Bankless - Unichain is Live! What This Means For The Future of DeFi | Hayden Adams

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Hayden Adams, creator of Uniswap, introduces UniChain, a new Layer 2 solution designed to enhance DeFi scalability and efficiency.  We explore UniChain’s innovations, including its decentralized sequencing mechanism, one-second block times, and seamless interoperability with Ethereum and the Optimism Superchain. Adams also discusses Uniswap v4’s impact on gas efficiency and how UniChain aims to reduce MEV extraction, benefiting users and liquidity providers.  A must-listen for anyone interested in the future of DeFi scalability and cross-chain integration! ------ 📣 MORPHO | GO-TO LENDING INFRASTRUCTURE https://bankless.cc/Morpho   ------   BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙 FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax   🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain   🌐 CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle   ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🏦ONDO | INSTITUTIONAL GRADE FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Ondo   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/31  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:38 Unichain’s Significance 11:43 Uniswap V4 & Unichain 18:56 Unichain's Interoperability 25:46 How Interoperability Works 31:21 Tech Behind Interop 46:33 Mempools, MEVs & Unichain 49:16 When Will Blocks Hit 250ms? 50:25 Unichain's Validation & Fees 56:02 Unichain Rollout 58:51 Unichain Developer Ecosystem 1:05:53 Hooks & Uniswap V4 1:12:29 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Hayden Adams https://x.com/haydenzadams  Unichain https://unichain.org/  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Scalable singular chains like Solana, a very successful has been that like, you know, there's two approaches to scaling. There's going vertical. There's going horizontal. They both have validity, but ultimately you need horizontal scaling to reach like true mass scale. And so that will require many chains running in parallel. And we need to figure out how to make that user experience completely seamless. The internet runs at massive scale. It doesn't do it by running everything on one massive server. It does it by running many, many servers that can just seamlessly connect to each other. And we have to do that for blockchains. And so we have to figure out how to make different blockchains feel like one. experience. With Unichane, a lot of our focus is on what we call Interop, which is how to make multiple blockchains feel like one cohesive experience. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore

the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is David Hoffman here to talk to you about the launch of Unichain. Unichain, the Uniswap Labs Built Layer 2 is live today. On the show, we go through the release of Unichain with Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap and CEO of the uniswap labs to talk through some of the bells and whistles that the uniswop layer two is bringing to the table. Some people out there, I'm sure, are saying something along the lines of not another layer two. Well, Unichane is bringing some novel tech to the table that no other layer two has. They have built some new kind of sequencing process that helps decentralize

the sequencer in collaboration with flashbots. They've been pioneering full-stack native interoperability with the Optimism Collective. And they've also built the Unichane validation network that allows uni token holders to stake their uni and check the validity of the output of the unichain sequencer and also earn the fees accrued by the unichain block space. I think that's

pretty cool. And of course, these are the subjects that I get into with Hayden. But first before we get into it, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Morpho. Morpho is a borrowing and lending application on Ethereum, also on base. And it is also the first and only defy protocol that has been integrated

into Coinbase.com. which is a pretty crazy concept, but if you're a longtime bank list listener, you know that the concept is known as the defy mullet, fintech in the front, defy in the back. Coinbase is using Morpho to offer its users Bitcoin-backed loans, which actually is how I'm also personally using Morpho as well. Feels good to have an app that I am an ongoing customer of to support the podcast, so I appreciate you Morpho.

There is a link in the show notes if you just got peaked by Morpho, so check him out. In addition to everything Unichain related, I also talk with Hayden Plenty. about Uniswap V4, which just got released last week. Uniswap V4 has this new singleton contract design, which means that the entire state of UniV4 is contained inside of a single contract. This lowers interpool trading gas costs and new pool deployments down by 99.99%. That's four nines.

As well as enables this idea called Uniswap hooks. And Hayden I spend a bunch of time talking about the possibilities that Uniswap V4 hooks unlocks for the world. So let's get into it, but first a message from our friends and sponsors, Uniswap. Let's go hear from them right now. Introducing Unichain. Built for Defy, empowered by Uniswap, Unichane is the fast, decentralized layer two, designed to tackle blockchain speed and cost challenges. With this Mainnet Now Live, you can enjoy transactions at up to 95% cheaper than the ETH layer one,

all while benefiting from an impressive one second block time that will be getting even faster very soon. Unichane is the first layer two to launch as a stage one rollup on day one. That means it comes with a fully functional permissionless proof system from the start, increasing transparency and further decentralizing the chain. More than 80 apps are joining the unichane community, including Coinbase, Circle, Lido, Morpho, and Uniswop. You'll be able to bridge swap borrow and lend and launch new assets and more from day one. Built by Uniswap Labs, the team behind the protocol that's processed over 2.75 trillion in all-time volume with zero hacks. Unichane truly enhances defy-exper experiences with faster, cheaper, and seamless transactions, even across chains. and soon the Unichain validation network will allow anyone to run a node and earn by securing the network.

Visit Uniswap.org and swap on UniChain today. Ondo finance is leading the way in the tokenization of real world assets, with a mission to accelerate the transition to an open economy by building the platforms, assets, and infrastructure that bring financial markets on chain. With Ondo, institutions get seamless access to tokenize finance, while on-chain users gain access to institutional-grade real-world assets like never before. By bridging traditional finance and the blockchain economy, Ando is unlocking liquidity, efficiency, and global access, reshaping markets for the digital age.

As the leader in institutional adoption, Ondo finances the gateway to the trillion-dollar tokenization revolution. Institutional grade finance, on-chain for everyone. Thelho is transitioning from a mobile-first, EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain to a high-performance, Ethereum Layer 2 built on OP-Stack with eigen-DA and one-block finality, all happening soon with a hard fork, with over 600 million total transactions, 12 million weekly transactions and 750,000 daily active users, Sellow's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top layer twos, built for the real world and optimized for fast, low-cost global payments.

As the home of the stablecoins, Sellow hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies, including native USDT on Opera MiniPay, and with over 4 million users in Africa alone. In November, stablecoin volumes hit $6.8 billion, made for seamless on-chain FX trading. Plus, users can pay gas with the ERC 20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone number. in seconds. But why should you care about Sellow's transition to a layer two? Layer two's Unify Ethereum. L1's fragmented. By becoming a layer two, cello leads the way for other EVM-compatible layer ones to follow. Follow Sellow on X and witness the great cello-havening, where

Sellow cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer-two era and continuing its environmental leadership. Bankless Nation, I'm here with the creator of Uniswop, the founder of Uniswap Labs, and the man responsible for burning almost a quarter million of Eath. Hayden Adams, welcome back to bankless. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So Hayden, Unichane is launching their OP stack layer two. And I think it's one of the more uniquely constructed layer twos that I think everyone

needs to understand and digest, including myself. So there is a new sequencing mechanism built with flashbots. There is some of the fastest block times on the OP stack. And from what you tell me, they are quickly going to become faster. There's also this brand new thing called the Unichain validation network to stake our Unitokens. Hayden, first, congrats on the release. There's a lot to unpack.

How should we start this conversation, maybe just at the highest of levels? How would you summarize the significance of the release of unichain upon the layer two landscape and just broader Ethereum? Awesome. And that's a great summary. What I would say is that, you know, we are UNiswob Labs. We built, you know, the UNICEP protocol, which is one of the, you know, it's the most used protocol in Ethereum, you know, full stop.

And then we also built the UNSWBELB app and USWWWWWLWLet, which are some of the up, you know, user-facing products built on top of decentralized protocols and blockchains. And I think that has given us a very unique perspective and lens and approach. And, you know, going into building unichane, you know, the thought was how can we advance and accelerate the Ethereum space and the blockchain space to build better applications, you know, full stack. And, you know, so when we think about building products, we, you know, we're now thinking not just at the front end level, but also at the back end level, also at the protocol, you know, smart contract level, also at the chain level.

