In 2019 Uniswap put a unicorn up against a pig on the first smart contract anyone had ever deployed to an optimistic rollup. The unicorn is on everything now. The pig has been sitting in an archived repo ever since.
A joke exchange doing the most serious demo at the conference.
Devcon 5, Osaka, October 2019. Uniswap teamed up with a research group called Plasma Group and shipped unipig.exchange. A fork of Uniswap trading exactly two tokens, $UNI and $PIGI, a unicorn against a pig. No gas. Instant confirmations. You opened it on your phone and started swapping.
It was the first smart contract ever deployed on an optimistic rollup. Not one of the first. The first. Before that week rollups were a paper and an argument. This was the week the argument ran in front of a crowd.
It held around 250 transactions per second across the conference and settled roughly 2,500 trades, mostly people messing about in the hallways between talks.
The code is still there, under Uniswap's own GitHub org. The repo description is two emoji and nothing else. Archived for years, never deleted, and unipig.plasma.group still returns a page today.
Uniswap started the fight. Then their founder switched sides.
It wasn't pitched as a tech demo. It was pitched as a fight. Pick a team, claim your airdrop, push your side up the scoreboard. What happened next got posted in public by the people who built it, so none of this needs embellishing.
The official account launches unipig.exchange, calls it a scalable instant demo running on Plasma Group's optimistic rollup, and tells everyone to pick a side.
both teams openHayden Adams posts his airdrop code, backs the unicorn, and says he's dumping every PIGI he owns. He tells everyone else to do the same.
team uniThree weeks on, having admitted he lost track of it while running a demo, he flips to the pig and starts signing off as team pigi.
team pigiSomeone asks where the name came from. He explains it plainly: the pig is Plasma Group's mascot. That collaboration is the only reason any of it exists.
on the recordEveryone in that room went on to matter. The pig didn't come with them.
In January 2020 Plasma Group raised $3.5m from Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures, wound down the research org, gave what was left to Ethereum public goods, and became Optimism.
Uniswap became Uniswap. The unicorn ended up on hoodies, badges, the front of an entire category of software.
unipig got archived. The last commit before Devcon is titled "down to the wire!". Nobody went back for it.
Which leaves something odd sitting there. Two separate ecosystems can claim it. It's early Uniswap history and it's the birth of the rollup era, and in seven years neither of them came back for it.
You don't have to take our word for any of it. It's all on their timelines.
Calls Unipig the first ever rollup proof of concept, built with the Uniswap team at Devcon V, and says it led straight into the seed round that created Optimism.
Dusts off the history books during the L2 boom and revisits Unipig as the first ever demo of the Uniswap exchange on an optimistic rollup.
Uniswap's founder: the goal of Unipig was to popularise optimistic rollups by putting their brand behind it and showing the UX. "Feels like it was a success."
The original declaration. Team UNI or team PIGI, battle for price dominance, on a scalable instant demo powered by Plasma Group's optimistic rollup.
Posts his airdrop QR for team UNI and tells everyone he's dumping all his PIGI, and that they should do the same.
Explains the name plainly: it was built with Plasma Group, whose mascot is a pig.
Reports Uniswap's L2 launch on Optimism arriving almost two years after the Unipig exchange demo. The press drawing the same line.
🦄🦄🦄. Uniswap teasing its move to Optimism, the rollup Unipig debuted, on the way to becoming one of the biggest protocols in crypto.
The pig made a call in 2019. That call now runs underneath a brokerage.
Every part of it shipped. The tech unipig debuted is boring now, the kind of thing billions move across without anyone thinking about it. The mascot that carried the argument is still where Uniswap left it.
The joke won. Nobody told the pig.
Every memecoin says it has lore. This one has commits, timestamps and two of the biggest names in ethereum standing in the middle of it.
The unicorn is Uniswap. The pig is Plasma Group, who became Optimism a few months later. Unipig is the only character that's ever stood opposite the unicorn, and it carries both houses.
The first smart contract ever deployed on an optimistic rollup. There's only one of those and it already happened. You can't mint a second one.
Robinhood Chain is an optimistic rollup. The thing Unipig proved in a conference hall now sits under a brokerage. Seven years, and the call landed.
Still sitting in Uniswap's own github, archived and untouched. Nobody made this up. Go read the commits yourself.
Nobody rebuilt this in seven years. We did. The exchange is up and playable, right there on this page, not a promise for later.
Two ecosystems, seven years, and neither of them ever came back. It was just sitting there the whole time.
$UNIPIG is a memecoin on the pools.trade launchpad, running on Robinhood Chain. Robinhood Chain is an optimistic rollup. That's the joke.
Everything here traces back to a repo, a commit or a public post. It doesn't need dressing up, so we don't dress it up.
PIGI lost in public, on the founder's own instruction. He came back to it anyway. So did we.
A timestamp isn't custody. Twenty-one people minted the name and none of them looked after it.
Museum, not pitch. We look after something Uniswap archived and forgot about. That's the job.
The 2019 demo, rebuilt and playable. Real market maths, real slippage, a real scoreboard, all of it running in your browser.
open the exchange →Two tokens, one pool. Pick a side and push the price. The maths are real, the market isn't.