If You’re in Infra, Pivot to Apps: The Story Behind Unichain By Zach Wong From Uniswap Labs

[Music] today I'm going to talk about uni chain what it is why we built it and how it empowers app developers to build new user experiences the title is a little provocative but it expresses my belief that if you're building infrastructure you should be empowering and focusing on how to make app user app developers provide new user experiences so today I'm going to talk about uh how we're doing that at Union chain how it affects our product road map and how we think about supporting Union chain Builders as we bring this to life first some stats unich chain has been live for two and a half weeks and in that time we've seen 117,000 smart contracts deployed over 6 million transactions and 155,000 wallets and that's all organic unincentivized growth which we're very proud of but this is a talk about app and building great onchain apps is in unisoft lab's DNA over the past 5 years we've seen over 94 million swaps over 7 million swapping wallets and today we have over 4 million monthly active users at Unis swap we have a customer support function which has solved over 150,000 user tickets over the past 3 years that's really useful for users but it's also useful to show us the problems that our users are facing and one thing we've noticed noticed is that the blockchain's problems are our problems this is a graph that shows the number of support tickets we get per day along with the price of gas on ether ethereum L1 and as you can see they're very strongly correlated when we talk to our users they don't make a distinction between Unis swap the app and the blockchain on which it's built and we get blamed for the blockchain's problems I'm sure this that many app developers in the audience empathize with this if you talk to your users here at ethereum e Denver or on Twitter or telegram you can tell that users especially new to crypto users don't make a distinction because why would they that's why we built uni chain to solve user problems uni chain is faster and cheaper it's built for interop decentralized by Design and has less me in my talk I'll talk about each of these features and how we're bringing them to life for all of you first uni chain is faster and cheaper today it's 1 second and one cent a swap and soon it'll be 250 milliseconds I know many of you probably know this it is eth Denver after all but I think worth going over why rollups are better and cheaper for users um especially in the context of Unis swap where we see that the majority of swap volume still happens on eth L1 L1 can be pretty expensive and that's off-putting for a lot of users especially new to crypto users who don't want to pay $45 for a swap or $10000 to Mint an n what rollups do is that they roll up many user transactions into one L1 transaction so you make a transaction on L2 it gets put into an l a set of L2 blocks which are then posted in a single transaction to ethereum L1 and so the effect of this is that transactions on uni chain are 95% 95% cheaper than transactions on ethereum L1 un chain is also faster in product development we've noticed that one of the most important metrics associated with user retention is speed of interaction if you're building an app you want to make sure your transactions are Snappy modern and fast and so at Uni chain we've made design decisions that prioritize decreasing the amount of time needed to interact with the blockchain transactions on uni chain today are 1 second and in the future they'll be 250 milliseconds which is about the speed of a blink of an eye un chain is also built for inter the ethereum rollup road map is working rollups are making blockchains better for users faster and cheaper but it is also causing some problems like duplicate tokens you have ether on Bas on uni chain on ether on ethereum L1 on Zora or Avalanche and other problems too duplicate tokens how do I get on to one chain but not another why don't I have e for gas on all these different chains we want to support developers who are building NextGen crypto ux like this where we have cross chain balances in a single line displayed for users but that is not possible right now because the underlying is not true ethereum ether on eel1 is not the same as ether on uni chain it's not the same as ether on op mainnet it's not the same as ether on Bas and so what we think is needed is new technical Innovation at the infrastructure layer to improve user experience uni chain is built to be seamlessly interoperable these are real technical challenges that we're addressing with our partners at optimism so that people who are building on uni chain as we make new technical breakthroughs will be able to have a chain abstracted experience that is true and they'll be able to build things um that are Next Generation crypto ux so what are we doing first we're pioneering the ERC 7683 standard with other partners in the ethereum ecosystem this is the technical standard that underlies the smooth bridging experience you may have experienced on our website where bridging transactions are a couple seconds a couple cents and feel like just another transaction second we're building the uni chain validation Network which provides fast finality the market makers that underly ERC 7683 they need assurances and fast ones that the transactions that they're making uh are actually happening and the faster we provide those assurances the cheaper and the faster they'll provide services to all of you and that's why we're building the union chain validation Network third we're contributing to the core development of native interop on the super chain native interop is a real technical Innovation that breaks this mental model of I have my chain on one token I have my token on one chain I need to bridge it to another chain and I need Bridge it back what we have with Native interop is the same thing we have in web today where an app developer deploys a website and the cloud service provider is the one who worries about on what server it's running if it doesn't have a lot of load it's on one server if it needs to expand to many servers then it does so automatically that's the what will happen when you build cross chain applications with subchain Native interop and it's coming soon so in the future digital cash is possible you have different stable coins on different chains and you can represent them to users as a single item batch spend is possible you have stable coins on a bunch of different chains you can buy eth from all those different chains in one single transaction next uni chain is decentralized by Design as the ethereum rollup road map has scaled we've seen new uh security models and new trust assumptions and those things work great they are safe for users they're making things better for users but we saw an opportunity to advance decentralization especially in the areas that we're experts in which is onchain trading and defi uni chain is the first role up to launch as stage one on day one this is a somewhat technical concept but what it means for apps and users is that you have very strong security guarantees the same guarantees that you came to blockchains in the first place for censorship resistance self- custody stage one means that those are very strong guarantees on uni chain second second the uni chain validation Network we wanted users to be able to verify what was happening and attest to that for the service uh to serve other people in the community we didn't want