And that allows us to really, you know, I think sometimes a problem that our space has is people will build at a very narrow layer of the stack and they kind of offload their problems to a different part. And for us, because we're building, you know, at every layer of the stack, it allows us, it gives us a very unique insight. And so when we, when we, you know, started building unichane, we were thinking, what does Defi need to be, you know, to be better to onboard more users, to create better user experiences, to create more efficient markets, et cetera.

And so, you know, Unichain, with Unichain, we're leaning very hard into, you know, faster block times. People want transactions to happen very quickly. And, you know, 12 seconds on that 1 isn't cutting it. Honestly, even two seconds at the L2 level isn't really cutting it. You need really fast blocks. And so for Unichain at launch, we'll be the fastest OP stack chain with one second block times. But then, you know, later in the year, we are in the coming lines. We're going to be working towards 250 millisecond subblocks.

Another problem for DFI is MEV and the amount of value that gets lost by users to MEV. And, you know, just, for example, Uniswap users end up missing out on about a billion dollars per year based on MEV. And, you know, we think that that value is burning so much ETH. Yes. And, you know, as much as we like burning ETH, we actually also like returning value to our users even more. Sorry, sorry, ETH people. No, I have also an ETH person. But still, we really do build with users and users in mind. that ultimately what's better for end users will be what's better for Ethereum for what is worth. And so, you know, some of this sequencing stuff that you talked about at the builder layer that we're partnering with flashbots on really will allow us to rebate MEV or allow us to, you know, allow

not just us, but other defy developers and even like, you know, et cetera to have MEV be returned to users. And that both works for unswap liquidity providers. It works for swappers, et cetera. And then, you know, I think that the final thing I want to get at here is really, interrupt. And the, you know, when I, when I look at our products today, the user experience of L2s has become very fragmented. And, you know, part of what even, you know, has made like very scalable, scalable, singular chains like Solana, very successful has been that, like, that has been that, you have one chain that can process a lot of transactions. And I think that, you know, in my mind, there's, you know, there's two approaches to scaling. There's going vertical.

There's going horizontal. They both have validity, but ultimately, you need horizontal scaling to reach true mass scale. And so that will require many chains running in parallel. And we need to figure out how to make that user experience completely seamless. When I look at what's truly possible there, you just can look at the internet, right? The internet runs at massive scale. It doesn't do it by running everything on one massive server. It does it by running many, many servers that can just seamlessly connect to each other.

And we have to do that for blockchains. And so we have to figure out how to make different blockchains feel like one experience. And so with Unichane, a lot of our focus is on what we call Interop, which is how to make multiple blockchains feel like one cohesive experience. And there's multiple approaches that we're taking, and we have to layer them all the same way that the Internet had multiple ways to feel seamless. And one of them is native interop through Optimism Super Chain,

which might be the fastest, cheapest version of Interop, the most seamless, the one that makes you feel like liquidity is essentially fungible between the two chains. And then on top of that, we also have, what we call intense-based inter-op, which is essentially using markets and trading to kind of quickly convert assets across chains using various bridging systems and liquidity systems. And so we're working on both of those for Unichain. And the end result that we hope to build is a really, you know, amazing, but really just like an

amazing platform on which you can build amazing products. Okay. So in this release, in this like tech release, I think there's something here for everyone. So if you are a person who is concerned about the centralization of layer two is because of centralized sequencers, well, that is the part of the conversation that's going to interest this person is this flashbots block building mechanism that we're going to talk about, which is going to be like the execution of the layer two. And the unchain validation network. And the unchain validation network. We have two things we're doing here. Okay.

If you are an Ethereum person who is worried about layer two fragmentation, there is a conversation here when it comes to native interoperation. There's a conversation here when it comes to native interop, which is some of the rigor that you guys have Uniswap Labs have been putting into creating this like full stack native interop mechanism that's coming to the super chain. So we're going to talk about that. And maybe if you're just like a uni token holder and maybe there's something here for you because now with the Unichain validation network, we're going to be able to stake our uni. And so I think this is kind of downstream of what you were talking about with your position at Uniswap Uniswap Labs where because you guys are building end to end on the stack from an application on the layer one, you guys have a wallet. You guys are a full stack company and it gives you a unique perspective to innovate at different parts of the stack and kind of create a full stack solution. So I'm pretty excited for this episode. Before we dive into each one of those areas in detail and specific, I also want to touch on uniswap v4 because UniV4 just got released not too long ago last week.

And many, many people are talking about that. And so I think some listeners are probably coming into this episode saying, oh, Hayden on bank lists, clearly they're talking about Uniswap V4. We're actually going to be talking about Unichchain. but I do want to talk about UniChane Uniswap v4. How do these two releases relate to each other? Is this a coincidence that they're happening within like a week of each other? These two different announcements,

how do these things fit together? It's like both a coincidence and not, I think, like, you know, we've been grinding on both for a pretty long time. These are, you know, I would say these are the two biggest projects we've done and we did ship them both within a two-week period of time, which is kind of insane. That was partially a coincidence,

but actually in some ways the timing is really nice because there's kind of like, It's a good moment for, like, new ecosystems to form. By the way, we forgot in our, there's something for everyone. Like swappers and liquidity providers will also greatly benefit from both of these releases. And that's part of where I can even talk about this convergence. So Uniswap v4 launched. Uniswap V4 is the latest and greatest edition of the UMSWP protocol.

There were really two areas of focus. One was around, you know, cost, gas efficiency, etc. And the other was around what we call hooks. So cost really simple, you know, we have a bunch of, improvements to the efficiency of using the protocol. And so that means deploying pools are like 99.9% cheaper. And we're doing that with our new, you know, single contract architecture. And that actually does make a big difference, right?

There's thousands of pools being created. And sometimes people think, well, pool creation, that can be expensive. On Mainnet today, it's gone from $55 down to $4, something like that. Uniswap V4 has brought pool creation from $55 down to $4. Something like that. at reasonably high gas prices that I tested yesterday. Right. But an L2s obviously gets even lower,

and it may be a matter of like cents or less than, like fractions of sense. And so pool creation much cheaper, which is really nice. We also have just, you know, in the early days, we used wrapped Eth under the hood, but that adds an additional cost. And so we have native East support. It all boils down to like transacting is maybe 15% less gas cost for when you're swapping against ETH. We also have, because all the tokens live in a single contract, when you do these more complex split routes and multi-hop routes, there's a compounding benefit to the more of those pools that are in V4.

Because essentially, you know, before you used to like need to transfer tokens between pools and these like multifract, you know, and each of those transfers incur a cost. For V4 you put in the input token, you could have like a complex series of routes and hops that are just all like internal accounting rather than real token transfers. and then you spit out a token on the other end. And, you know, that ends up being just like a much more efficient way to do multi-hop routing. And, you know, and then, yeah, so gas, just like across the board, gas is cheaper. And I think that it will compound the more liquidity moves into V4. And we're even seeing very early on that Uniswap V4 is getting, you know, the majority of small swaps through our UI. Even the liquidity is a tiny fragment, right?

Because it just launched. And so liquidity hasn't had full time to build up. But even at much lower liquidity for small trades, the gas savings outweigh the increased amount of liquidity. And so V4 is already performing very well there. So that's like the one half of V4. The other half of V4 is what we call hooks. And hooks are really, you know, turning the UNISWOP protocol into a developer platform. And the USWP protocol was always a developer platform.

People could always build things on top of it. But there were very strict limits on how you could modify your pools, right? the pools, you couldn't really modify your pools. There was a single implementation of concentrated liquidity, et cetera, and then a single implementation of how fees could be done. And then any modifications had to be done externally or through the token contract itself. With USOPB4, people can really modify,

we allow people to somewhat arbitrarily modify the logic of pools, but in a way that creates a very, like, consistent experience, and gets to benefit from this, like, low efficient routing against everything else within Uniswap. And so from that, we've already seen like a, like even day one, like I didn't even know about this project, but like the most, like the highest trading volume or the most assets for Uniswif4 and day one actually came through a third party hook project that launched at the same time as us called Slash, which, you know, people were trading.

