Bankless - Announcing Unichain | DeFi's Next Frontier?
Episode Date: October 10, 2024Unichain 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. ------ 🎬 DEBR...IEF | 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 🛞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
Transcript
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Welcome to Bankless, where today we got a special announcement for you, the Unichain.
This is Uniswops chain.
This was predicted for a very long time, and now it's coming to pass.
We got Hayden Adams from Uniswap, the founder of Uniswap.
We also have Carl Floresh.
He is a co-founder of optimism, which maybe gives you a sense for what layer two they're going to launch on.
Smash these two things together.
Tell me what you get.
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 ether the asset?
Where should Defi live?
Should it live on layer two or layer ones?
Anyway, Hayden and Carl give the context for that, what they're planning with this unit chain
project and answers to many of those questions.
I think this is going to start off a very big conversation in the Ethereum space.
because this is not just, you know, another generalized layer two.
This is not another optimism, another base, another arbitralum.
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 uny chain is going to push the frontier
on some very hard problems in the Ethereum space,
chain interoperability, chain abstraction,
you know, bridging without having to impose that choice upon users.
They are going to put a lot of, you know,
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 kind of a landmark moment
in the Ethereum roll-up-centric roadmap
when the largest app on the layer one gets,
becomes a very prominent chain inside of the super chain.
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 Leitzer, who put the first formal words of Uniswap.
He may have known it before Hayden that Uniswap is getting a chain.
The blog post said UniChane is inevitable and here that day is finally here.
Very big moment for both these teams, but also I think for the,
the greater Ethereum ecosystem as a whole.
Yeah, I think so.
And I also think in the aftermath of this
is going to cause further discussion
from those in the Ethereum community
who are like, wait a second,
we still want some of the defy apps
and liquidity on layer one.
And how's this going to work
if all of the liquidity goes into layer two?
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.
See, these are the types of conversations
that are going on.
And, well, we won't spoil Hayden and Carl's take on it.
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Bankless Nation, I'm here with Carl Flores, the chief optimist over at OP Labs. And also Hayden,
the chief unicorn officer over at Uniswap Labs. Carl and Hayden, welcome back to Bankless.
Thank you very much.
So why are the creators of, one, the OP stack framework
and two, the Uniswop AMM on the same podcast?
What are you guys doing here?
You know, just hanging out.
Yeah, I mean, look, obviously there's been a long,
a lot of speculation about whether or not Uniswop 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, like, Ethereum's scaling future.
Okay, so dropping the unichain, 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 roll-up landscape?
What does this mean for optimism?
What does it mean?
What's your perspective here with just the impact here?
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 super chain.
And, you know, now more than ever,
it's going to be important that we solve, you know,
fragmentation and interoperability.
But, you know, that's on us.
We're working on it.
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 and many different chains.
Why are we creating a uni chain?
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 UniChane 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, defy and the needs of, you know, the L2 ecosystem.
And, you know, the way that I think about it is that we are on, you know, Ethereum for, you know, there's all this like debate about.
Where should Defi live?
Should be L1 or L2?
There's that whole can of worms on Twitter right now.
And there's also just this concept of the roll-up-centric roadmap,
which is basically that, like, today, Ethereum is being designed and built with, you know,
essentially a layer two scaling vision in mind.
And we at Uniswap tend to be, you know, 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 they're 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, you know, you might want to use one of these fancy blockchain servers that add on, you know, 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?
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.
And the things, 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 main net, and again, it's not a, it's decentralized cool blockchain server.
I'm not saying it's just a server.
But when you run it all in that, you get these really nice properties.
Because everything can communicate.
Like, your balances are the same.
across every application, 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 very high-quality user experiences.
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 have an action.
They want to perform, and they want that to be as simple as humanly possible.
And then when you look at what has happened as we start to scale into many L-2s, 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 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 like seamless user experience?
whatever chain you're on, but then also, and how do we reduce some of the fragmentation
of liquidity, 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, you know, 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,
It's very cheap, but still, you know, decentralized, still, you know, like having good trust
properties, a 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 defy and can be really like a home for defy.
