After multiple migrations within the Ethereum ecosystem, on the evening of April 17, Worldcoin, an encryption project co-founded by Sam Altman, announced that it would launch its own Layer 2 network: World Chain, which means that Worldcoin can finally be expanded in a A place to find your home.

So, why did Worldcoin choose to build its own blockchain and enter the slightly crowded L2 track?

The Difficult Road to Scaling the Worldcoin Blockchain

The Worldcoin protocol has always hoped to become the world’s largest financial network and identity network and the most inclusive project, but if it is easy for everyone in the world to join, this means that its system needs to be able to support the experience of 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 to implement a higher-performance sequencer. Hubble’s original hybrid zk/optimistic design adopted BLS signature aggregation, custom compressed transaction formats, and fraud proofs, and successfully supported the Worldcoin protocol development Early app World App, which scaled to approximately 700,000 users in Alpha stage.

However, Hubble’s design proved to be limited in terms of user and developer experience, as Hubble only allowed simple transfers and required protocol upgrades to add new transaction types, but at this time Worldcoin user needs went beyond simply holding or Sending WLD tokens, World App began by deploying secure accounts for users, providing users with swaps and access to other tokens, and allowing gas-free meta transactions, so Worldcoin core contributors decided to migrate to the Polygon PoS network, which at the time was Ethereum The only high-performance and low-cost network in the ecosystem.

Time is moving forward. In July 2023, shortly before Worldcoin released the beta version, Worldcoin believed that Ethereum Rollup was mature enough and migrated to the OP main network. At that time, Worldcoin users had grown to about 2 million, but as the project started, Worldcoin Issuing the entire L2 ecosystem soon seems to be still in the early stages for the Worldcoin project, with many areas in the infrastructure stack still needing improvement, such as the OP mainnet itself, relay infrastructure, RPC providers, etc.

The migration to L2 has also exposed many inefficient on-chain activity issues, and in addition, the recent L2 overall activity solicitation has caused the L1 Gas price to increase by more than 20 times over a sustained period. Fortunately, Ethereum’s “Dencun” upgrade EIP-4844 has been released in February 2024. After that, Worldcoin users no longer worry about Gas price issues. However, EIP-4844 does not solve the long-term scalability problem of Ethereum. Mainnet Still need to go through a series of long-term improvements such as Danksharding.

Above: Percentage of all Gas used by Worldcoin on the OP mainnet over the past 30 days

At this stage, Worldcoin user transactions have accounted for 44% of OP mainnet activities every month. During the peak period, this value will increase by more than 80%, and sometimes even exceed the limit. Given the size and growth rate of the community, it was time for Worldcoin to move to a private network – and World Chain was born.

World Chain: Expanding Worldcoin and L2

At this stage, in order to meet the on-chain needs of Worldcoin, both L1 and L2 need to spend several years making significant improvements. For the Worldcoin Foundation, L2 can become a place for experimentation and innovation. On the other hand, it can bring everyone in the world together. On-chain is a very arduous task and beyond the capabilities of any single entity, so Worldcoin chose to become part of the Superchain together with Optimism, Coinbase, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem to launch a dedicated L2 network : World Chain.

World Chain is a new blockchain designed specifically for humans and is open to everyone. Compared to robots, verified humans will have priority in obtaining block space and gas subsidies for temporary transactions. Everyone can submit transactions to the World Chain , but transactions created by humans will be prioritized for faster confirmation times. Developers can reach millions of real users around the world by developing applications on World Chain.

In addition, World Chain will be deeply integrated with the Worldcoin protocol and use World ID’s personality proof to achieve permission-free and open source goals. The blockchain will eventually be independently managed by the community. According to Worldcoin, the World Chain developer preview version will be launched soon, and it is expected to be fully launched later this summer.

It is worth mentioning that World Chain will not try to cover all possible blockchain use cases. Through World ID’s anti-Sybil attack capabilities, its goal is to build a decentralized financial and identity application focused on daily life practicality. The ecosystem is built around Worldcoin, stablecoins, payments, rewards, lending, exchange, etc.

Above: World Chain users can choose to use World ID to anonymously verify that their address is a real person, and then receive priority block space and Gas quota

Worldchain is an OP Stack chain that will focus on scale. The short-term goal is to significantly increase the Gas limit of the L2 blockchain - but it should be noted that this goal has certain risks and cannot be carried out blindly, so Worldcoin decided to use more Do it in a safe manner while meeting application needs by studying worst-case performance scenarios.

According to Worldcoin, in addition to improvements to the execution layer, Worldchain will explore alternative data available (DA) layers, including a DA layer similar to Plasma. Although EIP-4844 alleviates the current Ethereum throughput bottleneck problem, the data availability layer problem may soon reappear. If the scale of Worldcoin users continues to expand in the future, World Chain may be required to switch to an alternative DA layer at some point. To achieve further growth without burdening users with high fees.

How do World Chain and Super Chain achieve a win-win situation?

Choosing OP Stack is actually a “shortcut” to Worldcoin.

By using OP Stack to build shared standard blockchain software, Worldcoin will gain the advantages of scalability and low fees. At the same time, the Optimism ecosystem will also be able to get a share of the on-chain revenue generated by World Chain, which will in turn be used for funding. Open source development and other improvements to the network benefit both builders and users, and this economic model allows Superchain to achieve self-sustaining network value.

By joining Superchain, World Chain will be able to interact with other blockchains such as Base, Mode, OP Mainnet and Zora. Developers who support Worldcoin can also continue to contribute directly to the Ethereum network and interact with the Superchain ecosystem. Cooperate on shared infrastructure. In addition, following the early OP Chains, World Chain also plans to actively participate in the governance of Optimism.

In general, the core of Worldcoin’s vision is to promote people all over the world to get on the chain, and the digital identity ecosystem based on World ID will continue to expand, so that more and more people can contribute to various aspects such as governance, DeFi, social media, games, etc. The goal of World Chain is actually very simple, which is to create a scalable and inclusive blockchain future, unlock on-chain identities and build a fairer digital economy for everyone.

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