People, it's essentially, you know, the equivalent, it's like a system that uses hooks to more fairly distribute, you know, like to more fairly issue new tokens, kind of similar to like it's a token launch pad. Yeah, it's like a token launch platform, but that like natively integrates with Unisop B4 hooks. And we saw like a lot of activity there. They wanted, I didn't even, you know, I was someone about it. Yeah. And so like, you know, that's sort of an, like a teaser of what is possible with

Unisop B4, but it goes like well beyond that, right? There's, you know, yes, it's good for token launching, but it's also good for, you know, creating, you know, for all sorts of like special designs for different and new asset classes. it's good for honestly just improving and optimizing USWOP fees. And maybe since you asked about the convergence of V4 and Unichain, I think I can give like a really good example here. The builder that we're working on with FlashBlocks will enable is, essentially it will create very fair priority ordered blocks.

And we can use that. And by we, I mean really anyone with building on Uniswap protocol or on Unichain. But, you know, one way to use that would be like you could have the hook in a uniswap pool that actually sets LP fees as a function of the priority fee for that swap. And what that would do is actually allow LP fees to be aware of how much MEV they're creating because the more MEVA transaction is generating,

the higher priority fees someone will bid for that, for that, you know, to, the higher priority fee someone will pay to, you know, the trade against it. And so LPs can actually now be aware of what is being bid and they can actually up the LP fee proportionally and ultimately capture more of the value that they're creating as liquidity providers and leak less value to MEV. And so this is like an example of like a really beautiful convergence between unichain and

UnisomP4. But like that's just like one idea, right? And like the kind of the world zero-wester there. And so I think that I'm just really excited that they're like both, you know, one other thing here is just that like when it comes to like interrupting and when it comes to like the kind of explosion of L2s and chains, I think that like a lot of developers might not want to be maintaining their info across like 50 different L2s. And so, you know, I think that Unichane can become, in part because it's, like, designed to, you know, with Defi and Mind can become, like, a really good kind of hub for, like, people that want to deploy hooks and experiment with, without trying to, like, manage across a million different chains at the same time.

And so I expect, like, a really exciting, vibrant developer community to form building on top of both Uniswap4 and Unichain. And I expect these, like, compounding benefits of the two. I think that maybe gets us into the interrupt conversation. I understand the desire for, like, many people to just not want to manage multiple deployments of their applications. And so, like, at the very least, use Unis-Unichain as, like, a shelling point of where to deploy your hook and manage your hook. Like, if you're just going to do it in just one spot, just do it, you know, at the epicenter, which is going to be Unichain. And honestly, that's probably if liquidity does end up going to Unichain, then, like, that's where you want to be anyways. I've heard Uniswap V4 hooks being called smart contracts for liquidity, which I think is.

a good meme. And so, but I think the truth of that is like the truth of will unichane be the epicenter of hooks and the developer experience and honestly the liquidity center of the layer two landscape is going to depend on that native interop conversation. So maybe we can start with that native interop conversation because if things can be deployed on unichain and also be natively interoperable with other layer twos, that is a really strong argument for unichain representing kind of the epicenter of liquidity. in layer two in the layer two landscape. So maybe you can talk about how, what this native interop

looks like with the unichain, how it works, what it'll feel like for users. Let's open up that conversation for us. Yeah, and maybe I want to contextual, like, for what it's where we were called that. Uniswap before at day one was deployed to all, pretty much all the L2s. And so we're not like, this doesn't represent

Uniswap, like moving away from supporting other chains and only supporting its own, right? This is like us trying to spearhead pushing forward innovation in the space and creating what we think is a very unique platform within it. So Uniswap still, you know, day one on, you know, on base, on Arbitrum, on Polygon, et cetera. And I believe that there will be very vibrant ecosystems there. And you have things like, you know, well, if you want to write a, you know, a smart contract in Rust on

a hook in Rust, then you might want to be using Arbitrum, right? And so just want to, like, contextualize that a little bit. But then when I talk about, you know, interrupt, I think one thing I want to bring into the conversation, I have this sort of metaphor I've been using recently, which is, I think an interesting conversation to have is what applications should co-locate within the same blockchain as like the leading liquidity protocol. Because I think that's not a thing people think about and maybe sounds kind of complex. But what I'm essentially saying here is we're in this and we're in this kind of system right now where we have a bunch of general purpose L2 ecosystems that are competing against each other. and the majority of activity in blockchains today is trading and because of that everyone wants to be the best place every every general purpose chain wants to have the most liquidity to be like a trading hub but i think something that like a point that is getting lost here that i that i really want to emphasize is that you know co-locating your application when it comes to like like engineering and like blockchain architecture like co-locating your application with a blockchain is like living they're like with an AMM

is like kind of like living with a hoarder sometimes and what I mean by that is that like what does like a payments network want a payment network actually wants like the lowest fees possible and very reliable very low fees what is like a big you know a game like running on a blockchain want they want low

fees and very reliable fees what does an AMM do and AMM actually like basically incentivizes an insane amount of trading because you know if there's ever an arbitrage available on the AMM someone will make a trade up to that value. And so AMM's almost set like a floor on the block,

on like the gas cost of a like, of, you know, interacting. And so like, of using that block space. And so, you know, I think that like you might, you know, maybe you want to like, you know, live next to the hoarder instead of with the hoarder, right? And what I'm, but like to do that, you need to be able to, like, maybe they have a lot of stuff and you actually want some of their stuff or you want to be able to engage in

commerce with said order. Like, you know, so I think that like really what we need to move towards is a where liquidity kind of sits like in its own sovereign box space and then people and then like applications that need very low fees actually sit right next to them and interrupt against them. And so like, you know, you have a payments network, but when it needs to convert between assets, you know, those assets get popped into a new chain. They get swapped and they get popped out because that is how you have low, reliable fees. Because, you know, anytime there's like a huge amount of market volatility, demand for trading

within an AMM is going to increase. And that will spike gas fees. And that's actually what happens to Ethereum. Every time Ethereum has like a gas fee spike, it's usually like the launch of a new token that people want to buy or like a big market movement that like creates a big market movement that creates, you know, a lot of demand for trading. And, you know, and that actually affects like small applications that shouldn't really be affected by those things.

And so I think that like some things certainly should co-locate with liquidity. And I think that's like going to be very. interesting thing to figure out, like do perps, do long co-locating with equity, just lending. You know, these are different interesting conversations to be had. But I think that like, and the last thing I'll say is that like even like the logic for how the chain like orders transactions might be very different for a payments network versus a trading platform, right? And and and so like, you know, when we're thinking about Unichane and like the builder that we're building and the sequencing logic and all of that, we're thinking like,

what is optimal for defy and as well as trading? And that might not be the same for like a game, for other use cases. And so like this priority ordering is actually allows us to create really fair, you know, really fair transaction ordering that is really good for users. And so for who are swapping, that might not be the perfect logic for another use case. And so I think that's like kind of the like positioning of it within the world. There are like some context in terms of like what it actually feels and looks like. Day one is going to look like another chain because these pieces are being rolled out step by step.

We don't have full interop day one. We are working to, you know, we're launching the chain and now we're working on it, you know, on interop, right? And so, you know, day one, it will look like kind of like any other chain with the caveat that, you know, it will be one second block times, which is, which is, you know, faster than all the other OPE stack chains to the A. And, you know, maybe we have some like, you know, and then and that's kind of like, you know, we also will have, you know, it has native USDC. We have a lot of partners we've been working with who and, you know, us and the UNSOP Foundation have been working with, who will be also, you know, launching cool things on eunuchane day one or building their, bringing their products, stuff like Circle, bringing native USCC. So they'll certainly be like an initial ecosystem, but I think that I expect very early on a lot of new projects to start deploying and doing cool things with it.

