fragmentation problem is, wait, wait for it. Launch another chain, yet another chain.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  It's the, it's the classic standard, the standards meme, like we have too many competing standards, let's build a new standard.

• 31:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we, can we address that head on?

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 31:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because I'm getting kind of a rough contour of this, where basically Uniswap is launching the Unichain. That's going to be another chain in the OP stack ecosystem inside of an emerging super chain. And hopefully, my hope is, the super chain, which is all of the OP stack chains, will gradually start to feel like one chain. So it's completely abstracted away. So if I'm on Base, or Optimism, or the new Unichain, it's all kind of the same to me from a user perspective. The UX is the same. It'll just feel like the same chain experience. Now, I, I hope that's where we're headed. Maybe you could flesh that out. But that still, like, leaves the problem of, how about some of these other L2 ecosystems?

• 31:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there's Arbitrum, and Uniswap has deployments there. There's all of the ZK sync ecosystems, like Polygon, Matter Labs, all of that. And so maybe we can unfragment a super chain, but what about all of the other super chains out there? And I want to address, let's address the haters head on. So Hayden, what do you say to that?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Let me start, and I think Carl might also have thoughts here, but I'm going to start by saying, like, my perspective on like trade, like where assets should live and where balances should live within wallets. I think the chains or tokens should basically mostly be held on the chain on which they're issued. Like, or like, like, any, like, essentially like assets that are, that are bridged are passively at risk to, like, when you think about like, like, the current model for L2s is like, most assets are issued on mainnet.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  So in addition, most assets should not be issued on mainnet, but we'll, we'll come back to that. So most assets are issued on mainnet, and then they're bridged into these L2s, and then they're like passively sitting in these bridges. And, or they'll be issued, or they're issued on an L2 and they're bridged, like, there's sort of this model where we have like passive liquidity in AMMs on chains for assets that were issued on other chains. And essentially, my mental model for how things should look is that like, You know, maybe certain assets, I mean, obviously ETH should be on, should be issued on L1, right? But like, assets basically ultimately hold their value where like people see them as having like social, like where social consensus is of like, is on what their, their value is, right? And so like ETH is always gonna have the most value on L1 and be like the most safe

• 33:27Speaker 03

  and whatever on L1. And so what, you know, we want to create is a model where, you know, you can buy, if you have an asset on, you know, like essentially you can abstract away the chains and you, you only think about assets, right? When you're, within Uniswap's context, right? Like you, when someone goes into Uniswap, they don't want to think, I'm holding ETH on this network, right? Our network selector is becoming kind of a nightmare because you search ETH and there's like 20 ETHs across 20 chains. And what it should really be is a user's onboarding into a wallet. The wallet stores, you know, you know, they, they have a kind of a chain that they keep their like balances on, right? And they're, they're balanced in like, what is it like a unit of account asset? Like whether it's ETH, whether they want ETH to be their money or USDC

• 34:09Speaker 03

  to be their money. Like you basically have like one or two assets that people treat as unit of accounts. Then you buy a token and you buy that token and at the end of that transaction, that asset is sitting in your account on the chain, on like, on the chain that it like holds the most value essentially, right? Like if you're buying, you know, if you're buying, you know, an L2 native token on base, you should probably be holding it in your wallet on base. And what we need to do is have trading systems and interoperability systems that, that, because a user, like again, like every user-facing application should not show you networks. That's like, it's like basically like, it would be like if you're, you know, if your email client showed you every AWS server that like you were, every user, it's just like nonsense. And so, well, you

• 34:54Speaker 03

  know, that's what like this, like even like the cross-chain Uniswap X or the EIP 7683 is, is partially about just like allowing you to like essentially swap between native assets on different chains.