to tell users and apps just trust us just trust the single sequencer we want to make it possible and we will make it possible for everyone to participate verify what's happening on uni chain double check what's happening on un chain and tell everyone else about it lastly we're making it possible to cryptographically verify block building using tees and this is really important for uni chain because of our def Focus I want to talk about what a te is because it can often feel complicated or get into really a lot of jargon but I think it's actually very straightforward tees enable us to verify block building for those of you who don't know block building is really important for onchain trading because it's a very important part of the me process and at Uni chain our goal is to minimize me V essentially in the traditional system we have transactions on the left that come into the block Builder and then we see blocks emerge but the problem is that normally block building is a black box we see the transactions that come in and we see the blocks that come out but we don't know what's actually happening in the block builder in the robot but this is a solvable problem and if you work on blockchains you solve this problem every single day what we do is we make the robot the block Builder sign the function that it's executing the code is executing with a private key embedded in the robot and then we have an onchain signature that we check against the public key to see if what we expected to be run was actually being run so now transactions come in they go into the block Builder where they get signed with this private key and then we have blocks that are attested to on chain and we can verify that the code that we expected to be run is actually being run the truth is that we would build things in a decentralized way just because we wanted to this is unis swap it's what we do but we also think that decentralization is a big business Advantage for us and for the apps that are building on top of uni chain as we've built the Unis protocol we've seen that when we build the protocol to be immutable when we build it where there's no privileged position for unisel labs or any other party in the ecosystem that tens of thousands of Builders integrate the unisoft protocol into their apps and use the unisoft protocol in ways that we could never have imagined as an app developer building on a decentralized chain is also good for you here's what you get first things work like you expect them to what we say happens you can verify it actually happens you don't have to just trust us second you get more than one source of truth if you're trying to debug something if you're trying to figure out a problem or just what the heck is going on you don't have to trust us you can cross reference what we say happens with what someone else says happens and that's easier for you to work with but lastly we're doing these decentralization features without compromising on ux as app developers ourselves we know that it doesn't matter if you build decentralized apps if no one uses them and so we've made sure that as we add these new features for decentralization we're not touching consensus and we're not reducing throughput in fact as we've built these new decentralization features we've seen that we actually actually improve user experience which has been fantastic lastly uni chain has less me first there's no sandwiching second faster blocks mean means LPS earn more fees from Arbitrage and lastly priority ordering allows for new experiments in me minimization first there's no TR traditional sandwiching on uni chain on blockchains like salana there's a public menol and so what can happen is that malicious Searchers see the pending transactions insert their own transactions ahead and give users a worse execution price and this has been a big problem over the past 6 to9 months so we got rid of that in uni chain because we're using a SE single sequencer architecture while still maintaining the vast majority of security guarantees that users get on ethereum L1 we're able to get rid of the public men pool keep transactions private and get make sure that transactions on uni chain are safe from standard sandwiching next shorter block times mean more trading and more fees for LPS consider a situation on a slow chain where over the course of 36 seconds there are three blocks that means there are three opportunities to trade against that price but the price is moving continuously and so on a faster chain like uni chain which has 1 second block times now and 250 millisecond block times soon uni chain naturally exposes more opportunities to trade and therefore there's more trading and LPS earn more fees lastly unun uses strict priority ordering to allow for me minimization Priority fees are things that are paid in a transaction that affect where the transaction lands inside of a block and so they're very important for m Dynamics uni chain orders things strictly By Priority fee which is not the same as uh on other chains uh and that opens up a new design space that's very very exciting for example apps can uh encode an order a swap order such that the output amount the user receives is a function that's directly proportional with the priority fee paid so the output amount is directly proportional with the priority fee paid that means as Meb Searchers compete to fill this transaction as they keep paying more and more priority fees they also need to give out more and more output tokens which means when you swap you get more money and this is a vast design space that's really really exciting and available on un chain right now what these three things mean is that uni chain uniquely stands for me minimization we don't think it's a valid and a good business metric that we should be proud of the total value extracted from users we think it's better to build a blockchain that protects users earns their loyalty and keeps them coming back for the long run we think that's a better uh business model for uni chain and we think it's a better business model for apps built on top of uni chain at uniswap we're here for the long run and we know that our Builders are too so that's the story of uni chain we saw the rollup Centric road map happening and there were opportunities to add something new we saw purpose built chains a world of many l2s new security models and also opportunities to innovate at the L2 level and that was an opportunity for uni chain unchain is scaling ethereum the Unis swap way we're designed for defi we're redefining cross chain interoperability keeping decentralization at the heart of product development and lowering value lost me if you're an infer Builder I encourage you to Pivot to apps think about how the infro features that you're building help aptiv Vel opers deliver better user experiences for their users that's what we're doing at unich chain if you're an app developer build on uni chain we're focused on solving user problems but we need your help to do that build apps that have genuine Innovation at their core build apps that have a great ux that is crisp clean and modern build apps that prioritize long-term growth and have confidence that you'll be around to enjoy it if you need contract addresses or Tech docs to deploy on un chain those are available at docs. un.org if you want grants or Builder support co-marketing or tech support fill out the form at un.org Builder form and if you want to use unchain bridge at app.is swap.

org thank you [Applause]