I think each tech stack, layer two tech stack, like the OP stack, Arbitrum Orbitrots, ZKCccc chains, ZK chains. They're all trying to work on internal interoperability, native interoperability inside of their tech stack. And I think the market, myself, users are all kind of those waiting to be able to experience that. And to my understanding, this native interop part of the union chain is being worked, built on, worked in collaboration with the optimism collective. Can you shed a little bit more light on that? And say we do get to a day where this native interop is live and can be experienced by users. How does this kind of work under the hood? And what does this mean for the optimism super chain?

And how is this really built collectively? Yeah, that's a great question. And I will also add that there's like interop within ecosystems that are somewhat competing with each other, but then there's interop between them. And I think both of those are important. And I think that like, but to just start with like native interrupt and, you know, like the, you know, optimism calls it the super chain, arbitram calls them chain clusters. But the idea here is, you know, I think with like native interop, the goal is really to almost have like assets feel fungible between the two chains. Like in our UI, you know, I think we failed if we can't.

show the token balances. Not, and again, there's like day one and there's like day like 90 and there's day like one. Like this will be a process to get there, right? We have to like iterate through the UX flows. We have to iterate through the like, you know, the sequencing design, et cetera, right? But to me, we have failed if we, if we show you two different versions of ETH in our UI. And so to me, like, it means that like you don't have different representations of assets within user experiences. So you have like, and to me it means that like, even if you're transacting, if you're buying a token, like if you're on Unichain and you,

you buy a token on OP Mainnet or something or base if when they join Interop or if slash when they join Interop, which I assume they are just saying I can't speak on behalf of another team, but it shouldn't take that much longer to me. Like I should be able to buy a token from on OP Mainnet from Unichain within a second, right? It might not, well, though the question will be remained if we can do it at the 250 millisecond flashbox level. But really like, you should be able to buy a token on another chain that you should be able to view the balances as combined.

It should take, you know, like less than a second, and it should cost, you know, a very, you know, almost, you know, it shouldn't cost more, much more than converting assets within a single chain. So it's really just like fast, cheap, good user experience. You know, you shouldn't really have, like, we should be able to, once you have a super chain, you should be able to start abstracting the chains and that you shouldn't feel like there are multiple chains. It should just feel like one chain. But it's now running at a much greater scale than any individual chain. And, yeah. Okay. So, but what is the, how would you actually, like, illustrate the technical solution here?

So the, when Unichane goes live, it's part of the optimism, a collective, there's going to be, we're working towards native interop. It is a process. But is, like, how do you actually illustrate the technological advances here to getting to, like, this native interoper? Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's, like, technical back-end advances. And, you know, that gets at, like, you know, each, if you're running a sequencer for one chain, you probably want to also be running a sequence there for the other chain. Or like, you want to be running a node for the other chain so that you know that you're also up to date on the state of the other chain.

You want to, like, you know, so you want to, like, some level of, like, you know, communication there. I think the other thing that you really want is, like, a send, like, basically, like, to really have, like, it feel fungible, you want, like, a shared security model between the two because, and you can layer additional security models, but you want, like, the base level security model to be, like, shared so that you, you know, because if the security model isn't shared, then it's hard to, to treat two assets as fungible because they have fundamentally with the different security model, they should have a different market price to some to some degree, right? And it's not, and so, you know, it's about like sharing a security model with like shared bridge

logic and it's about sharing, you know, standard protocols for how sequencing works and for how, you know, proving works, et cetera. And then it's about, you know, sequencers that, that validate other, other chains. And kind of it all comes together. And I, you know, I think you guys could do entire, I'm sure that like when interop launches, we can do like a whole one, maybe we've been Carl Black on, et cetera, and we, like, go really deep on the technicals there. But then that's like the level there. Then there's, like, the UI level, which is how do we present these things to users? And I actually think that's even more important.

Like, I think that we could do a version of this UX today where chains are abstracted, but it would just feel bad. And the difference is that it would, like, it would feel like we could have no chain selector and we could show a combined balance of all your eat balances. But then when you convert, behind the hoods, we would have to do like a whole series of very slow interactions that would take a very, very long. long time. And so, like, swapping ETH might randomly take 20 minutes instead of 12 seconds because to, like, properly bridge from one chain to the other to make the swap, like, it's too

slow. And whereas within the super chain, we will, you know, know, every different chain can be bridged in and out of from every other chain very quickly so we can create a cohesive, fast user experience, and it will be cheap, too. So I think that, like, you can build these UXs today. And I think to some what we're doing now in preparation for this is starting to think about that at the UI level, even before the super chain stuff or the interop stuff is fully ready to integrate at the UI level. That's coming soon. But, you know, yeah, to really have it feel good, you need very fast, very cheap bridging, essentially. Right.

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One is like the top-down user interface level, and it just rounds out the tech under the hood, like all tech does, right? This is just like what the personal computer did and what Apple did when it made just a usable computer interface. It abstracted away a bunch of the choices and complexity. And that's coming from the user interface level. But then also we need to have like tech advances. We need to have fast block times. We actually need the assets to transfer over blockchains very quickly so that the U.S. can easily show and make choices that help things abstract. So like you have the top down and meets the bottom up.

These two things touch at like a like, you know, they meet together and that's where we get chain abstraction. And then, but whose responsibility is it to actually like deliver the bottom up tech advances? Is this what you guys are building at Unichain? Is this in the optimism collectives? Because I'm just trying to get a sense of we have in this in the Unichain announcement like some like excitement about native interop. I'm just kind of trying to figure out where this in native interop is coming. It sounds like it's not one tech. technological advancement. It's coming from a variety of different places. And so there's not actually

one clear, like, deliverable here. Like, I'm trying to get a sense of that. Well, I mean, a lot of the heavy, there is, like, a lot of heavy lifting being done by the OPE collective. Part of what we were excited about joining the super chain is that we can, like, work with them and collaborate. So I think that it is a collaboration, kind of on both sides. Like, like, the bottoms up part of the collaboration and the top down is a collaboration with, I'd say that, like, yeah, maybe we're doing a little bit more of the heavy lifting on the UI side, but we're going to have to be working with them closely. And then, yeah, they're doing more of the heavy lifting on, like, the, you know,

development of interop technology. But we're like, we have to still, like, make the sequences, you know, like, we still have to run it and we have to work with them on it and make sure that it. And, like, there's also, like, when it comes to, like, the thinking of how it, like, feels across the stack and the interfaces between them, there's also an area that I think we can, like, have some very unique input into. And so it's a collaboration as, as the best things in crypto are, in my opinion. Is there any sort of timeline on, like, expected arrival of a seamless cross-chain inside of the U-Supor chain experience?

I mean, look, I would say that, like, I don't know what I can't say. I don't think that we're going to be waiting that long here to have pieces of it start to roll out. I think that, like, you know, I don't know, like, again, like, there's, like, to me, like, also even my own definition of seamless is, like, a really high bar. And so, like, but I think that, like, the cool thing is there's a lot of wins along the way. Like, it's going to get better and better and better throughout the year is how I would put it. And so, like, I think that, like, you know, every couple months we should have very, we should have, like, meaningful improvements to, to, you know, the experience of using L2s, in my opinion. So there's never going to be one single announcement of, like, congratulations, layer two interop is here.

It's just going to be, we chip away at some of the frustrations, some of the U.S. values. People start to be like, oh, wow, using the Uniswad Web App feels better than it used to feel. You know, like, it's just going to be like, it's, there were so. be a day where we're like the first version of interrupting L2s is like that that will be here. There will be big announcements, but like it will, you know, part of it will just be chipping away at it. And definitely like a goal for me is by the end of the year, like, it should be like completely seamless. And, you know, there will be a lot of steps to getting it more seamless along the way. And so, you know, I hope that, yeah, I think some of them will be realized, you know,

in the near term. Some of them have already been realized. Like, we've already been preparing for this, right? We already, you know, worked to make. L2's first-class citizens and have like the all our drop downs be multi-network. Like in the past we used to silo our interface between networks, you know, to switch between the network at like the top of the page. So like we've already been preparing for this. We've already been like abstracting away different parts. We already integrated bridging as like a step towards there.