• 35:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is kind of the Vitalik school of thought that like what we need is UX improvements that will fix fragmentation and just like wallet standards and some simple things to just like abstract UX.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  And good news is that we have a wallet. And like, I think the thing that we're One of the things that we're so excited about when we talk about like bridging the tech stack is that we get to like face these problems head on and just like work through them. There's this sort of like, part of the problem that we have in scaling blockchains in Ethereum is that like, everyone is building at this like sliver of the tech stack. Like, and it's kind of like, you, when you think about like blockchain, when you, when you use that mental model I said earlier of blockchains as servers, right? Like, imagine like, so like, we have like a thousand people saying we're a server building company. And then like, we have a few people saying we build applications on servers, but like, we have like, you need people that like are like actually thinking like across these systems and how they fit into each other. And that's like what we're trying to do here. But, you know, I, I know that, like, so look, Uniswap will continue to have deployments on other chains.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  I think that like, my hope is that the, the number of different chain ecosystems, like, we're kind of, because of this rollup centric roadmap and because Ethereum has intentionally been very hands off in how rollups should develop as standards. Like, like, basically has like, kind of like, let this like ecosystem of, of L2s develop. We're gonna probably have like a reconvergence of, of standards to like, probably like, you know, whether it's, whether it's one or a few, like, winning, you know, ecosystems. Ultimately, it will probably reconverge over time as standards improve, as quality improves. There will still be many chains within, within the superchain or with, and just generally, we want to make, you know, we really do, like,

• 36:40Speaker 03

  in our wallet, we will, you know, you know, we're gonna be like on, like, people will like on, they'll deposit cash in some form, right? They're gonna buy a stablecoin that will probably, you know, within our wallet, ultimately live on, on, on like a uni-chain, right? And then, they wanna buy a token that is on, you know, another chain. I, I think within the superchain, assets will essentially be fungible, which is really exciting. So you can like, almost not think about, like, it will make this like process of, of abstracting very simple. Ultimately, there will be other chains and you will be able to buy tokens on those other chains and create a seamless experience. And at the end result of that transaction, the asset on the other chain will be held on that other chain. But what we're trying to do with Uniswap, with UniChain in particular, because I feel like I actually have almost not talked about this, is like, we do think a lot of the liquidity should live there and there should be kind of like a hub for liquidity there.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  The thinking there is essentially right now main-

• 37:28David Hoffman?

  Re-fragmenting of Ethereum liquidity back onto the one central chain. It's the liquidity chain.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, like right now, a lot of mainnet is like, like, like mainnet is kind of the liquidity hub and that is like, you know, has some benefits, but I think the really painful problem there is that anytime you bridge in and out of mainnet, it's going to be expensive. So you're inherently subject to mainnet gas costs and mainnet is not trying to improve on those for L1, right? Or like it is to some degree, but like as more and more roll up the satellite, like it's gonna, it's not. So what we need to do is have a liquidity hub that's on L2 so that we can, you know, have it so that when you like bridge, like the reason that bridging in and out is so painful is because mainnet is slow and expensive. And that's not a, that's not a knock at mainnet. It's like, it's like by design in terms of how we're scaling it, scaling Ethereum.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  And then like L2 are fast and cheap. And so you can actually build very fast and cheap systems for bridging and abstracting away which chain you're on because if you, if moving between chains means each transaction is less than a second and less than a cent, then, you know, it won't feel painful to bridge in and out of it. And so that's really what we're trying to do here. And the super, and then like superchain interrupt is a really good step for us because for, for different chains within superchain, we'll be able to do that very, very soon. And then over time, I do think that like, you know, essentially every, you know, we should have that with everyone, but yeah, anyway, that long rant, I feel like I've been granting forever.

• 38:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Carl, same kind of question to you. And there's two like sort of bankless predictions that I'll throw into this. One is actually coming to you on today's podcast. We had for a long time thought that, you know, apps like Uniswap would eventually roll their own chains. And so that's happening. And a second prediction is like Ethereum will fix its fragmentation over time. So we're in this fragmentation stage, fragmented liquidity, fragmented UX and this divergence. And then we're going to swing back to towards convergence. And the way that the convergence might happen is, is first across kind of like superchain infrastructures. So like everything that's on the same superchain, so base optimism, the new Unichain will all feel as one and will still have like ties that are maybe a little bit more clunky to other L2 ecosystems.

