Uniswap’s V3 Launches on Layer 2 Solution Optimism

It’s a good time for Layer 2 enthusiasts as Uniswap V3 has soft-launched on Optimism, a leading optimistic rollup solution for scaling Ethereum.

Users can now tap Optimism to deposit, trade and provide liquidity on the decentralized exchange (DEX), which captures roughly half of all DEX volume, according to a Dune Analytic’s query.

Optimism “currently reduces baseline user transaction costs by ~10x-50x,” the project states in a blog post.

The launch comes after almost two years of collaboration since the two teams shipped a testnet version of Uniswap on Optimism, called Unipig. The move also comes almost a year after daily average transaction prices on Ethereum crept over one USD in mid-July. And prices haven’t dropped below that mark since then.

Prices hit an insane average daily high of $68.72 per transaction on May 11, according to Etherscan, before falling to today’s $4.80 mark. Although some transaction costs were far higher; for example, at the high, minting NFTs ran in the triple digits.

It’s important to note that Optimism’s lower fees are for a baseline of 50K transactions per day. This means that if the baseline is breached, the protocol will increase fees until the number of transactions falls below the threshold.

Karl Floersh, CTO of Optimism, spoke to that limit on Twitter, saying, “That is NOT A LOT of transactions!” So while the limit is in place, he asks users to double check their transaction fees, especially if they’re priced in ETH.

Optimism plans to ramp up the transaction limit as the team gains confidence in the system’s stability — the reason for the soft-launch in the first place.