By the also mentioned like I do want to shout out like beyond native interop. There's like intense based interrupt, which I think is very important part of the story. It's, you know, part of how we'll be able to interrupt against other ecosystems beyond the super chain. Right. clusters Yeah, and it might also like abstracted.

And there might even also be a way to like go from one second interop to 250 millisecond interop within the super chain. Like I don't know, but I have intuitions there, but that we haven't explored in full depth yet.

But I'd say that like, you know, the way I think about that one is just you can use, you know, intense, like people can use arbitrary bridging mechanisms and arbitrary liquidity providers to convert between chains, right?

You just need a, bridge or a liquidity provider to, you know, be willing to sell you one asset in one chain for the asset you up in the other chain. And you can use these markets as like an abstraction layer for all possible bridging systems, including native interop. And that will be part of the story. And getting better at that. And that gets that like you asked a bit, like, I think that we should have a convert. Like, I don't think that we need, like, I worry a little bit about too many. Like, I think that the same way that like computing has kind of converged towards like we have like Linux and we have Mac and we have Windows, but we don't have like 80 of them.

Right. Because it's too complex technology. Like having like applications have to support, like, when people build an application, they'll often make it work on Mac and Windows, but they're not going to make it, and Linux even, but they're not going to make it like work on like 80 different things. So I think that like there will be eventually a convergence of tech stacks. And so we probably only need to have like cross. So like when people worry about like, oh, how will interrupt ever work or it needs, like,

I think that like, you know, you know, who knows? Maybe it's arbitrament optimism. Maybe it's like, who knows? Maybe it's a ZK chain. Like, you know, maybe, maybe they're, like, I don't know how it converges exactly here. Right. But I'd say that, like, you know, having all of these tools in our belt such that we can create cohesive. Like, I think at the end of the day, like, you know, two years from now when I think about

what our product lets and feels like, I think if you can't, like, an asset shouldn't really appear in our UI if it, you know, can't be converted for every other asset in the UI in, like at a low cost for, you know, relatively quickly, right? Otherwise, like, we're just creating values experiences for people. And so I think that like these interop systems will be what gets us there. And yeah. Cool. Let's turn from interrupt to execution, which will invoke flashbots.

So maybe you can illustrate a little bit about what is different with unichain block execution and block building, how flashbots got involved here. My understanding is that there's this flashbots puts this TEE in front of the unichane sequencer to enforce some additional rules, which kind of checks the power of the sequencer, makes the centralization of a sequencer just less important and does some other cool mechanisms. Can you open up this conversation for us? Yeah. And so we have two approaches here. And they some of them, and they actually both in some ways solve multiple problems at once. But I'd say that, you know, we have the builder, the flash, that we're, you know, that we're working on in partnership with flashbots, and then we have the union shaded validation network. And I think it's good to talk about them both. And they

both in different ways provide checks and balances and additional decentralization on top of the sequencer. And then the flashbots builder also provides additional capabilities when it comes to the fairness of transaction ordering when it comes to ways of returning MEV to users and stuff like that. To start with the flashbots system, we're essentially, you know, it's not too dissimilar to people who've heard of like proposer builder separation in Ethereum. But really what it is is that before transactions are fed into the sequencer, they're fed into this other system first. And it is what we call a block builder. And, you know, this block builder is running inside what it called TEEs or trusted execution environments. Essentially, what it is, is it's like at the hardware, like, it's people,

there's chips and at the hardware level, they have, like, certain rules for how they operate. And it allows you to create, it's kind of like a blockchain for a server. Like, in the same way, like, blockchains, kind of you have sort of guarantees for what will, what will execute with, like, certain trust assumptions, et cetera. And I think TEEs allow you to create, like, applications that have, you know, specific rules imposed on them. or like the lives of create essentially servers that have certain rules imposed on them. When people talk about, you know, sequencers, one of the, there's a few different things that they talk about. One is like, the sequencer could take the MEV if they wanted.

And, you know, today, like, most sequences don't take too much MEV or they do some, but like, you know, you're sort of relying on goodwill for them not to be doing like the most malicious forms of extracting MEV, which would be like sandwich attacks, et cetera. But, you know, what we want to do with this builder is we want to say, well, by running some of the builder logic inside a TE, we can actually have stronger guarantees around how transactions are being ordered such that the sequencer is not able to arbitrarily you know, extract the MEV. And then, and what that actually also does

is it allows you to, you know, essentially what we're doing is we're going to be ordering transactions according to priority fee. And that, and, you know, so everything that's set into the TE within a period of time will get, you know, ordered fairly according to this, like, yeah, very transparent rules, right?

The transparent rule is, the higher the priority fee paid, the higher up than the block it will be. So that next brings us back to this like 2016, 2017 era of Ethereum Layer 1, where no one had really discovered MEV because there really wasn't too much MEV on the Ethereum Layer 1 back then in the first place. And so like it was very simple of a how to get your transaction included. You just played a higher priority fee than all of your peers. And if you did, then you got included.

And if you didn't, then you didn't get included. And there was no other games to be played. There was no MEV extraction. There was no transaction reordering. It kind of feels like using the power of a TEE and pushing everything through that TEE, all the transactions, we're kind of returning to just a very simple, reductive, kind of like naive way of ordering transactions, which is good, which is good. Just if you want to go first, you pay more.

And if you don't want to go first, you pay less. Yeah. And I think that like, back of the day, there were issues with that on Ethereum because we didn't have like very, like people barely knew it. MEV was and there weren't very many rules imposed on how transaction. So part of it is about like using the TEs to impose like rules that that create, you know, better outcomes. But also exposing those to smart contracts running on the chain allow you to do all sorts of very cool things. Right. But like one thing that like, you know, could happen is like you can have like like like transactions that are not like like, like, you know, if you have like a side channel deal between the, you know, the builder and and the like swapper like or the arbitrage, like you might be able to like, like, you might be able to like, like, you know, like, you might be able to like. you know, like pay your priority fee outside of the system, right? And so part of the purpose of having a priority fee is to make sure that, like, you know, you can use TEs to have like certain like rules around privacy and stuff so that in order

to participate in the system, you have to kind of pay the fee, right? And so within the system. And so that allows you to like do things at the smart contract level that is aware of that system. And what I mean by that is like you can construct, a liquidity provider pool, like using Lux LPs could set their own fees proportional to the priority fee. which is visible on chain for that transaction, which means that liquidity providers can now be aware of the MED of the swaps through the chain.

Now, there's different levels of, like, enforcement of the TE builder, like when we initially roll it out, it's kind of like a layer on top of the sequencer. It's possible over time, like, as it proves out to its robustness, and as we iterate on it and as we roll it out, like, it could be like, you could eventually, for example, enforce it in the fault proof. You could say, this block is not valid unless the builder has signed off on it. And then the builder will only, you know, in the TE, the TE will verify that, like, you know, we'll only sign off if it's run this logic.

And so you can have like these additional layers of enforcement on top of it. And part of that is it just about proving out the initial version. Two other things on the TE builder that are going to be possible is going from one second blocks down to 250 millisecond blocks. And that is, you know, again, possible because some of the like the thing that takes time to build blocks, for example, is like things like mercilizing the state. And you don't need to commit. And so the TE builder can like commit to the state for a period of time while murkyizing

in parallel. And so what we have is these like 250 millisecond increments that are like can be generated faster than you can generate a full block. And each of them feels like a block from like a, you know, from the perspective of swappers, from the perspective of like, you know, MEV and block bill, right? It feels like 250 milliseconds. But then like they go, those get like combined into one second blocks that get posted by the sequence area. And so you have, you know, so you have this sort of like kind of so that's another thing that's made possible by the TE. The last thing I'll say is that we're planning on adding basically revert protection, which means that if your transaction fails, you don't have to pay gas fees, which is another nice

thing that we're going to have in the builder. It does cost resources to revert a transaction. So is that just? But it doesn't require. Yeah. So at the builder level, I think that, you know, that like the builder will have to like, you know, and I think that there's going to be like, we're going to see how well it works. I'm excited for it.

I think we can do it. But yeah, I think that like. It's the cool thing is that the builder is running like off chain, right? It's not. And so you can, you know, like, you just have to do like, you know, sophisticated techniques for, for, you know, handling that. But again, I think that like, you know, that's another thing that we can start to, you know, that we're going to be experimenting ways at the builder level is revert protection

and having, you know, people not pay fees for failed transactions. Check my understanding on this. There is no public mempool for the uny chain. And so when people, when we talk about MEV on the uny chain, The only knowledge that like an MEV bought or, you know, an wannabe MEV extractor would be able to have about the state of MEV is from the public state of unichain, which is like free, open, you know, totally publicly accessible information. And the only way to extract that MEV is to not not be able to be playing in the mempool because there is no mempool, but instead just like reviewing the state of the chain and trying to get an arbitrarance transaction in by paying a higher gas fee. And so there's no, like, collocation shenanigans. There's no trying to read, like, get transaction order flow ahead of others.

It seems to be like this mechanism from flashbots with this TEE really just reduces the number of games that can be played in private spheres and allows just, like, one larger, bigger game to happen that's downstream of the public state of the uny chain. Does that check out? Yeah, I mean, I think that they're still kind of like equivalent of memorable in some ways that, like, that the builder is reading from. But then the sequencer is only reading from the builder. So like, I think about it as like the sequencer is in reading from a public-man pool. There's like a, you know, there's a place that transactions are posted that the builder reads from and then constructs blocks. And then the sequence are pretty much just reads from the builder. I say that like when it comes to like these types of games, like eliminating them completely in all context is really challenging.

Right. Like you can still like, sure, can you still communicate faster with the builder if your server is closer? Maybe. And maybe the only solution to that is you have to have like geographically distributed multiple pieces of the builder that somehow are recognized. reconciled with each other. Like, sure, you can eventually, you know, like, it's not, like, eliminating all games is impossible, but the goal here is to, like, massively reduce

the impact of this on users. Like, and I think that that, like, I'm very confident we can do, is massively reduced the amount of value that is extracted from end users by sophisticated, you know, searchers and arbitraggers and professional market, right? And, you know, all these parties still play a role in this world, but like, let's try to return as much value to users they create it as possible.

And so I'm not going to come up here and claim that we've eliminated, you know, all forms of games that could be played because that's like maybe impossible and maybe, and it also actually might not be optimal, which is kind of an interesting thing. Like games, like, incentives to participate in systems can provide net value. And there's some value, like, there's value that people like arbitragerers provide to the world. And so, like, I think it's okay for them to make some money, but it's really about like, today, I think Unswap users are like not getting as good of a deal as they could be.

And so we're trying to, like, you know, improve on that significantly. Is there a timeline from when Unichain one block times go down to 250 milliseconds sublocks? I don't know if I can give you a date right now, but I think, again, it's like very actively in development. We have, like, an internal test net of this right now. And it's about, you know, and then, you know, next step would be an external test net and then a public launch of it. And I think it's all about just like, you know, making sure that like, when we launch these things, we want them to be like, you know, we want to minimize. Like, you know, we don't want sequence of downtime. We don't want, like, we want things to run it.

You know, we want them to be able to be well tested and run at scale. So, like, I don't have an exact date for you at this moment, but, like, all of these things are you. 2, Q3, you know, sure, like, somewhere in, you know, in that area. I'm just saying, you know. So before Q4? You know, I get not committing to any date, but I say that, like, I'm very excited. I'm very optimistic about a lot of these pieces, you know, shipping throughout the year, not, like, at the end of the year. Like, across, you know, across things like interrupt, across, slash, block.

slash blocks across the Echained validation network. Like, we're not in a, we're working as, we're not working as if we have like years to figure this stuff out. Let's put it that way. Okay, let's turn to the last piece of the puzzle of the Uniswap validation network. What is this? Because this is something that I don't think there is a parallel of for other layer two's to my knowledge.

So what is this? What is the Uniswap validation network? What does it do? Yeah, I think Unichin validation network is kind of like another layer of, of validation and check and balance on the sequencer. You know, a lot of people kind of talked about, like, we should decentralize a sequencer, and then, like, but it's like the most handwaves thing of all time, and no one has a plan for how to do it. And I've said that, like, our way of doing it is just, like, adding additional checks and balances iteratively and incrementally.

And if they proved to be really good, building on top of them, until we have a point where, like, we don't have a sequenceer that has much power at all. And say, even at launch, or like, or not, like, even like, you know, and there's already checks and balances built to the LP stacked, right? We already have, like, forced inclusion. We already have, you know, the stage one fault proofs. We have things that are beginning to be checked and balances. We have the fact that anyone can run a node and validate and detect bad behavior. But what the unichain validation network is essentially is just like, you know, you can, you know, you stake uni, you run nodes. You run unichane nodes.

So part part of it is just like an intent. You know, it's a good, you know, you earn a portion of fees from unichain as part of that. So part of it is just like incentivizing more people to like be validating the network, which is on its own. a good thing. You know, people are signing off on, you know, people will be able to, like, sign off on the validity of blocks. And when it comes to, like, when it comes to, you know, a settlement, there's no, like, there's actually multiple layers of settlement on every system, right? Even on Ethereum L1, you post it, there's, like, the settlement of when, like, maybe, like, you're using, like, a builder and they say they're going to include it. Then there's, like,

a settlement of, like, a settlement of, like, you've, like, had, like, 20 minutes of Ethereum blocks built on top of it. And so you, like, less likely to reorg, right? Settlement is just, like, a series of weight of realness. And so this is like an additional weight of like additional layer. Like if you if you think about like the chain of additional weights of settlement, you have like the fastest is like it's been confirmed by the flash blocks builder. Then that's 250 milliseconds. Then you have it's been, you know, included in the one second block from the sequencer that's read out of these builder. Then you have shortly after that will be it's been, you know, signed off on by the unit.

It's been like, you know, validated by the unit chain validation network. That's like the next layer. And I think that there's all sorts of different implementations, and I think that we'll have more details on that coming out. So don't need to go that deep on it right now, I'd say. It's not worth going that deep. But essentially, you know, people that want, there will be like nodes validated the network

and people that don't want to just depend on a sequence. They may be they have a higher certainty that it's now been included because the validation network has confirmed because their nodes have run the transactions as well. and you know I'd say that like you know maybe that will be used by bridges maybe it will be used by centralized exchanges and then you have the final layer of settlement which is it's posted to Ethereum after which you have all the other forms of Ethereum settlement I mentioned which are like more more Ethereum blocks have been built on top of it more estate right and so there's just like another layer that can be used for faster bridging for centralized exchange it also like adds like a like an incentive to check to be a check and balance on the sequencer and that like you know these people these these notes would detect bad behavior very quickly from the sequencer. which even that might be very limited. And then I'd say that even beyond that, like, one thing that's very cool is that, like,

as we have this validation network that improves and evolves, as we have this builder that improves and involves, it's possible that we're, like, squeezing the sequencer, and maybe you eventually collapse it and you just have, like, a decentralized sequencer by virtue of, like, a really good builder and a really good TE builder and a really good validation network. I don't know if that's optimal or not.

It's possible that there's still a role for the sequencer that is very constrained. But the point is that we're, like, you know, we're just trying to push forward and advance on the, decentralization of L2s in this project. And this is sort of our approach to it, which we think is pretty unique. We're kind of just like, I don't know. I think that like people have talked about a lot of things, which is trying to like do them and grind through them and see what works and kind of put in our best foot forward.

So yeah. Okay. So there is a uni token staking and fee mechanisms. So fees are being collected by the Uniswap validation network. And then they're also being redistributed to a variety of stakeholders. Can you talk about? And that's important to like, you know, have more people's validations. isolating the network, right, which will add increased, you know, economic security.