• 39:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  But eventually, eventually in the fullness of time, we will unfragment all of the fragmentation. Can you tell us that story? Because this is back to, again, that objection saying, uh, you just rolled another chain to go fix your fragmentation? How's that going to work?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. So interoperability is the superpower of open source and shared standards. That is what shared standards get you. It gets you interoperability. And so I think actually, you know, for example, the David, your Peloton analogy of everyone contributing to different parts of the OP stack and then upstreaming them back into the shared standard, that thing is starting to come true more and more. And it is critical that as we are moving forward, everyone is converging around shared open source standards that are forkable, that are, you know, people can experiment, all this kind of stuff. And what this ends up looking

• 40:32Speaker 02

  like is today, we exist in this world where because all of the chains are different, you need to reason about each chain individually. You can't say, I'm going to deploy across the superchain, or I'm going to deploy across Ethereum broadly. And because of that, it means that as a developer, I'm experiencing maximum fragmentation and that trickles down to the users, that trickles, that leaks, that leaky abstraction kind of ruins the whole thing. But the cool thing about Ethereum, the cool thing about all of this open source stuff is that we are working together on these shared standards, on these open source things. And to me, I actually see the kind of the superchain, the progression of the

• 41:15Speaker 02

  superchain, the progression of, you know, optimism, governance, and, you know, the kind of united chains of Ethereum vibe. That thing is starting to happen. And I think there's actually natural incentives for us to collaborate and work together on making it real. I think we're, we're all pushing for the same standard. We all benefit from being on the same standard. And we are all kind of moving towards that unified Ethereum, you know, vision that is scalable, that is able to, you know, get the next billion, billion, seven billion users.

• 41:51David Hoffman?

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• 42:36David Hoffman?

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• 43:21David Hoffman?

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• 43:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so Carl, are you optimistic that it's like, as again, back to kind of the cynic coming to this episode, they'll see another chain, but they'll also say, guys, all the chains are, you know, all the different L- and L2 ecosystems are playing zero sum games against each other, right? It's a war of all against all. And so Uniswap is coming in and launching the Unichain. They're talking about them being kind of a home for global DeFi liquidity. Well, guess what? Every single L2 ecosystem also wants that. And you're all kind of building the same thing. So we have a coordination problem here, Carl. And I can see how it's coordinated across the superchain. So we get that step. But are you optimistic that we're going to be able to coordinate across the entirety of Ethereum? So if I'm an Ethereum user, there's just like one unit of chains of Ethereum?

• 44:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  One user experience for me? One place for all of the liquidity?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I am very bullish. Here's why I am very bullish. Because all of the chains within the superchain, part of that whole deal is that they're all contributing back to retroactive public goods funding. And what is retroactive public goods funding doing? It is funding open source standards for all of Ethereum. I think that the boundaries between a lot of these ecosystems, etc. There are definitely dividing lines and whatnot. But I actually think that part of the reason why I've been just, oh, it's the L2 space has been historically so incredibly toxic is just because there is all of this tribalism around these tech stacks. Like, no, we are building open source MIT licensed software

• 45:33Speaker 02

  that we want to create that flywheel where everyone is transacting on the network. Where is that money going? Well, it's going to the people who created that value. Impact equals profit, going to fund the open source software that the whole thing is based on. So I do think that there is a real non-trivial convergence around what the Ethereum vision and everything that we've all been doing. And I think it's like this weird thing where we don't realize we're all working on the same thing. Even different L1s, they're all working on the same thing. Anyway, this gets a little bit metaphysical, but still.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  I just have to vent. I just want to also, I think I invite you guys to like think like to replace the word blockchain with server in your brains more often. Again, I literally, it helps with things like this. And the reason I use this analogy is not because it's perfect, but it's because it helps answer questions like this, like, "Alvarad server is toxic to every other server." Like, it's like, it's like insane. It's like idiotic. It's, it's like, people, things need to have purpose.

• 46:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, why are we like this?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Because of, like, if you want the honest answer, it's because there are tokens and people care about their back.