And, you know, yeah.
Home for Defy, L2 liquidity hub.
Hayden, I just have a bunch of rapid fire, just general questions.
So this thing is called the unit chain.
When is it launching?
You know, drop the, it's cleaner.
But it's, yeah, what 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 that out right away.
And then it will be launching, you know, imminently very soon this year.
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 the plan to like take Uniswap the protocol and deploy it on this chain?
Or are we like for 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 will actually be uniswap about the unichain
and will it also be home to other defy apps like so when we think about a defy chain
l2 chain we sort of think of something like optimism itself or something like base let's say
or something like arbitraum and it's kind of general purpose across all sorts of different
defy is it like that give us some more color here 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 one to support
the general class of use cases.
So it is a, you know, like base, like optimism,
it is a, you know, general purpose rollup.
But we've, you know, parameterized it
and kind of, you know, build systems around it
that are really optimized for Defi
and for, you know, things that we've learned.
learned in, you know, in the course of developing Uniswap as well as our products that are
built around Uniswap. And so it's really like, you know, designed for Defi in Mind and
designed for like the specific needs and use cases. But it's, you know, it's still like a general
purpose roll-up and can have all sorts of applications built on top of it. I will, I'll say that like
one thing, when you can kind of compare like what is Maynett's role and how does this fit next to
mainnet. I'll say that like the, the world of like mainnet being the central hub.
And by mainnet, you mean the L1, yes.
Sorry, Ethereum L1, Ethereum Mainet being this like sort of a starting point that people
onboard, like 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 like
pretty good. The Ethereum is being built entirely with the, in the mind, you know,
the mind of 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 you.
comes to like your average user, they need transactions to happen. Even like a second is too
slow, right? 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 that you need-
NASDAQ on chain, Hayden.
No, I think that like 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, 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 a 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, and we start every user there, and every token 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 every transaction needs to happen in under a second, and it needs to happen.
for under 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 MayNet is like the place
that everyone is.
And I don't think that we should try to build MayNet
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 of MayNet to kind of enhance
a decentralization of faster, more scalable layer twos
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
as well as like a, you know, kind of an acceleration even of, you know, the super chain and
Carl's vision and kind of this sort of like advancement of how we scale layer two is and create
good user experiences on top of them.
Yeah, let's bring in the super chain.
I think the 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 unichain.
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 super chain here
and the interop puzzle pieces that are bringing to the table with this whole unichain thing.
Totally.
So the super chain is exactly here to address that kind of network.
network switching and, you know, high latency, interoperability pain points.
And so that comes in the form of a couple things.
One, it comes in most importantly shared standards.
So the OP stack shared standard across all of the chains within the super chain.
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 Uniswap building out all of these extensions and improvements to the OP stack to the super chain 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 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 super chain, within the chains that have shared standards,
such as really low latency interoperability and, you know, really low, you know, zero slippage, you know, token transfers, etc., etc.
And so I'm actually super excited for Uniswap, both contributing to the kind of cross-chain
intense and 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 super chain and sharing the
OPI stack and improving it together.
Yeah, it might help if I talk a little bit about like even the, what we keep alluding
to these improvements or enhancements or extensions to the super chain that we were building
and how it relates to these user properties, it might make sense for me to just explain what they are
and what we're actually talking about here. 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 front end focused as in addition
to the protocol level thinking that we do. And we kind of try to like bridge, we try to bridge,
be a bridge between like understanding users, understanding application development,
understanding protocol development, understanding chain development, and kind of like span
the full text 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 part of this.
And so it's we just want to like build the user experiences and like work through each
problem iteratively.
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, 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, you know, finalized on L1.
So we have these, like, additional layers.
At its core, you still get to, 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 the FlashBots team on building this.
is, you know, a system where we basically can do, you know, there's sort of these, like,
fundamental, like, limits you run into, like, how long does it take to mercilize the state?
And that, and that, you know, leads to slower block times.
That's why you sometimes have, like, roll-ups that have these, like, yes, it's fast.
It's fast than that one, which is 12 seconds, but it's still, like, two-ish seconds or one-ish seconds.
And so 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
or 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 very like new technical innovations
but we're basically aiming for 200 to 250
millisecond flash blocks which are essentially
it's running inside a trusted
execution environment TEE
that's a whole hot topic
on Twitter 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 TEEs 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 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 TE is basically like kind of, you know,
building these smaller blocks
that are ultimately being laddered up
into these bigger blocks
that the sequencer is posting
and also emitting these state updates
so that people can,
from the perspective of someone, for example,
doing arbitrage between a centralized exchange
and a decentralized exchange,
you will be able to 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 proposal builder separation.
And it's building that, you know, proposer system or builder system within a trusted execution environment to improve on the trust properties.
Another thing that's kind of very interesting with flashblocks 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, is that like, you know, I don't, there's this blog post
from, from Dan, a paradigm called priority is all you need, which is a whole kind of word and it
itself, but essentially what it is saying is you can go a long way when it comes to MEV reduction
and minimization, you know, using prior, when you have very strong guarantees around the priority
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 we can then use to basically enhance how we do trades through things like Uniswap X to have a really, really clean, nice tradeoff 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.
I also feel like I just went deep on that.
So anyway, that's the T.E.
I can also get to the verification service,
which comes after.
But essentially, that's sort of the builder thing.
Okay, I kind of want to just finish the one
of the last little,
piece there.
For bankless listeners
want to go down
the tribal hole
we did an episode
with Shay
from FlashBots
a lot on TEs
in this very subject
and like
well there's there's
two things that
two parts of this
whole unichain thing
that really impacts
Ethereum
there's the under the hood
technical tech stack
the M.EV 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.
I think when it comes to the users, 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 milliseconds block, like right now when you make a trade on Maynet, 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
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.
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. I think 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 unichane or to
can I swap from base? Like what is kind of the user experience of this whole process?
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 like cross and intense trading system. So we we had
announced Unswap X back in the day
and then we talked about this future cross-chain
Uniswap X version.
Essentially, we were like, well,
we wanted to be a true standard more and more people
can adopt. We just call it cross-chain
Un-Swap 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.
But essentially the way that you think about
cross-chain-usuf X is it's aiming to create this
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. 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.
The important thing, I think the really important thing here is that like that that is like
the abstraction layer. Under the hood, the people that are making those orders happen, the fillers,
etc. 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.
Right.
We're essentially, we have built a marketplace where people can, you know, express an intent.
I want to have an asset.
I want to buy an asset.
It doesn't matter what shit.
Like, it can be on this chain or that chain.
And then you've created a system by which other people can match that intent.
But then those people have, like the better systems available to them.
So when it comes to things like super chain interop, right?
You know, that is in my mind just basically building very, very, like any chain within the super chain, you get very, very fast bridging.
And so what that looks like is it looks like, you know, much cheaper, more liquid kind of settlement of these orders.
You know, we will still be able to like create these same interoperable systems to some degree against other chains outside of the super chain, right?
We have, you know, swap 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 super-chain chain,
the fundamental underlying bridges that are used are just going to be 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 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 easier to build these, like, settlement connectors.
And it'll be much, like, within the super chain, 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 another chain, like, it's going to be
slower and harder to figure out, like, each new, like, everything within the super chain.
The whole idea of standards is that, you know, 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?
We're building a user interface, new chains launch, there's new deploy,
deployments and every time we add a new chain, if it's, you know, if it's an entirely new proprietary, you know, system, it 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.
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. I've never had a hater.
Okay. No one has ever gone out of me on Twitter for anything. There are haters out there who will hear this and they'll say, okay, so Ethereum's solution to fix.
seeing the L2 fragmentation problem is wait, wait for it, launch another chain, yet another chain.
It's the classic standard, the standards meme.
Exactly.
We have too many competing standards.
Let's build a new standard.