Right. Where do the fees for the Uniswit Validation Network come from? Like, how does that, like, quote, unquote, well, it's just like, priority, things like, like, you know, just like base fees and priority fees from the. Oh, it's just the layer two chain fees. Just like the layer two chain fees. Okay. Yeah.

And there's not, like, there's going to be, you know, there's going to be some split across like sequencer, validation network, et cetera. But that will all be like, I think some of it's already public, but that can, that will all be documented, et cetera. Okay. So like the Uniswot valid. network receives the chain fees of unichain and it sends it out to some portion goes to the sequencer some portion i believe goes to the optimism collective because you guys are part of the super chain this is how that works and then some portion goes to the uni token stakers yeah i mean it's it's split out at the like in it yes there's like a split out cool okay neat so this is kind of like a way for

you know the uny token holder community to like get involved with like the management and operation of the chain. It's a way for them to provide additional, you know, security to unichain and additional transparent and additional kind of validation of unichain. Yeah. Cool. Okay. All right. So that's the Unisot validation network. We've talked about native interoper.

We've talked about the flashbots block building. What is left to talk about with the unichain is launching today. So that's that very important detail. What should people, now that they have this information, what should they go do? What links should we send them to? Like, what

What are kind of the next steps for the rollout of the unichain? Yeah. So, look, this is day one. I expect, like, I don't, like, I think that, you know, there's going to be all sorts of things. I, you know, I'm very excited to see what people do with it in some ways. Like, it is, you know, it is a decentralized blockchain. People can deploy, you know, permissionless smart contracts to it.

So, like, you know, will someone do unicorn with hat? I don't know. Like people, you know, there's going to be all sorts of random things happening, I'd say, or exciting things. But we also are going to have like all sorts of, you know, tier one projects begin building on top of it. you know, things like, again, like Native USDA. Like what kind of run projects?

Can you know those? There's actually a whole, off the top of my head, I'm actually, I have to, there's an entire site section of our website that has like, that will be updating and will be, is live right now that people can look at. I don't know if I've been named names off the top of my head. What's the, what's the Unichane website? Justunuchain.org. And that it will be, you know, as a.

the new launch, oh, this is a slightly pre-recorded, oops. But as of the launch, you will be updated with an entire section that shows some of the initial projects that are already launched on it or launching on it. But yeah, I say, you know, day one, people can bridge into unichane. They can try trading on it. They can access all the, anything built on top of it. They can start, you know, designing neverware, or they can start thinking about, again, this won't be day one, like, I would say that this is like just, like, day one is like just the beginning, right? We're like in the earliest stages. So like I think part of it is just like, you know, beginning building, preparing for a world where we have flash blocks, where we have the Unichshan validation network, where we have, you know, interrupt, which is all, you know, in my mind, definitely all coming this year.

Right. And so, you know, I think that like, and again, we'll be rolled out like one by one, right. And so, you know, I think that part of it will be like thinking about those things. And I think about Uniswap v4, thinking about Uniswap v4, hook. You know, day one, Uniswap V2, V3, V4 will all be deployed to Unichin as well. it will be working in our products at UNICEF labs. So you'll be able to create liquidity pools on top of UNSWP4, using hooks, et cetera. That will all be there, day one.

But then you can start thinking about what this chain is going to be and how to kind of make use of its unique benefits, which I think is maybe the most exciting thing. And I think that that ecosystem will just be evolving over the coming months to year. Something that I have picked up on as a pattern is things that start off as, apps that then develop into the grow, evolve into developer platforms. So, you know, Uniswop V1, V2, and V3, I would all call those applications. Those are all applications. Uniswap V4, with the introduction of hooks, is turning Uniswap into a developer ecosystem,

kind of like not really with an app store, because there's no app store here. But like hooks are apps for Uniswap. And now hooks can be developed by, there are teams that are building, taking in funding and growing a team to produce a product, that product is a Uniswap hook. And so now there's a developer ecosystem on Uniswap before. And that same idea extends into the existence of UniChain as a platform as a whole.

Maybe Hayden, we can just zoom all the way back out and just talk about the trend of Unoswap turning into a developer ecosystem. Yeah, and by the way, I will say Uniswap in some ways has always been, like, I think of it almost like going from like Bitcoin to Ethereum or something. Like Bitcoin is also developer.

You can build applications on top of Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin, et cetera, but Ethereum is just much more expressive. And so you could certainly build applications on top of V3 and V2, but they just weren't very expressive because you couldn't modify the pool logic. You had to, like, kind of interact with the pool logic. It was just, like, much more constrained.

And so I think that, like, for me, it was kind of like, in some ways it was maybe an obvious evolution, but at times it didn't always feel obvious. Like, there's a lot of dis... I think, like, a really interesting kind of complex challenge is, like, the trade-off space between liquidity fragmentation, and hook and pool innovation where like there's almost like a zero

like a like the more you know liquidity is fragment like the more like the problem is like if you have like only one you know only one AMM right all the liquidity is in one place you actually have like very unfragmented liquidity which allows you very like efficient you don't have to think about this like a really insane sprawl of insanely complex routing

and like liquidity isn't fragmented across a million things that ultimately incur its costs to access but you also like don't have the level of innovation and that, you know, you only have one design and it doesn't give you the expressiveness in the innovation. So I think early on with V2, V3, we took like these, like, stances, like very opinionated designs.

Like, what is the best thing you can do in a single design, V1 as well? And I think that they took us very, very far. And I think that, like, the concern about things like earlier on would have been like, okay, but like now there's like this insane fragmentation, how do we handle it within our routing? How do we handle it within our UI?

How do we handle it, you know? How does that not lead to just crazy liquidity fragmentation that no one can grab? with. But I think that like what we've like what we saw ended up happening is that people just took that like innovations that they wanted to do and took it outside the EMSP ecosystem and were even less standardized. Right. It was like it's like you know people were like innovate like people that were innovating were just doing competing AMMs essentially. And that wasn't really a good status quo because that that actually means that like the interfaces were less standardized. There's like

even worse like fragmentation and and gas costs. And people are in some ways like, sometimes people would build a new custom wonky AMM and then like it gets hacked and then people like shit my AMM got hacked and like that's unfortunate right and so we wanted to figure out how can we lend our like security mindset our like code quality our like and reduce fragmentation while still allowing open innovation and so that's where we land on like you know something before is design which allows you to create very customizable pools but the liquidity all sits within a single contract we have like a lot of a lot of security mindset that went into making that a secure thing or what we feel to be very secure

and what has been very well audited at this point, at least. And then, you know, that and then we've also kind of like, using hooks, we've kind of allowed, like, a lot of the core logic, AMM logic to be shared, a lot of the interfaces to be shared, but allow like specific points to inject customized logic such that even when you're thinking about the security

of a pool builds on top of it, you can think about what hooks are being used. It constrains the area of which you need to audit and think about risks from. Like as an example, If the only hook that's being used is like the custom fee hook, then like you know that the worst thing that can happen is like the fee can be modified, right? Like if your only thing you're using is the swap hook,

you know that it can't modify the liquidity provision portion of it. Like there's like different, you know, constraints you could put on how you're modifying that allows you to build. And what that allows to you is much more quickly like, you know, you have this like aggregation problem. It's very hard to aggregate every liquidity protocol. And if you do it, if you do everything, you might end up aggregating something unsafe and then you use these might lose money.

With hooks, we can like massively constrain this this mindset. So like as an example, like this, that project's launch I mentioned, like they launched. They're a custom hook. They do some, some kind of semi-wanky things that are not wonky. And then like semi like custom niche, right? Like different from what we do in like the standard pools. But, you know, we've done some initial looks at it and we think it's like not too hard for us to route through it because they're like, they, you can still just call like

the swap function in the pool manager and it still works. We just have to like think about the slivage tolerance. we said because it's like slightly effective. So like it allows us to like, and that's like some custom logic that like in the past would have had to be like an entirely competing AMM. And, you know, so they don't have to build an entirely competing AMM. We don't have to like think like aggregate an entire competing AMM. We're instead, you know, able to just, you know, so it like constrained.