• 46:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's where the metaphor breaks down.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  It's just, it's like, that's all it is. Like, but like, servers usually serve applications or other servers. Like, like, they have purposes and use cases, and there's going to be a lot of them. And like, it's like, we are building something that we think, you know, will, will have a unique value proposition and purpose in the world, right? And that's why we're building it. You know, there's all things, we're excited about like Unichain native tokens, and we're excited about like, you know, all the kind of, like, again, there will be USF deployments on, you know, USF V4 is going to be deployed to all the chains. That's a question people will have. We're going to deploy USF V4 to all the different L2s. We're not like picking and choosing and only favoring ourselves. We're, but, but Unichain, you know, will, is like designed with a specific kind of like,

• 47:36Speaker 03

  you know, the same way that different servers are optimized for different applications building on top of them. Like, we're designing Unichain to be optimized for, you know, as like a, this like L2 liquidity hub, home for DeFi thing. And it's, it's, I think that's a really unique, useful value proposition for the world. It has these really cool user properties that we've been thinking about our users and what they need, and we're, we're expressing that in terms of how we think about, you know, how a chain should be parameterized and optimized, and the systems that should be built around it.

• 48:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Uniswap is not launching a chain, it's launching a server then? That's what you're telling us?

• 48:10Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's, the coolest, I mean, and by the way, important to the analogy is that like, there's servers with unique properties and superpowers, right? The unique property of, you know, you know, like, if you want your server, if your server is so critical to the world that it can never go down, you really need a lot of redundant copies running and a lot of, you know. So critical your server, like if it's critical that your server can't like kickoff arbitrary parties and is permissionless because it's like a global piece of infrastructure. You need one of these fancy blockchain servers, like they have a purpose to them. But the whole like kind of like, but a lot of like the like toxicity that sometimes comes up in crypto is just these like religions that form around, you know, around the economic incentives incentives of the various parties involved in the religions.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  And like, that's not really the kind of the game we're playing. We're trying to build like useful products for users, useful products for developers, you know, useful, you know, and useful like platforms and shared standards for how to like, you know, bring money into the internet.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Just a couple logistical questions about how this thing is getting built that I want to bang out here. The uni token, is there an association between the uni chain and the uni token?

• 49:17Speaker 03

  So I think that like generally when we think about Uniswap's, you know, you know, unique and Uniswap broadly, like, you know, the community, the, you know, the kind of users, et cetera. Like there's like some unique things that Uniswap has that like, I think that position it really interestingly. And Uniswap has always been like very decentralization first, right? We've always like tried to go the extra mile, the extra like, like kind of even like before Uniswap V1, people made their smart contracts upgradable because they were like, there's no way you can have a non-upgradable smart contract. And, you know, we're gonna, and then we like kind of even pioneered this like migrate to a new, a new contract if you build a better one. That's just an example, that's not, but the point I'm making here is that like, we've always been very decentralization focused.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  And so when we like look at the model, we think, how can we continue to improve and enhance on it? And that's why, for example, even like a lot of the blocks are being built in this, the TE is kind of replacing some of the, and then the other, on the other side, we're, we built a system essentially for like validating and verifying the actions of the sequencer. And so that's what the uni, you know, the uni chain verification service, I think that's the name, is doing, it's kind of a, you know, it's like a, you know, a system of nodes. And you can stake and you can verify the transaction, the blocks, the sequencers being built. And it provides this additional layer of check and balance and verification of what the sequence is doing so that you could either detect bad behaviors

• 50:47Speaker 03

  or you have this additional layer of, you know, almost like economic security or faster finality. So you have different levels. You have many different tiers of finality. There's like, oh, it's been confirmed in a flash block in a 250 millisecond increment. Oh, it's been posted by the sequencer. Oh, it's been like that. So it goes 250 milliseconds to like one second to like, oh, it's been validated within the Uniswap Verification Service. That's like another layer of finality that happens not too soon after the sequencer. And then there's the final layer, which is it's been confirmed on Ethereum and Ethereum has been finalized. So it's just like an additional layer in between the sequencer, which is very fast, and Ethereum, which is pretty slow.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  It's like an additional layer of economic finality. And that's where we expect the uni token and Uniswap community to play a role in verifying the chain.

• 51:40David Hoffman?

  And then who is also operating the sequencer? Where is that sequencer being managed?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the sequencer itself, much like Coinbase is operating the base sequencer. We will be running the Uniswap Labs will basically be running the sequencer for uni chain.

• 51:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  What L2 beat stage will you guys be at launch? And what's the plan to progress beyond that? Is it just like basically part of the OP stack upgrade cycle?

