Uniswap’s native token, UNI, ignored a stagnant crypto market and surged by more than 12% on Thursday as the decentralized exchange (DEX) project announced a new Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 project.

Uniswap Labs says the new project, called “Unichain,” aims to facilitate decentralized finance (DeFi) and liquidity across chains.

“Unichain is designed to leverage and accelerate Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, moving execution to an L2. In practice, this means Unichain will lower transaction costs by ~95% compared to Ethereum L1 in the short term, and even more over time.

Unichain will soon introduce a decentralized validation network that allows nodes to verify blocks. This adds an additional layer of finality and reduces the risk of conflicting or invalid blocks.”

Hayden Adams, the chief executive of Uniswap Labs, says the new layer-2 is a result of “six years of designing and building in the DeFi space.”

“Unichain is built on top of the Superchain – with a few new additions that we’re bringing to the table:

A fast, provable block builder that will make transactions feel ~instant, reduce MEV loss, and enforce fair transaction ordering.

A decentralized network of validators that add an additional layer of finality and economic security on top of the sequencer

A focus on user experience and crosschain interop – as part of joining the Superchain, and also through our work on ERC7683 – we will be building out crosschain user experiences that are even better than the experience of swapping within a single chain today.”

UNI is trading at $8.12 at time of writing, up from $7.15 a day ago. The 20th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is also up more than 23% in the past week.