Okay.
Can we address that head on?
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.
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
uny chain, 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
hope that's where we're headed. Maybe you could flesh
that out. But that still
leaves the problem of
how about some of these other L2 ecosystems?
So there's Arbitrum
and Uniswap has deployments.
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?
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 wallet.
I think the chains or token should basically mostly be held on the chain on which they're issued.
Like or like any like essentially like assets that are that are bridged are passively at risk to like we when you think about like the current model for L2s is like most assets are issued on Maynet.
So in additional most assets should not be issued on Maynet.
But we'll come back to that.
So most assets are issued on Maynet and then they're bridged into these L2s and then they're like passively sitting in these bridges.
and or they'll be their issue or they're issued on an L2 and a bridge, 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, it 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 the social consensus is of like is on what their value is.
Right? And so, like, ETH is always going to have the most value on L1 and be, like, the most safe in 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 Uniswop's context, right? Like, 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 eth across 20 chains.
And what it should really be is a user's onboarding into a wallet.
The wallet stores, you know, they have a kind of a chain that they keep their like balances on, right?
And they're balanced in like what is it like a unit of account asset.
Or like whether it's ETH, you know, whether they want ETH to be their money or USDC to be their money.
Like you basically have like one or two assets that people treat as unit as account.
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 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
what, you know,
that's what like this, like, even like the cross-chain
U-Swap X or the EIP-S-6-A-3
is a partially about just like allowing you to like
essentially swap between native assets on different chains.
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 a U.S.
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 bridging the text act 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 and Ethereum is that like everyone is building at this like sliver of the
text act. Like and it's kind of like you when you think about like blockchain, when you use that
mental model I said earlier of blockchains as servers, right? Like imagine 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 know like so look, Uniswap will continue to have deployments on other chains.
I think that like my hope is that the number of different chain ecosystems like we're kind of because
of this roll up centric roadmap and because Ethereum has intentionally been very hands off in how
rollups should develop as standard. Like basically has like kind of like let this like,
ecosystem of L2's develop, we're going to probably have like a reconvergence of standards to like,
probably like, you know, whether it's, whether it's one or a few, like, winning, you know,
ecosystems, like, ultimately you will probably reconverge over time as standards improve, as quality improves.
There will still be many chains within, within the super chain or with, and just generally,
we want to make, you know, we really do, like, in our wallet, we will, you know, you know,
They'll be like on board.
People will like on board.
They'll deposit cash in some form, right?
They're going to buy a stable coin.
It will probably, you know, within our wallet, ultimately live on, on like a unichain, right?
And then they want to buy a token that is on, you know, another chain.
I think within the super chain 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 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 Uni-Chain 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.
The thinking there is essentially right now,
Maynett.
Re-fragmenting of Ethereum liquidity back onto the one central chain.
It's the liquidity chain.
Yeah, yeah.
And like right now a lot of Mainnet is like, like,
like Maynet 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 any time you bridge
in and out of main net it's going to be expensive.
So you're inherently subject to main net gas costs.
And Maynet is not trying to improve on those for L1, right?
Or like it is to some degree.
But like as roll up more and more roll up to satellite,
like it's going to, 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 main net is slow and expensive.
And that's not a knock at Mainnet.
It's like by design in terms of how we're scaling it, scaling Ethereum.
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 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 then like super chain interop is a really good step for us
because for different chains within the super chain,
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'm granting for over here.
Carl, same kind of question to you.
And there's two, like, sort of bankless predictions that I'll turn to this.
One is actually coming true 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 towards convergence and the
way that the convergence might happen is
first across kind of like super chain
infrastructures so
like everything that's on the same super chain
so base optimism
the new unit chain will all feel as one
and we'll still have
ties that are maybe a little bit
more clunky to other L2
ecosystems but 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, you just rolled another chain to go fix your fragmentation? How's that going to work?
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, 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 forcable,
that are, you know, people can experiment, all this kind of stuff. And what this ends up looking 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 super chain, 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 super chain, the progression
of the super chain, 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 forward 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.