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that it's like, yeah. So it's going to be like they're at L1 or to stage one. And I think it will be a stage one as well.

• 52:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, and then so the uni token, you were implying that that would be somehow involved in the verification layer in some way? Sort of like a staking mechanism, something like this?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you deposited, you validate the chain and...

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  For money?

• 52:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you validate the chain for money?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's usually how it works.

• 52:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, cool. Well, what is even money, huh, David?

• 52:38Speaker 03

  I don't know. It depends on if you think ETH is money.

• 52:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we happen to think that, Hayden. And that brings us to another question about this. And I'll go back to kind of the cynic here. There's been a discussion lately around where should DeFi live? You alluded to it earlier in the episode. Should DeFi in Ethereum world live on the L1 or on L2? And so, you know, one case for the L2 roadmap, of course, if you are a believer in the economics of Ether and you think it's money, it's basically that Ether, the asset, will propagate through all of these Layer 2s and be a, not the only, reserve asset, but will be a monetary reserve asset in all of these Layer 2s.

• 53:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  So ETH economy expands good for Ether, the asset. The other side of that argument is basically like, well, if Ethereum Layer 1, as a Layer 1, loses all of its DeFi and all of the liquidity is kind of sucked out. And Uniswap is a big contributor to that liquidity and has been from day one.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  And by the way, the mainnet deployments are immutable. L1 smartcoin, we're going to deploy V40 mainnet as well.

• 53:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure, sure. So it never loses that. But now it has some L2, let's say, competitors. Some people view this as a competitive type relationship and a zero-sum relationship, right? And it's starting to accrue all of the execution transactions, all of the MEV. And if you look at like Layer 2s, they've been phenomenally successful. But they are only the cost to Ethereum. The amount that they're charging like back to Ethereum for buying DA and L1 is a fraction of what they're gaining in terms of like gross profit. Anyway, we could talk about that. But at the high level, where does DeFi traffic belong on Ethereum?

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Look, I'm going to start by just saying like, if rollups are competitive to Ethereum, then we are really confused as an ecosystem when we're on what we call a rollup-centric roadmap.

• 54:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, that's what people pointed out.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Right. So like, I think that if that's the case, then we are like very... Very deeply confused and we need to like completely reassess like what we're doing like like the all like the hard forks are like desire are like basically like lowering the cost of blob data and the roadmap is called the role of centric roadmap and so like I think that we're like taking that advantage and I don't think it's a bad roadmap and I think that you could argue what is a good photo what is a bad I think that it's like it is a an interesting intentional strategy to some degree um you we're obviously getting at like it's seen a part of what you're getting at is like where will the value like what will make each valuable asset like

• 55:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think I don't think the critics are saying yeah, I don't think the critics are saying it's a bad roadmap for Ethereum as a network. Okay, I think what they're more saying is it's a bad roadmap for ether the asset, which might also impact like Ethereum.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Look, I think that like two things. One, I don't think that like that's super clear. I think it's like very debatable. I it's very clear that you can't just run all defy and out one because like you can't simultaneously like Ethereum can't be like too many things at once, right? And like, yes, historically, defy is what has made Ethereum used and useful. And now we have to move to a model where it is scalable and because it used to be we used to have one second, one cent transactions more not one second, but one cent transactions like because no one you not only people used it. Now we're like scaling up that we need more. We just need more servers to run the thing on. That's what L2 are about, right? Like the the server analogy helps you is like you can't run everything on one server. We and

• 56:06Speaker 03

  we and we we obviously could make it extremely beefy, but then, you know, ultimately, it will never run everything, right? Like even like, you know, systems like Solana, right? They're starting to like add these like Solana extensions that you can't run everything on one thing. You have to have multiple things. You have to have multiple, you know, chains. And so I think that Ethereum's roadmap is interesting, and I think it's good. In terms of how each should accrue value within it, I do think that, one, there can be a lot of value to just being this like very censorship resistant, very decentralized kind of settlement layer that people are posting data to that they want to have an extreme degree of decentralization. Maybe we're like in this weird like moment where like when all the execution was happening on Ethereum, it was a huge amount of revenue being generated. Now it's like we're starting to move it. We're early on in that

