Optimism to run Unichain operations starting Oct. 29

Unichain, the Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Uniswap Labs, will transfer production sequencing, public node access, monitoring and incident response to Optimism. The testnet migration is scheduled for Oct. 13, followed by the mainnet migration on Oct. 29.

The arrangement, announced Oct. 9, expands Unichain’s existing OP Enterprise relationship with Optimism. The relationship previously included the Mission Critical support package. The new agreement gives Optimism responsibility for day-to-day production infrastructure.

Uniswap Labs says the migration will preserve Unichain’s chain ID, contracts, balances, applications and Uniswap v2, v3 and v4 deployments. Unichain will remain a Stage 1 rollup with permissionless fault proofs and its existing contract-upgrade governance.

Optimism’s fully managed service can include operation of the sequencer, batcher, proposer and other chain infrastructure, along with security patching. The sequencer orders transactions, the batcher submits transaction data to Ethereum and the proposer submits claims about the chain’s state.

The arrangement follows similar plans for other OP Stack networks. Soneium’s Sept. 30 agreement assigns the Optimism Foundation and OP Labs responsibility for deployment, sequencer operations, node infrastructure, upgrades, monitoring and incident response. Soneium will continue to manage its network roadmap and engineering work, including its tokenized intellectual property products. The agreement does not specify a cutover date.

Ink’s June plan assigned Optimism responsibility for its mainnet and testnet sequencers, RPC services, explorer, monitoring and incident response. The Ink Foundation was to focus on ecosystem development. An Optimism guide published in September describes Ink’s infrastructure as operated by the Foundation through OP Labs.

Soneium’s agreement includes a 99.9% monthly uptime target and round-the-clock on-call support. Optimism’s Mission Critical package lists a 99.95% uptime service-level agreement, a 15-minute initial response target for the most serious incidents and status updates every 30 minutes. These figures are service commitments, not measured uptime results.

The announcements establish Optimism as an operator for multiple branded networks. They do not disclose whether the chains share cloud regions, signing keys or other infrastructure.

Ethereum provides a fallback when a sequencer is unavailable or censors transactions. A user can submit a deposit transaction to a chain’s portal contract on Ethereum. After the sequencing window expires, network nodes can derive blocks containing those transactions without regular sequencer batches. A forced transaction can begin a withdrawal, but funds become available on Ethereum only after additional state proposals, proofs and other withdrawal conditions are completed.

Unichain and Ink allow permissionless state-root proposals, giving other funded participants a way to submit accepted roots if the regular proposer fails. Soneium uses whitelisted proposers and currently has no functional onchain dispute process. If those proposers become unavailable, withdrawals can stop even when forced transactions remain available.

Unichain, Ink and Soneium each retain a seven-day proof-maturity period in their withdrawal processes. Current arrangements also give the Foundation and Security Council joint approval powers over upgrades, with no guaranteed delay for regular upgrades. The Unichain migration changes its production operator without changing its stated upgrade authorities or withdrawal conditions.