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token valuation. And so Carl, are you optimistic that's like, as again, back back to kind of the
Senate coming to this episode, they'll see another chain. But they'll also say, guys, all the chains
are, you know, all the different L2s and L2 ecosystems are playing zero-sum games against each other, right?
It's a war of all against all. And so, you know, Uniswap is coming in and launching the Unichain.
They're talking about them being kind of a home for global defy 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 super chain.
So we get that step.
But like, 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 United Chains of Ethereum, one, like, user
experience for me, one place for like all of the liquidity?
Yes, I am very bullish.
Here's why I am very bullish.
Because all of the chains within the super chain, part of that whole.
deal is that they're all contributing
back to retroactive
public goods funding. 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, you know, ecosystems,
etc., like 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's all of this like,
tribalism around these tech stacks. Like, no, we are building open source MIT licensed software
that we want to, you know, create that, you know, that flywheel where everyone is transacting
on the network. Where is that, where is that money going? Well, it's going to the people who
created that value, you know, impact equals profit, going to fund the open source software that,
you know, the whole thing is based on. So I do think that there is like a real non-trivial
convergence around, you know, what the Ethereum vision, like the Ethereum vision and, you know,
everything that we've all been doing.
And I think it's like, it's like this weird thing where we don't realize we're all
working on the same thing.
Even different L. Wellens, they're all working on the same thing.
Anyway, this gets a little bit metaphysical, but like still, 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 and your brains more often.
Again, I literally, it helps with things like this.
The reason I use this analogy is not because it's perfect,
but it's because it helps answer questions like this.
Like, Alvria's server is toxic to every other server.
Like, it's like, it's like insane.
It's like idiotic.
It's like people, things need to have purpose.
Well, why are we like this?
Because of, like, if you want the honest answer,
it's because there are tokens and people.
That's where the metaphor breaks down.
It's just, like, that's all it is.
Like, but like, servers usually serve applications.
or other servers, 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, we'll have a unique value proposition and purpose in the world, right?
And that's why we're building it.
And there's all things we're excited about, like, Unichane native tokens.
And we're excited about, like, you know, all the kind of, like, again, there will be the UISOF deployments on, you know, UNSWP4 is going to be deployed to all the chains.
That's a question people will have.
We're going to deploy UISO before it all to the different L2s.
We're not like picking and choosing and only favoring ourselves.
But Unichane, you know, is like designed with a specific kind of like, you know,
the same way that different servers are optimized for different applications building on top of them.
Like we're designing Unichane to be optimized for, you know, as like this like L2 liquidity hub,
home for defy thing.
And 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 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.
So Uniswap is not launching a chain, it's launching a server, then.
That's what you're telling us.
No, I mean, it's the coolest, I mean, 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, like, if you want your server,
if you're a server is so critical to the world that it can never go down, you really
need a lot of redundant copies running in a lot of, you know, if it's so critical to your server,
like, if it's critical that your server, you know, can't, like, kick off 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. And, like, that's not really the, the kind
the game we're playing. We're trying to build like useful products for users, useful products
of developers, you know, useful, you know, and useful like platforms and shared standards for how
to like, you know, bring money into the internet. Just a couple of 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? So I think that like generally when we think about
uniswops, you know, unique, and USWPobbing broadly like, you know, the, you know, the,
the community, the, you know, the kind of users, etc.
Like, there's like some unique things that Uniswap has that, like, I think that positioned
it really interestingly.
And Uniswop 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
Unswap v1, people made their smart contracts upgradable because they're like, there's no
way you can have a non-upgradable smart contract.
And, you know, we're going to.
And then we like kind of even pioneered this like migrate to a new, new contract.
if you build a better one.
That's just an example.
But the point I'm making here is that, like,
we've always been very decentralization focused.
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,
where we built a system essentially for, like,
validating and verifying the actions of the sequencer.
And so that's what the unit, you know,
the unichane verification service,
I think that's the name,
is doing, it's kind of,
kind of, you know, it's like a, you know, a system of nodes.
And, you know, you can, like, you know, stake and you can kind of verify the transaction,
the blocks of the sequencer is being built.
And it kind of provides this sort of like additional layer of kind of check and balance and
verification of what the sequence is doing so that you could either detect bad behaviors
or you have like this additional layer of like, like, you know, almost like economic
security or faster finality.
So you have like different levels.
You have like many different tiers of finality.
There's like, oh, it's been confirmed in a flashblock and a 250 millisecond increment.
Oh, it's been posted by the sequencer.
Oh, it's been, you know, like that.
So it goes to 250 milliseconds to like one second to like, oh, it's been like, you know,
validated within the Unswap verification service.
That's like another layer of finality that happens, you know, 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.
Right.
So it's just like an additional layer in between.
the sequencer, which is very fast, and Ethereum, which is pretty slow, it's like an additional
layer of economic finality. And that's sort of where, you know, we expect the Unitokin and
Unitop community to kind of play a role in in verifying the chain. And then who is also operating
the sequencer? Where is that sequencer being managed? Yeah. So the sequencer itself,
you know, much like Coinbase is operating the base sequencer and blah, blah, we will be running the
Unisop Labs will basically be running the sequencer for Unichain.
What L2Bete stage will you guys be at kind of launch?
What's the plan to progress beyond that?
Is it just like basically part of the OP stack upgrade cycle?
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's like, yeah, so it's going to be like, you know,
they're at L1 or to stage one and I think, you know, will be a stage one as well.
Okay.
And then so the Unitoken, 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?
Yeah, you know, you deposit it, you validate the chain and...
For money?
Do you validate the chain for money?
Yeah, that's usually how it works.
Okay, cool.
Well, what is even money, huh?
I don't know, it depends on if you think it is money.
Well, well, we happen to think that hid.
And that brings us to another question about this.
And I'll go back to kind of the, like 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 throughout all of these layer twos and
be a not the only reserve asset, but will be,
a monetary reserve asset and all of these layer two.
So, eth economy expands good for ether the asset.
The other side of that argument is basically like, well, if Ethereum layer one, that's
the layer one, loses all of its defy 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.
And by the way, the mainnet deployments are immutable L1 smart economy.
We're going to deploy V40 main net as well.
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 M-E-V.
And if you look at, like, layer two, 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 L-1 is a fraction of what they're gaining in terms of, like, gross profit.
But anyway, we can talk about that.
But at the high level, where does defy traffic belong on Ethereum?
Look, I'm going to start by just saying, like, if, you know, roll-ups are competitive
to Ethereum, then we are really confused as an ecosystem when we're on what we call a
roll-up-centric road map.
Yes.
That's what people have pointed out.
Right.
So, like, I think that, like, if that's the case, then we are, like, very deeply
confused and we need to, like, completely reassess, like, what we're doing.
And like, because like the, all, like, the hard forks are like, basically, like, lowering the cost of blob data.
And the roadmap is called the roll-upcentric roadmap.
And so, like, I think that we're, like, taking that a benefit.
And I don't think it's a bad roadmap.
And I think that you can argue what is a good voter.
What is a bad?
I think that it's like, it is an interesting, intentional strategy to some degree.
You, when we're obviously getting at, like, it's part of what you're getting at is like, where will the value, like, what will make eth valuable asset.
Yeah.
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. Look, I think that like two things.
One, I don't think that like, yeah, it's super clear. I think it's like very debatable.
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 be.
move to a model where it is scalable.
Because it used to be, we used to have one second, one cent transactions more, not one second,
but one cent transactions, like, because knowing, you, not many people used it.
Now we're like scaling up, but we need more, we just need more servers to run the thing.
That's what L2s are about, right?
Like, the server analogy helps it.
It's like, you can't run everything on one server.
And we, and we, we obviously could make it extremely beefy.
But then, you know, ultimately it will never run everything, right?
Like, even like, like, you know, systems like Salana, right?
They're starting to like add to be like Salana extensions.
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 it 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.
And maybe we're like in this weird 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 process.
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 going to 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 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 make it in a very highly decentralized censorship position data availability.
I don't really, I think that they eat this money.
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.
I like that there's like, I like decentralization.
I like that there's like competing forms 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 like role as like this like extremely decentralized trusted settlement layer.
And you think you think, you know, if the unit chain is successful, that will be good for the Ethereum network and for ether the asset.
Yes, I do.
I think I really don't view it as like, you know, talk to.
I think that there's obviously, like, 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, you know, every, like, you have, like, the same assets represented across, you have, like,
you have, like, the user experience, like, when you use the Unisop interface, like, you receive 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 do need to scale blockchain,
and then we need to 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, like, you're killing your previous thing.
You can't be afraid to like to like move into the future.
Like the actual thing to be scared of is not progress, is lack of progress.
Right?
You just need to continue advancing and improving on the thing.
And, like, 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.
You know, so it has millions of users at this point, which is cool.
And they, you know, and we need to have billions of users.
And we can't just have Ethereum be like this one thing that runs at all.
It's just not sustainable.
It's not scalable.
and Ethereum, if it can't adapt, we'll die.
And so it does need to adapt.
And that's what it's doing.
And that's what the roll-up centric roadmap is about.
And I do think that there's sort of like,
let's just run everything on Ethereum again.
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, like, the only thing that isn't reasonable is, like, let's just not progress.
Yes.
And I just want a plus one on the fear thing.
There was a huge amount of fear when we were moving from just OPM Mainnet to the super chain
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, you know, concerns, fears, etc., like, you're going to have, we're going to have.
going to have them, I'm going to 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.
Speaking of just like, you know, having a faith about the commitment to the future, Carl,
the super chain idea has been around, 20, 21, I think, maybe even earlier, maybe before he was
even called the super chain.
and now Ethereum's largest layer one application is becoming a chain in the super chain.
Just like reflect for a moment on the path to get here.
The thinking of the super chain model before there was even any evidence for it in the first place,
yet here we are.
Like just reflect upon that journey for us so far.
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 super chain 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. And every day the path gets clear and
clear. Why is this? It's because we are making progress towards that vision and we are not strained.
We're just keeping 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 shade 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, bigger super chain, bigger Ethereum, more users.
Happy, happy life.
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.
Yeah, yeah, the date that I can give you right now is October 10th,
unichane.org will have all like the developer docs and all the information
can go start deploying projects and experimenting with it.
This is basically the first instantiation of it.
So we are going to have an experimental test net coming out in the near future,
which will have some of the more advanced features,
the flash blocks thing and the Unichain builder thing
and the Unichane verification system,
those are not quite ready to be released on the TestNet.
So there will be a test for those coming further along the line.
And then, yeah, definitely, you know,
aiming to launch Unichane production this year.
Cool.
Are you guys working with Sorrella?
Where does Sorrelia fit in this release?
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, you know,
I imagine that they will continue to build their hook.
Wait, wait, lastly, what is the latest on uniswap v4?
Does that have dates yet?
Is uniswap v4 and uni chain the same thing?
Does it have a public date?
I don't know if it has a public date or not.
It's coming very soon.
The main thing with Uniswap v4,
The thing else, we basically barely talked about it.
But UISWF4, extremely exciting and awesome.
I imagine we'll do like another episode or something on that after the launch or something
like that.
Hayden, think you can just waltz back on to Bankland.
Yeah, you totally.
Yeah.
Every time I want.
The, you know, Unisvon 4, 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.
Well, you know, it's like you have to launch a spaceship at a certain point, but you have to do a lot of auditing.
So, you know, U-Sopi4 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.
We would never have the guts to actually launch something with.
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's 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, on the audits.
security front for V4, but also coming out this year, for sure.
Well, thank you both for your service to Ethereum.
Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal.
Crypto is risky.
You can 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 on your monolithic chains if it's not for you.
But we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey.
Thanks a lot.