• 56:51Speaker 03

  So it's using the data, but the data is not generating that much revenue and there's not that much data availability. Like it's cheap, but it's also not like, it's not like, but we're gonna like, if we have this like explosion in usage of L2s as we make high quality interoperable L2s, there's actually a lot of data that's needed. And a lot of that data probably will want very high decentralization properties. So like my vision for Ethereum is Ethereum should focus on providing as much cheap data availability as humanly possible. And that there will be a lot of demand for that and, and make it in, in a very highly decentralized, central position data availability. I don't really, I think that they eat this money. Like, I don't know. I've become, I've kind of, I don't care that much either way at this point. I think it's useful and good.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  I like that there is like, I like decentralization. I like that there's like competing forms of, of, of money and things people store value in. I think it can continue to do that and should continue to do that. But I think that like the focus of Ethereum as a network, as a platform should be on like scaling up how much data availability it can create. While retaining the, you know, it's, it's like role as like this like extremely decentralized trusted settlement layer.

• 57:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you think, you think, um, you know, if, if the unit chain is successful, that will be good for the Ethereum network and for Ether the asset.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. I think I really don't view it as like, you know, I think that like, there's obviously like,

• 58:13Speaker 03

  it's kind of like, it depends on like, you have to like zoom out and like, look at the world that like we're trying to create, right? It's very clear that there's like extremely fragmented, like every L2 is different and can't interoperate very well. And, um, you know, every like, you have like the same assets represented across, you have like assets that are like, like the user experience. Like when you use the USAP interface, like you will see a bajillion different chains and you have to like, you're very confused. Like that's not sustainable, right? We need a model that we, we do need to scale blockchain and then we need to have, do it in a way that creates good user experiences. And I think that that is like, you know, people get very scared, like. Almost every version of Uniswap, people were very scared. They're like, oh, no, you're killing your previous thing.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  You can't be afraid to move into the future. The actual thing to be scared of is not progress, is lack of progress. You just need to continue advancing and improving on the thing. And Ethereum, yes, there was a period of time where it was really nice because we only had 100 users. And so it was all really cheap to run everything on one chain. We're not in that world anymore. We have more users. Uniswap has millions of users at this point, which is cool. And we need to have billions of users. And we can't just have Ethereum be like this one thing that runs it all. It's just not sustainable. It's not scalable. And Ethereum, if it can't adapt, will die. And so it does need to adapt. And that's what it's doing. And that's what the rollup-centric roadmap is about.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  And I do think that they're sort of like, let's just run everything on Ethereum again. It feels a little bit like going back to the past. And we need to figure out. And it's scary. The future is scary. Change is scary, but we need to embrace change. And we just need to figure out what that looks like. And so, yes, in my mind, if Ethereum focuses on really cheap, huge amounts of data, it probably will be very valuable. I think there's also paths where ETH is valuable as a store of value and as a monetary asset. I think that's also very reasonable. I think that the only thing that isn't reasonable is like, let's just not progress.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yes. And I just want to plus one on the fear thing. There was a huge amount of fear when we were moving from just OP mainnet to the superchain and expanding the vision, changing things. Everyone's like, oh, my gosh, what's going to happen? And it's natural. But I think that the key is that we need to look at where we are heading, what we are trying to do at a high level, which is bring Ethereum to the entire internet, literally change the way that every single person on this planet is operating and interacting and coordinating with one another. And if we stay down that path and we take the straightest shot, then all of these concerns, fears, et cetera.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  You're gonna have them. We're gonna have them. I'm gonna have them. But we are going to move in a direction that achieves what we are trying to achieve at the end of the day, which is user impact, making the world a, you know, hopefully a better place, hopefully.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Speaking of just like, you know, having a faith about the commitment to the future, Carl, the the superchain idea has been around, 2021, I think, maybe even earlier, maybe before it was even called the superchain. And now Ethereum's largest layer one application is becoming a chain in the superchain. Just like reflect for a moment on the path to get here. The thinking of the superchain model before there was even any evidence to for it in the first place. Yet here we are, like, just reflect upon that journey for us so far.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that is a true testament towards faith, to be honest, and understanding, thinking about things from first principles. You're like, do we need a shared standard? Yes. Do we need multiple layer twos with their own ecosystems? Yes. How can we make all of these layer twos with their own ecosystems contribute back to public goods, to, you know, can work together and coordinate? Okay, sounds like we're gonna need a superchain with a scalability problem. There is no other solution. And so, you know, we just start going and it's scary. And we're like, wow, are we going the right way? This seems insane. And then we talk about it in public and we're still like, oh, my God, this is so insane.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  And every day, the path gets clearer and clearer. Why is this? It's because we are making progress towards that vision and we are not strained. We're just keep making progress. And so it is incredibly exciting to see the kind of united forces of all of these different chains working together, building on the shared standard, kind of realizing that decentralization vision. That is why I have been in Ethereum, you know, from day one. Like, this is the dream. This is realizing Ethereum. I mean, what are we out here to do? We're here to scale Ethereum's technology as well as scaling Ethereum's values. And so we've been saying it, we're doing it every day. More chains, more bigger superchain, bigger Ethereum, more users.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Happy, happy, happy life.

