Why Worldcoin Built an Ethereum Network Specifically for Humans

Worldcoin, newly rebranded World—the crypto-fueled, eyeball-scanning identity platform co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—launched the mainnet for its own Ethereum layer-2 network called World Chain on Thursday.

World Chain is rolling out with the goal of bringing millions of verifiable human users onto the blockchain, in addition to promoting the development of digital identity tools and applications that promote financial freedom, its core team told Decrypt.

Many blockchains are dominated by bots, World advisor Liam Horne told Decrypt. But World Chain hopes to serve the kinds of users who the project believes stand to benefit most from blockchain technology: human beings. 

“On a lot of chains, there's more algorithmic trading bots that are kind of moving money around on chains than [there are] people,” Horne said. “World Chain is about expanding out the set of use cases for [humans], and also building a blockchain in a kind of a way that is more designed for them.”

World Chain is part of Optimism's Superchain, a network of interoperable layer-2s that share security and other infrastructure. As such, it is interoperable with more than two dozen chains, such as Base and Blast, which should help it bring in users from all across the crypto ecosystem, Horne said. It’s also faster and cheaper than Ethereum’s mainnet, with gas subsidies also available for verified human users.

By using Optimism's open-source development framework, the OP Stack, World Chain also aims to attract a wide range of developers, encouraging the building of decentralized apps with real-world use cases on its network. This development will help attract even more humans onto the blockchain‌, Optimism Unlimited Chief Growth Officer Ryan Wyatt told Decrypt. 

“What the Worldcoin team does, what the Base team does, what the Uniswap team does, they are all contributing to and advancing OP Stack,” Wyatt said. “So it's the engineering efforts of the best protocol engineers in the entire industry, across these many teams, that are pushing development and advancing—which benefits World Chain.”

Worldcoin, founded in 2019, made waves when it launched its Orb, a futuristic-looking device that scans users' irises and ties them to a virtual key on the blockchain. Humans who got scanned were eligible for an allotment of Worldcoin, subject to regional restrictions.

World Chain will natively integrate World ID, granting users that are verified through the system access to prioritized blockspace. It will also host a global network of on and off-ramps in more than 150 countries, in addition to several stablecoin markets.

Services that can be used by people who are shut out of the traditional financial system are exactly what will help drive the chain's adoption, Horne told Decrypt. 

“It's places that genuinely need access to stablecoins for financial access, for moving money across borders, for just getting a hedge against inflation of the local currency... that will use Worldcoin,” Horne said. “Those are people that need crypto.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward