Leaked developer access to Unichain quickly led to memecoins. Now devs have shut off access and users are stranded
2024-11-12

The team behind Unichain disabled the Uniswap Layer 2's public remote procedure call (RPC) after early developer access details "circulated publicly," allowing some savvy users to jump the proverbial gun and start using the L2 before the developers intended.
"Some details for early developer access to Unichain mainnet have circulated publicly, but Unichain mainnet is not live — and the canonical bridge has not been finalized," the official Unichain account posted on X. "Since it is not ready for public use, the RPC for this developer access period has been disabled," it continued, before mentioning that "details for the public RPC will be posted on this account and unichain.org when it is ready."
The Unichain X account stated that "until then, users who bridged can still withdraw to Ethereum Mainnet." However, most aren't sure that is even possible — as you cannot submit transactions to a chain without an RPC. "Errr, so how exactly do you expect us to bridge with an offline RPC," one user asked in a reply. "*disables RPC, making it impossible to add network to Metamask ... it's cool bros, just withdraw," another X user, @Punk_2070, sarcastically stated.
Taking Unichain offline
Unichain was introduced by Uniswap Labs on Oct. 10 and is purported to have 250ms block times, cross-chain interoperability, and a decentralized validator network. Many have subjectively interpreted this to be an attempt to gain market share in the memecoin trading space, which Solana currently dominates.
The project is now being criticized for the messaging surrounding the taking of its public RPC offline — an uncommon response in a sector where frontrunning new chains is commonplace.
"Literally every chain gets frontrun today, sometimes by weeks," Gas.zip founder Tom Kyser told The Block, mentioning Scroll, Gravity, ApeChain, Morph and Shape as recent examples. "'Nobody' has ever turned the RPC off. Some even embraced it. Most just ignored it. But bridges are super aggressive in searching online for when these RPCs go live, so it's really hard to "launch" a mainnet and not get found today."
Regarding whether or not bridging funds away from Unichain with an offline RPC is even possible, Kyser noted that the developers might be able to whitelist only a canonical withdrawal transaction. The Block reached out to Uniswap Labs for clarification.
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