• 1:03:17David Hoffman?

  Awesome. Carl, Hayden, thank you guys so much for the time today and congratulations on the announcement. When is the actual release? Is there, what are the dates that you can give us? I think you gave them to us earlier, Hayden, but one more time.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, the date that I can give you right now is October 10th. UniChain.org will have all the developer docs and all the information. You can go start deploying projects and experimenting with it. This is basically the first instantiation of it. So it's, we are going to have an experimental testnet coming out in the near future, which will have some of the more advanced features, the kind of, the flash blocks thing and the Uniswap builder thing and the Uniswap verification system. Those are not quite ready to be released on the testnet. So there will be a testnet for those coming further along the line. And then, yeah, definitely aiming to launch Uniswap production this year.

• 1:04:14David Hoffman?

  Cool. Are you guys working with Sorrela? Or where does Sorrela fit in this release?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  I believe that they're building a hook on Uniswap V4 and whatever chain they put that. I don't know what chain. I haven't like, I imagine that they will continue to build their hook and.

• 1:04:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, lastly, what is the latest on Uniswap V4? Does that have dates yet?

• 1:04:40David Hoffman?

  Is Uniswap V4 and Uniswap Chain the same thing?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Does it have a public date? I don't know if it has a public date or not. It's coming very soon. It's, the main thing with Uniswap V4, the thing also, we basically barely talked about it, but Uniswap V4, extremely exciting and awesome. I imagine we'll do like another episode or something on that after the launch or something like that.

• 1:04:58David Hoffman?

  Hayden, can you take us waltz back onto Vancouver?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, anytime I want. The, you know, Uniswap V4, you know, the main thing is that like, because it's an immutable smart contract, we have to like audit it. Like, you know, the analogy we use is like a spaceship, right? People eventually put spaceships into space with humans on them, right? It's very scary. Eventually you have to do it. You can't, that's an immutable thing. You can't be like, oh, so let's rewrite that spaceship. But, you know, it's like, you have to. To launch a spaceship at certain point, but you have to do a lot of auditing ahead. So, you know, use for before is such a big release, such an important protocol upgrade. So we've just been undergoing like the most insane auditing process. Good. I mean, take your time, make it secure. This is why David and I are podcasters.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  We would never have the guts to actually launch something. I think we've worked with every major auditing firm in the entire space already. And we've like, you know, we have like just as like endless rounds of auditing and testing and verifying and. You know, so we're doing just like a really intensive audit. So the code has been frozen for a pretty long, like mostly frozen or like mostly done for a pretty long time. And we've just been like endlessly testing it and trying to make it as secure as humanly possible. Because that's, you know, one of the reasons that are the new things we release get used. It'd be because people trust them because, you know, we've never been hacked. And so we aim to make things as secure as possible. And so we've just been grinding on the auditing security front for before. But, you know, also coming out this year for sure.

• 1:06:24David Hoffman?

  Well, thank you both for your service to Ethereum. Bankless nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west into the roll up frontier. It's not for everyone. That's for sure. You can just stick in your monolithic chains if you, if it's not for you. But we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.