Original author: Jordan
Source: PANews
After several migrations within the Ethereum ecosystem, on the evening of April 17, Worldcoin, a crypto project co-founded by Sam Altman, announced that it would launch its own Layer 2 network: World Chain, which means that Worldcoin can finally find its home in a place where it can scale.
So, why did Worldcoin choose to build its own blockchain and enter the slightly crowded L2 track?
The difficult road to scale on the Worldcoin blockchain
The Worldcoin Protocol has always wanted to be the world's largest financial and identity network and the most inclusive project, but if it is easy for everyone in the world to join, it means that its system needs to be able to support the volume of billions of users, and from a technical point of view, no blockchain can currently 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 with BLS signature aggregation, custom compressed transaction formats, and fraud proofs, and successfully supported the Worldcoin protocol's early application, the World App, which scaled to approximately 700,000 users in the alpha phase.
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 point Worldcoin users were no longer in need of simply holding or sending WLD tokens, and the World App began to do so by deploying secure accounts for users, Swapping and accessing other tokens as well as allowing gas-free meta-transactions were provided to users, so Worldcoin core contributors 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.
Fast forward in time, July 2023, Worldcoin Shortly before the beta release, Worldcoin thought that the Ethereum Rollup was mature enough and migrated to the OP mainnet, at that time Worldcoin users had grown to about 2 million, but with the launch of the project, Worldcoin soon issued the entire L2 ecosystem It seems that it is still in the early stages for the Worldcoin project, and many areas of the infrastructure stack still need improvement, such as the OP mainnet itself, relayer infrastructure, RPC providers, etc.
The migration to L2 has also exposed a number of inefficient on-chain activity issues, in addition to the recent L2 overall campaign solicitation that has led to a more than 20-fold increase in the price of L1 gas over a sustained period of time. Fortunately, Ethereum's "Dencun" upgrade EIP-4844 was released in February 2024, after which Worldcoin users no longer have to worry about the gas price problem, however, EIP-4844 does not solve Ethereum's long-term scalability problem, and the mainnet still needs to undergo a series of long-term improvements such as Danksharding.
Above: Worldcoin has used all the percentage of gas from the OP mainnet over the past 30 days
At this stage, Worldcoin user transactions already account for 44% of OP mainnet activity in the month, and this value rises by more than 80% during peak periods, sometimes even exceeding the limit. Considering the size and growth rate of the community, it was time for Worldcoin to move to a private network – and so did WorldChain.
WorldChain:扩展Worldcoin和L2
At this stage, to meet the on-chain needs of Worldcoin, L1 and L2 need to take years to make significant improvements, for the Worldcoin Foundation, L2 can be a place of experimentation and innovation, on the other hand, it is a very difficult thing to put everyone in the world on the chain, and it is beyond the capacity of any single entity, so Worldcoin chooses to cooperate with Optimism, Coinbase, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem to launch an exclusive L2 network: World Chain.
World Chain is a new type of blockchain designed specifically for humans, open to everyone, compared to bots, verified humans will have priority access to block space and gas subsidies for temporary transactions, everyone can submit transactions to World Chain, but human-created transactions 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 the goal of permissionless, open-source, and the blockchain will eventually be independently managed by the community. According to Worldcoin, the World Chain developer preview will be available soon, with full availability expected later this summer.
It is worth mentioning that World Chain does not attempt to cover all possible blockchain use cases, and through World ID's Sybil-resistant capabilities, its goal is to build an ecosystem of decentralized finance and identity applications that focuses on the practicality of everyday life, and is built around Worldcoin, stablecoins, payments, rewards, lending, exchanges, etc.
Above: World Chain users can choose to use their World ID to anonymously verify that their address is a real person, and in turn receive priority block space and gas allocation
Worldchain is an OP stack chain that will focus on scale, and the near-term goal is to significantly increase the gas limit of L2 blockchains - but it is important to note that this goal is risky and cannot be done blindly, so Worldcoin decided to do it in a more secure way, while studying the worst-case performance scenarios to meet the needs of the application.
According to Worldcoin, in addition to the improvements to the execution layer, Worldchain will explore alternative data-available (DA) layers, including a DA layer similar to Plasma. While EIP-4844 alleviates the current Ethereum throughput bottleneck, the data availability layer issue may soon recur, and if Worldcoin users continue to grow in the future, it may be necessary for World Chain to switch to an alternative DA layer at some point to enable further growth, while also not burdening users with high fees.
World Chain和超级链如何实现双赢？
Choosing OP Stack is actually a "shortcut" to Worldcoin.
By leveraging the OP Stack to build shared standard blockchain software, Worldcoin will gain scalability and low fees, while the Optimism ecosystem will be able to take a share of the on-chain revenue generated by World Chain, which in turn will be used to fund open source development and other improvements to the network, benefiting both builders and users, and this economic model will allow the superchain to achieve self-sustaining 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 developers who support Worldcoin will also be able to continue to contribute directly to the Ethereum network and collaborate with the SuperChain ecosystem on shared infrastructure, in addition to the early OP Chains, World Chain plans to actively participate in the governance of Optimism.
In general, the core of Worldcoin's vision is to promote people around the world to go to the chain, and continue to expand the digital identity ecosystem based on World ID, so that more and more people can contribute to governance, DeFi, social media, games and other aspects. World Chain's goal is simple: to build a scalable, inclusive blockchain future that unlocks on-chain identity and builds a fairer digital economy for all.