“Worldcoin” has found its own home! Why enter the crowded L2 space?
After multiple migrations within the Ethereum ecosystem, on the evening of April 17th, Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project co-founded by Sam Altman, announced the launch of its own Layer 2 network: World Chain. This means that Worldcoin can finally find its own scalable place to reside.
So why did Worldcoin choose to independently build a blockchain and enter the somewhat crowded L2 race?
️ Related reading:
Ultraman is launching “World Chain”! Designed for all of humanity, fastest deployment by summer vacation, what’s the purpose behind it?
The road to scalability for the Worldcoin blockchain has not been easy…
The Worldcoin protocol has always aimed to become the largest global financial and identity network, as well as the most inclusive project. However, if every person in the world can easily join, it means that the system needs to have the capacity to support billions of users. From a technical perspective, currently no blockchain can meet the needs of the Worldcoin protocol.
At the end of 2020, the Worldcoin team discovered the Hubble project and began implementing a higher-performance sequencer. Hubble’s original hybrid zk/optimistic design, which incorporates BLS signature aggregation, custom compressed transaction formats, and fraud proofs, successfully supported the early applications developed on the Worldcoin protocol, such as the World App. The app expanded to approximately 700,000 users during its alpha phase.
However, Hubble’s design proved to be limiting in terms of user and developer experience, as it only allowed for simple transfers and required protocol upgrades to add new transaction types. But at this point, the needs of Worldcoin users were no longer just simple holding or sending of WLD tokens. The World App began deploying secure accounts for users, providing access to other tokens, and allowing for gasless meta-transactions. Therefore, the core contributors of Worldcoin decided to migrate to the Polygon PoS network, which at the time was the only high-performance and low-cost network in the Ethereum ecosystem.
As time went on, in July 2023, just before the release of the Worldcoin test version, Worldcoin believed that Ethereum Rollup was mature enough and migrated to the OP mainnet. At that time, the number of Worldcoin users had grown to approximately 2 million. However, with the launch of the project, it quickly became apparent that the entire L2 ecosystem for Worldcoin was still in its early stages, and many areas of the infrastructure stack needed improvement, such as the OP mainnet itself, relay infrastructure, and RPC providers.
The migration to L2 also exposed many issues with activities on inefficient chains. In addition, the recent overall L2 activity recruitment led to a more than 20-fold increase in L1 gas prices for a period of time.
Fortunately, Ethereum’s “Dencun” upgrade, EIP-4844, was released in February 2024, alleviating the gas price concerns for Worldcoin users. However, EIP-4844 did not solve Ethereum’s long-term scalability issues, and the mainnet still needed to undergo a series of long-term improvements such as Danksharding.
Currently, Worldcoin user transactions account for 44% of OP mainnet activity on a monthly basis, and during peak periods, this value can rise to over 80% and sometimes even exceed the limit. Considering the size and growth rate of the community, it is time for Worldcoin to turn towards a dedicated network – World Chain.
World Chain: Expanding Worldcoin and L2
At this stage, meeting the on-chain demands of Worldcoin would take several years of significant improvements for both L1 and L2. For the Worldcoin Foundation, L2 can serve as a place for experimentation and innovation. On the other hand, onboarding every person in the world onto the chain is a very challenging task and goes beyond the capacity of any single entity. Therefore, Worldcoin chose to become part of the “Superchain,” along with Optimism, Coinbase, and the wider Ethereum ecosystem, to launch a dedicated L2 network: World Chain.
World Chain is a new blockchain designed for humanity, open to everyone. Compared to robots, verified humans will have priority access to block space and gas subsidies for temporary transactions. Everyone can submit transactions to World Chain, but transactions created by humans will be prioritized for faster confirmation times. Developers can develop applications on World Chain and reach millions of real users around the world.
Furthermore, World Chain will integrate deeply with the Worldcoin protocol and utilize World ID for decentralized identity verification, aiming for permissionless and open-source goals. Ultimately, the blockchain will be independently managed by the community. According to Worldcoin, a developer preview of World Chain will be released soon, and it is expected to be fully launched later this summer.
It is worth mentioning that World Chain will not attempt to cover all possible blockchain use cases. With the anti-sybil attack capability of World ID, its goal is to create a decentralized financial and identity application ecosystem focused on everyday practicality, built around Worldcoin, stablecoins, payments, rewards, lending, and exchanges.
World Chain users can choose to verify their addresses as real humans using World ID in an anonymous manner, thereby gaining priority block space and gas quotas.
World Chain is an OP Stack chain that will focus on scalability. The immediate goal is to significantly increase the gas limit of the L2 blockchain. However, it is important to note that this goal carries certain risks and cannot be pursued blindly. Therefore, Worldcoin has decided to proceed in a more secure manner while also meeting application demands by studying the worst performance scenarios.
According to Worldcoin, in addition to improvements in the execution layer, World Chain will explore alternative data availability (DA) layers, including DA layers similar to Plasma. Although EIP-4844 alleviated the current bottleneck in Ethereum’s throughput, the issue of data availability layer may reoccur soon if the future Worldcoin user base continues to expand. At some point, World Chain may need to switch to an alternative DA layer to achieve further growth without burdening users with high costs.
How do World Chain and the Superchain achieve a win-win situation?
Choosing OP Stack is actually a “shortcut” for Worldcoin.
By building a shared standard blockchain software using OP Stack, Worldcoin will gain scalability and cost advantages. At the same time, the Optimism ecosystem can benefit from the income generated by World Chain and use it to fund open-source development and other network improvements, benefiting both builders and users. This economic model allows the Superchain to achieve self-sustainability of network value.
By joining the Superchain, World Chain will be able to interact with other blockchains such as Base, Mode, OP Mainnet, and Zora, and support developers of Worldcoin to continue contributing directly to the Ethereum network. It will also collaborate with the Superchain ecosystem on shared infrastructure. In addition, after the early OP Chains, World Chain plans to actively participate in the governance of Optimism.
In summary, the core vision of Worldcoin is to drive people worldwide onto the chain. Based on the expanding World ID digital identity ecosystem, more and more people will be able to contribute to governance, DeFi, social media, gaming, and other aspects. The goal of World Chain is to build a scalable and inclusive blockchain future, unlocking on-chain identities and creating a more fair digital economy for everyone.
This article is authorized for reprint from:
PANews
Proofread by: Gao Jingyuan
