Earlier, we introduced Uniswap, the leading Dex, which announced the launch of Unichain, a Layer 2 designed for DeFi, using Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology to build Rollup-Boost, providing faster and more decentralized trading scenarios for DeFi. The technical features of Unichain will largely internalize the Ethereum MEV problem within the application. In addition, the consensus mechanism of Unichain is PoS, which means that it will bring great empowerment to Uni token holders. The founder of DeFi Report pointed out that Uni holders will receive over $468 million in revenue per year.
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ToggleMichael Nadeau：Unichain brings $468 million in revenue per year for Uni holders
The report indicates that Uniswap originally earned $500 million per year on the Ethereum mainnet, and now a large portion of these fees may be collected by validators who stake Uni tokens.
Michael Nadeau, the founder of DeFi Report, stated in a post that last year Uniswap generated nearly $1.3 billion in trading and settlement fees across 5 blockchains. However, the protocol and token holders have not captured any of this value, which is why the Uni token has been dubbed a "air token". These fees have been 100% directed towards liquidity providers, Ethereum validators, MEV bots, and L2 sequencers, but this is about to change with the launch of Unichain.
Michael Nadeau divided the revenue into three parts:
1. Settlement fees: Uniswap Labs and UNI token holders will capture settlement fees when Unichain is launched, compared to the $368 million Uniswap currently pays to Ethereum validators annually.
2. MEV revenue: Uniswap will be able to capture MEV revenue, which is estimated to be around 10% of Uniswap's total paid fees (or $100 million last year). This is because Unichain has all the validators on the network, rather than allowing Ethereum validators to extract MEV.
3. Liquidity providers: Liquidity providers will continue to receive 100% of trading fees, and when Unichain launches, they will also be able to participate in settlement and MEV.
Further evidence of Ethereum inflation speculation, who does Unichain create revenue for?
So who are the beneficiaries of this transformation? And who will lose out? Michael Nadeau says Uniswap, Uni holders, liquidity providers, and Optimism are all beneficiaries.
Uniswap Labs' revenue model is to capture network settlement fees and MEV, while Uni token holders will participate in settlement fees and MEV through staking. Uniswap liquidity providers will participate in settlement and capture MEV revenue through staking. Of course, as the provider of the OP Stack technology architecture, Optimism will also receive a portion of the settlement and MEV fees from Unichain.
Where there are winners, there are also losers. Who will lose out? Michael Nadeau points out that Ethereum validators will lose the $368 million in settlement fees from Uniswap. ETH token holders will also see a reduction in ETH settlement fees and gas fee burn, which corroborates our previous view. Finally, other Layer 2 chains, including Arbitrum, Base, will lose the settlement fees and MEV fee revenue from Unichain.
