Worldcoin announces the launch of its shared blockchain, World Chain, a blockchain-based financial protocol, on April 17th. World Chain is designed to be open to everyone and verified users will have priority access to block space and gas subsidies for daily transactions. The purpose of World Chain is to allow developers to create applications with practical use cases in everyday life. To ensure user authenticity, World Chain will integrate with the Worldcoin protocol and use World ID for identity verification.
Worldcoin, led by Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, aims to achieve global distribution of cryptocurrencies, making it accessible to everyone. Worldcoin believes that although mainstream digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have gained popularity in the blockchain industry, there are still many regions and populations that have not benefited from this innovation. The Worldcoin project aims to promote global financial inclusion through blockchain technology. Worldcoin has developed a biometric identification device called Orb, which uses iris scanning for user verification to ensure uniqueness and privacy.
Worldcoin has received investments from industry leaders such as Coinbase Ventures, a16z, Multicoin Capital, DCG, and Variant Fund, indicating high market attention. The project envisions building the world’s largest fair digital identity and cryptocurrency system, which is a macro narrative in the crypto market. However, Worldcoin also faces challenges in adapting to various market environments and regulatory requirements, overcoming infrastructure limitations in underdeveloped areas, addressing privacy and security concerns with iris verification, and dealing with resistance to data collection in sovereign countries.
As of April 17, 2024, Worldcoin has attracted widespread attention and usage, with over 10 million people from 160 countries/regions creating World IDs and compatible wallets, executing 75 million transactions, and 5,090,928 people verifying their World IDs using Orb. Worldcoin’s high transaction volume on the OP mainnet, reaching up to 80% during peak periods, has prompted the need for its own dedicated network, World Chain.
World Chain is built on Optimism’s OP Stack, an Ethereum Layer2 scaling solution, to meet the high capacity and low-cost requirements of Worldcoin and enable low-cost transactions for wider adoption. World Chain offers scalability and customization options, allowing developers to create their own dApps to interact with real users on the network. This opens up possibilities for various DeFi scenarios and the introduction of real-world assets with verified identities.
In conclusion, World Chain aims to attract a wide range of users through Worldcoin as an application layer use case and capture their value through the underlying infrastructure network. The open nature of World Chain also attracts developers to create DeFi scenarios based on real user use cases. However, the use of iris collection for identity verification may face legal constraints in some countries, and further legal and technical advancements are needed. World Chain is set to launch in the summer of this year.