The launch of Unichain, Uniswap’s long-awaited layer-2 network, has seen the price of the decentralized exchange’s governance token UNI rise by around 4.5% to around $9.7 and led to a significant increase in social activity and sentiment.

UNI’s price benefitted from the launch of Unichain but failed to break through the $10 mark. It still outperformed bitcoin (BTC) in the short period since the launch of the layer-2 network, as the cryptocurrency is down around 0.3% in the past 24 hours.

Sentiment surrounding the token has remained positive since the launch, with the number of posts on X rising by roughly 30% to over 1,400 with roughly 41% of those being positive and 48% having a neutral tone, data from TheTie shows.

The rise is notable as social media posts surrounding the token were rising in the lead-up to Unichain’s launch. A Unichain block explorer shows the network already has 15,000 active wallets and has processed nearly 100,000 transactions hours into its first day.

One notable post came from Hayden Adams, CEO of Uniswap Labs, who pointed to a promising future in which the protocol will launch “many new improvements to accelerate blockchain scaling.”

These include reducing block times, allowing most maximal extractable value (MEV) to be returned to users, an additional layer of economic security, and seamless interoperability for Unichain.

“In other words, relentless shipping will continue until Ethereum scales and DeFi is bigger than tradfi+cefi combined. In just four months of testnet the network processed ~100M transactions. Now it’s live with 80+ projects already building on top (plus Uniswap + v2, v3, and v4 deployments already live),” Adams said on X.