So it's like a trade agreement. You guys have like a constrained conduit of trade between the uniswap at the AMM and flaunch the hook. And because you guys have constrained things to these like more narrow pathways, like you can just trust each better. I think that like, you know, trade agreement, like, has various, like, implications to it. I'll, all metaphor's break down pretty quickly. I hear your, I hear your metaphor, but yeah, the main thing is that, like, it allows, you know, there's like a positive sum thing here, which is, like, slunch actually benefits from co-locating their liquidity with all the other

use of off before liquidity, which means that you can, like, do very cheap, efficient routing between them. They also don't have, like, they can, like, do less work in terms of, like, building an AMM, they can kind of, like, you know, and they get, like, a very cool platform. they even maybe get some in. And then we get the benefit of like, we don't, like, there's no single best. I think that I've, I'm fully pilled on the fact that I used to think maybe there was just like an optimal implementation of AMMs and that we could achieve it.

And VIII was like a really good shot at that, I'd say. I think that like I've concluded that there is no optimal implementation and that the only solution is, is customizable. And I think that there may be like, I don't know like how many hooks will be like super popular or not. I think we've already seen like a good amount of them. being developed. I think that like, you know, hooks that minimize MEV extracted on top of Unichain, you know, priority ordering is like a really meaningful hook on its own, right? That could

like massively boost LP profits because they're not losing as much money. And so like, yeah, I think that like it's, you know, I think that there's a lot of very meaningful hooks. Well, and yeah, I'm excited. So Hayden, I want you to do this hypothetical with me. You, Hayden Adams, CEO of Uniswap Labs, fires yourself and dead or just challenges yourself to go build a hook. Like your next task, you're fired from Uniswap, you're fired from the CEO of Uniswap. Now you have to go build a hook on Uniswap v4. What hook would you build? Or what hooks would you like developers to build?

Is like maybe an easier way to ask that question. Okay. There's a lot of, I think that like there's a bunch of categories that I'll shout out and they're all kind of interesting to me. Like definitely like the token issuance ones are really interesting ways to like bootstrap liquidity essentially, and we already have seen some of those. I think that, like,

one of my favorite ones is, like, the dubbit, it's just, like, Uniswap v2 on top of Uniswap V4. It's kind of funny, but, like, Uniswap V2 is still, like, the highest TVL version of Unuswp. And there's a lot of really good benefits of V2, and it's, like, ultra-dead simple. You don't have to, like, have any brainpower

in some ways to use it. And then beyond that, there's, like, fee compounding that's still hard to do in V3. So even full-range V3 doesn't have the fungibility or fee-compounding of V2. but I think that what you could actually do on top of V4 is you could literally create a hook that has the exact same interfaces V2 like the exact same like the exact same logic

has all the same auto compounding fees, fungible liquidity, and has lower gas costs than V2. Oh, interesting. And so V2 on V4 can actually be identical to V2, but better. You can do better V2. And I know that's kind of a funny what to say, but I think like a better V2, but even like a better V2

with liquidity bootstrapping, is like pretty sick. I think that beyond that, like, you could do, I think definitely this like priority ordered ordering stuff is pretty interesting. Do you think if somebody builds a better, a V2 hook on Uniswop v4, that it would actually migrate some of the old liquidity

from actual Uniswap V2 into the hook version of Uniswap V2? Or do you think that, why do you think the Uniswap V2 liquidity is so sticky? It's so sticky because one, there's like a, there's a lot of info that's been built, that was built around V2 for like deploying an incentive out. Like the fungium.

and fee compounding of V2 is just like a pretty good thing for projects that only want full range liquidity, which it seems like a lot of like long-tail tokens, that's like a very dead simple way for them to do it. So I think that like, you know, and then there's like info built around that. There's like token launchers that use that launchry two pools

and there's like, you know, whatever. There's like liquidity locking mechanisms that like, you know, whatever. There's all these different mechanisms and things people have built on V2 and like people are continuing to use those products even as V3 has existed. But I think that V4, you could truly do a much better version of V2, which to me is pretty exciting. Other hooks, by the way, I would do, like, so yeah, there's all sorts of priority ordering stuff, I think is interesting. All sorts of fee designs that are pretty interesting. There's companies like Sorrella, et cetera, that are doing some stuff like that.

Sirella, I think, is making the hook that is, like, on the main quest line of Uniswap itself. Because, like, one of the big things that plagues Uniswap is LVR in permanent loss, just MEV extraction from Uniswap LPs. So I think if there was any hook that would ever be created by like uniswap the team, it would be the one that Sirela is building that just so happens to be built by a third party team. I mean, I have a lot of hooks I want to build, but you know, that's definitely an interesting one for sure. Let's see. I think another one, I don't know, I'm I'm, I think like everyone in these days, I'm a little AI obsessed. I think that there's probably convergence of TEEs plus AI plus hooks that are kind of fun.

You know, I don't know the right, the exact thing there. but I just, my, my curiosity there is, you know, is interesting. I'm curious what people will do there. I'm nerd snipe to bit there. Let's see. I'm probably forgetting ones. I think that there's pretty good, like, you can definitely do, like, you can definitely do things like, you can definitely do things like, or like, you can definitely do things like, or like, you could definitely do things like, lending as a hook. Like, you can do like a lot of, like, defy primitives and protocols within hooks.

I think they're interesting or even, like, natively, like, do your liquidation. a hook. Yeah, like potentially or like portions of those systems. Like maybe the liquidations are done through the form of a custom hook pool. Like I think there's like a lot of really, I think there's also like efficiency and like like the some of the like using LP like using liquidity as a collateral as part of the system as a hook, which is pretty interesting. I think that like you can do it in ways that like, you know, things automatically like like like yeah, you can just kind of like combine these defypidiv like kind of money like or stuff that people used to talk about more. I think there's a lot of there as well. uniswop, either Uniswop Labs or Uniswop Foundation, what is the effort here to, like, foster

this ecosystem? Are there, like, hook hackathons? Like, what's going on here? Are you guys doing in December? So that's a great question. I will differentiate the roles here. Because, like, Uniswap Labs, we've been, like, building this core protocol. We've been launching it. And I think that, like, we're thinking about within our products, how do we support hooks? How do we make sure we can route through as many hooks as possible in our front end, right? Stuff like that. And I think sometimes we'll be, like, a technical resource just, like, you know, through our own technical expertise to people that are building hooks. And we also, I guess, have Uniswop Labs ventures, which we can invest in projects, including

hook projects, but also all of crypto. But then that actually went dark for a while. We have reactivated it. So Uniswap is a thing now if people want to reach out. Yes. But then Uniswop Foundation is really leading the charge here in terms of directly working with, you know, this ecosystem of hook builders. So there's, you know, like a hook registry.

There's a hook. There's all these things that they've been doing to try to help. They have, like, you know, giving grants to builders, providing, you know, giving, like, you know, I believe there's stuff around, like, even helping hook builders get audits and funding audits, having, like, sort of standard, like, you know, GitHub repos with all the pools that have been audited. Like, the foundation is doing a lot of really cool stuff. I actually wish I knew it all off the top of my head in some ways, you know, the actually, like, the people always think that we're like one entity, but, like, the actual separation means

I literally don't actually know the latest of what they're doing. we catch up sometimes, but this is like a big part of their mission right now is supporting hook builders. And so that's really been their domain. Could even make sense for you guys to have like the foundation team on it for a whole episode. Yeah, a hook episode. A hook episode with the foundation team would be great. Awesome. It's been great to have you on and help. Thank you for walking me through all of this. It's pretty exciting. I'm very excited to see what the native interrop can do when that rubber meets the pavement. And now I'm going to go play around on some hooks. So thank you for joining me on the show today.

Yeah, use Unichane, launch some hooks. Do you do stuff. We're building away. Cheers. Thanks for having me. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Hooks, they're brand new, so they're also risky.

You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.