Uniswap Labs Blog

Multichain Uniswap
January 20, 2022

We believe users should access Web3 on chains with properties that are important to them. That’s why we’re excited the Uniswap community voted to deploy v3 on Polygon – just as the community suggested Arbitrum earlier last year. The Polygon deployment is the 4th chain for v3 after Mainnet, Optimism, and Arbitrum and has given users access to even faster transactions, even lower gas fees, and more applications. As the community considers deploying to additional networks, we want to share some lessons learned and thoughts on cross-chain deployments.

We believe that community members should be able to more easily signal support for, and approve, cross-chain Uniswap Protocol deployments. So today, we have publicly released the deployment script and documentation outlining how to deploy Uniswap Protocol v3 to other chains. (The Uniswap Labs team is available to answer technical questions in the governance forum and in our weekly Developer Office Hours soon) We’ve also proposed simplifications of the community governance process that can guide future cross-chain proposals from the community. And we’re exploring the UI to create proposals to make adding exemptions to the v3 license file easier. We welcome input and feedback on these suggested simplifications.

When evaluating a Uniswap v3 deployment, we encourage the community to pay close attention to the security and trust assumptions of the bridge being used to relay governance to that chain. Uniswap Governance contracts live on L1 Ethereum, so when the Protocol is deployed to a new network, UNI holders need a bridge contract to govern the Protocol on that network. Few networks offer general trust-minimized bridges that support arbitrary message passing. Without those bridges, the Uniswap community would rely on either trusted bridges or multi-sigs to handle governance updates, which could affect the Protocol’s existing security guarantees.

We expect cross-chain experiences to play a large part in growth and user experience improvement this year. As the multi-chain world continues to develop, more bridges will be developed or updated to support bridging governance actions from Ethereum Mainnet. We’re excited to see where the community takes the Protocol next.

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