TL;DR
Unichain is the DeFi-native Ethereum L2 from Uniswap Labs, built on the OP Stack with one-second blocks and gas costs roughly 95% lower than Ethereum L1.
Mainnet went live February 12, 2025. Uniswap v4 on Unichain now holds around $369 million in TVL.
Across supports Unichain on mainnet (chain ID 130) and bridges ETH, USDC, and other major assets in roughly two seconds.
The bridge uses an intents architecture: a relayer fronts capital on Unichain from their own balance sheet, the protocol settles with the relayer afterwards through UMA's Optimistic Oracle, and your wallet receives canonical assets, not wrapped tokens.
Unichain is Uniswap's home for liquidity, not a general-purpose rollup
Most L2s try to be everything: gaming, social, payments, DeFi, all on one chain. Unichain doesn't. It is an OP Stack rollup engineered specifically for decentralized finance, built by the same team that ships Uniswap, and tuned for the workloads that actually move volume onchain: swaps, liquidity provision, perps, money markets. The thesis is that DeFi performs better on infrastructure that knows what DeFi needs.
The numbers reflect the focus. Uniswap v4 on Unichain holds roughly $369 million in TVL as of early 2026, up from $9 million in the first 48 hours after launch when the DAO's $60M liquidity program lit it up. Block times are one second, gas costs run about 95% below Ethereum L1, and the team has signaled TEE-based block building that targets effective 250-millisecond block times. If you trade onchain, this is the chain Uniswap built for you to trade on.
If you're moving capital from anywhere into Unichain, the bridge in front of you matters as much as the chain itself. Below is what the chain actually is, what Across supports, and how to bridge in a few clicks.
What Unichain is, technically
Unichain is an Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP Stack and participating in the Optimism Superchain. That gives it a few specific properties worth knowing before you bridge.
Block production targets one-second slots, with announced upgrades toward sub-second confirmation. The chain is fully EVM-equivalent, so Solidity contracts deploy unchanged and the wallet UX (MetaMask, Rabby, Frame, Coinbase Wallet) matches every other EVM chain. The chain ID is 130, which is what your wallet uses to identify the network when you add it.
Settlement is anchored to Ethereum L1 via OP Stack proofs, so the chain inherits Ethereum's security for finality. Sequencing is operated by Uniswap Labs at launch with a roadmap toward decentralization.
The applications that have shown up reflect the DeFi-first pitch. Uniswap v4 is the anchor tenant. Native deployments and liquidity programs are concentrated in money markets, swap infrastructure, and yield strategies rather than the broad L2 mix you see on Base or Arbitrum.
What you need to bridge to Unichain
Three things, in this order:
A wallet that supports Unichain. Any EVM-compatible wallet works: MetaMask, Rabby, Rainbow, or hardware wallets through WalletConnect. If your wallet doesn't already have Unichain configured, add it with chain ID 130 and the public RPC published at unichain dot org.
A small amount of ETH on Unichain for gas. Bridging ETH solves this in one step: send ETH, receive ETH, pay gas with the same asset. If you're bridging USDC or another token, you'll want at least a few dollars' worth of ETH on Unichain to cover transactions.
A balance on a source chain Across supports. Across covers Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Linea, zkSync, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, and the rest of the production network. Whatever EVM (or Solana) chain holds your funds, Across can move them to Unichain in one transaction.
How to bridge to Unichain in three steps
Open the Across dapp and connect your wallet. The dapp will detect the chain your wallet is currently on.
Set Unichain as the destination chain, pick the asset (ETH, USDC, or another supported token), and enter the amount. Across will return a quote with the destination amount you'll receive, the fee, and the estimated fill time. For transfers under $10,000 on L2s, that fill time is typically around two seconds.
Approve the input token if it's your first time bridging that token (a one-time approval), then confirm the bridge transaction. The relayer network competes to fill your intent. Whichever relayer wins delivers the asset to your wallet on Unichain from their own balance sheet, and the protocol repays them after the bundle settles through UMA's Optimistic Oracle.
That's it. You're holding canonical ETH or canonical USDC on Unichain, not a wrapped representation of either. Your wallet, your tokens, no bridge contract sitting between you and the asset.
Why intents-based bridging fits Unichain's speed profile
Unichain shipped one-second blocks for a reason: DeFi rewards latency. A swap that lands at the front of the next block sees a different price than the same swap that lands a block later. A liquidation that fires the moment a position crosses the threshold protects more collateral than one that fires three seconds later. The whole point of building a chain with one-second blocks and 250ms-block-time aspirations is that the application layer can actually use that speed.
A bridge that takes minutes to settle is the wrong bridge for that chain. Across's intent architecture pushes the wait off the user: the relayer is the party absorbing finality risk and waiting on the optimistic settlement window. The user gets canonical assets on Unichain in roughly two seconds and can start trading, providing liquidity, or borrowing immediately. The verification step happens in the background; the user already has their money.
This is the load-bearing claim of the architecture. There's no honeypot of locked liquidity on Unichain to drain, no wrapped token waiting to be over-minted, no validator set whose signatures the user has to trust. The relayer takes the risk in exchange for the fee. Across has processed over $35 billion in crosschain volume for more than 2.5 million users with zero protocol-level security exploits since launch.
What you can do once your assets are on Unichain
The ecosystem on Unichain skews to the DeFi audience the chain was built for.
Uniswap v4 is the headline application: concentrated liquidity AMMs with the hooks framework that lets pool creators customize behavior at the protocol level. If you're an LP, the v4 + hooks design is the most expressive AMM environment shipped to date.
Lending and money markets are the next tier, with Unichain-native lenders coming online to take advantage of the chain's gas profile alongside ports of established protocols.
For traders, the latency advantage compounds. Perpetuals, options, and structured products all benefit from faster blocks, and the chain's gas costs make strategies that would be uneconomical on Ethereum L1 (frequent rebalancing, granular hedging) actually viable.
Costs, finality, and what you should know before bridging
Across charges a relayer fee and an LP fee, both visible on the quote screen before you sign. For small transfers (under $10K), total fees on Unichain bridging are typically a fraction of a dollar plus the source-chain gas cost. Source-chain gas dominates: bridging from Ethereum L1 costs whatever L1 gas costs that minute; bridging from another L2 is usually pennies.
Finality on Unichain is bounded by Ethereum L1 settlement at the protocol level (OP Stack fault proof window), but Across delivers canonical assets to your wallet long before Ethereum-level finality. For withdrawing later, swapping, or providing liquidity, your assets are usable the moment they arrive.
If you want to bridge back from Unichain to another chain, the same Across flow works in reverse. Open the dapp, set Unichain as the origin, pick your destination, and confirm.
Move funds into Unichain and start using the chain Uniswap built for DeFi
Unichain is what Uniswap Labs built when they decided general-purpose L2s weren't tuned right for liquidity. Across is what gets you onto it without giving up speed, custody, or asset canonicality at the door.