Unichain Halted After Early Developer Access Gets Leaked

Uniswap Labs’ upcoming Layer 2 blockchain, Unichain, is mired in controversy for the second time without officially launching.

On Nov. 11, users reported that the Unichain mainnet was “live,” and millions of dollars began pouring into the chain. Soon after, the Unichain team addressed the situation and said, “Unichain mainnet is not live — and the canonical bridge has not been finalized. Since it is not ready for public use, the RPC for this developer access period has been disabled.”

This comes less than a month after Uniswap Labs faced criticism from UNI delegates for “killing the fee switch” and building Unichain without consulting its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is meant to govern Uniswap.

After Unichain addressed the matter, users were left to fend for themselves to withdraw their ETH from Unichain.

Tom Kysar of GasDotZip took to social media to call out the team and said, “If you want your chain to not be ‘public’ stop hosting them on your public domain lmao, and it was definitely “live,” also unsure how the bridge can be ‘not finalized.’”

Unichain was announced on Oct. 10 by Uniswap Labs as “a new L2 designed for DeFi,” touting 250ms blocks, cross-chain interoperability and a decentralized validator network. The chain aims to act as “the home for liquidity across chains” and perhaps help solve the issue of liquidity fragmentation across Ethereum’s controversially large Layer 2 ecosystem.