Why Worldcoin Built an Ethereum Network Specifically for Humans

Worldcoin, newly rebranded World—the crypto-fueled, eyeball-scanning id platform co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—launched the mainnet for its personal Ethereum layer-2 community known as World Chain on Thursday.

World Chain is rolling out with the purpose of bringing hundreds of thousands of verifiable human customers onto the blockchain, along with selling the event of digital id instruments and purposes that promote monetary freedom, its core workforce informed Decrypt.

Many blockchains are dominated by bots, World advisor Liam Horne informed Decrypt. However World Chain hopes to serve the sorts of customers who the challenge believes stand to profit most from blockchain expertise: human beings. 

“On lots of chains, there’s extra algorithmic buying and selling bots which are type of transferring cash round on chains than [there are] individuals,” Horne mentioned. “World Chain is about increasing out the set of use instances for [humans], and likewise constructing a blockchain in a type of a approach that’s extra designed for them.”

World Chain is a part of Optimism’s Superchain, a community of interoperable layer-2s that share safety and different infrastructure. As such, it’s interoperable with greater than two dozen chains, similar to Base and Blast, which ought to assist it usher in customers from all throughout the crypto ecosystem, Horne mentioned. It’s additionally sooner and cheaper than Ethereum’s mainnet, with fuel subsidies additionally obtainable for verified human customers.

By utilizing Optimism’s open-source growth framework, the OP Stack, World Chain additionally goals to draw a variety of builders, encouraging the constructing of decentralized apps with real-world use instances on its community. This growth will assist entice much more people onto the blockchain‌, Optimism Limitless Chief Development Officer Ryan Wyatt informed Decrypt. 

“What the Worldcoin workforce does, what the Base workforce does, what the Uniswap workforce does, they’re all contributing to and advancing OP Stack,” Wyatt mentioned. “So it is the engineering efforts of one of the best protocol engineers in your entire trade, throughout these many groups, which are pushing growth and advancing—which advantages World Chain.”

Worldcoin, based in 2019, made waves when it launched its Orb, a futuristic-looking system that scans customers’ irises and ties them to a digital key on the blockchain. People who acquired scanned had been eligible for an allotment of Worldcoin, topic to regional restrictions.

World Chain will natively combine World ID, granting customers which are verified via the system entry to prioritized blockspace. It’s going to additionally host a world community of on and off-ramps in additional than 150 nations, along with a number of stablecoin markets.

Providers that can be utilized by people who find themselves shut out of the normal monetary system are precisely what is going to assist drive the chain’s adoption, Horne informed Decrypt. 

“It is locations that genuinely want entry to stablecoins for monetary entry, for transferring cash throughout borders, for simply getting a hedge towards inflation of the native foreign money… that may use Worldcoin,” Horne mentioned. “These are folks that want crypto.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward