XDAI
Over the last few weeks, we heard many Unlock users who are complaining about very high gas prices on the Ethereum mainnet. Many of them have asked for xDAI support!
It is no secret that DeFi has trusted the Ethereum main chain's blocks. Over the last few months, it became clear that purchasing memberships would often not be economically viable, with gas fees costing up to $10 per transaction.
This leads us down the path of exploring our options. We are still profoundly convinced that the Ethereum ecosystem is the right place to build Unlock. Its developer community, the multitude of tools, its track record, and, most notably, the culture that it embodies are all assets that no other "layer 1" has been able to match.
We then decided to explore "layer 2" and found many options that Unlock will leverage shortly.
The first one is xDAI. xDAI is a blockchain that leverages Proof-of-Stake (much more eco-friendly!), uses a stable coin as its "core" currency, and has low gas fees (it costs about costs about $0.000203 to purchase a membership!) Today, we're very excited to see you deploy locks using our front-end and add these locks to your blogs and websites! Just make sure to point your wallet like MetaMask to the xDAI network, and transfer some of your DAI from the main Ethereum network. Everything else works out-of-the-box!
Over the next few weeks, we will also add xUDT, the xDAI equivalent of our Unlock Tokens, and add support for credit cards and more! If you have deployed a lock on xDAI, please message us on Telegram for a surprise!
Finally, we will also start exploring deploying Unlock on other chains such as Polygon or BSC as prompted by some of our early adopters, and explore Optimism and Arbitrum, to make sure that Unlock can grow and scale with the tens of thousands new NFT fans :)