Worldcoin Foundation launches World Chain developer preview ahead of mainnet

The Worldcoin Foundation, an organization behind the iris-scanning Worldcoin crypto project, has launched a developer preview of its upcoming Layer 2 network, World Chain.

The World Chain developer preview enables a limited number of developers to start exploring, building, testing and providing feedback on World Chain before its mainnet launch, expected later this summer, according to a statement shared with The Block.

The preview also allows developers to set up their deployments ahead of the migration of Worldcoin’s more than 10 million World App users from its existing base on OP Mainnet. World Chain is intended to be permissionless, open source and independently governed by its community, the Worldcoin Foundation said.

First announced in April, the World Chain is secured by Ethereum within the Superchain network of Layer 2 chains built using the OP Stack. Officially, the Worldcoin Foundation is launching the new Layer 2, although Worldcoin has been primarily developed and promoted by Tools for Humanity, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“We're beyond excited to have Worldcoin, one of the largest projects in our space, build World Chain using Optimism's OP Stack, joining the Superchain and working alongside other core development groups to push the OP stack forward while contributing sequencer revenue to the Optimism Collective,” Optimism Unlimited Chief Growth Officer Ryan Wyatt said. “The launch of World Chain’s developer preview marks a significant step forward, enabling Worldcoin’s developers to leverage the power of the OP Stack to build ambitious applications, further enhancing the Superchain's impact.”

World Chain is currently supported by partners including Alchemy, Safe and Elliptic to provide tooling and infrastructure to developers building on the chain, with additional node providers, analytics companies, wallet infrastructure providers, block explorers and bridges to be announced in the coming weeks, the Worldcoin Foundation said.

"We are dedicated to achieving self-custodial ownership for every human, and we’re thrilled to support World Chain with Safe's advanced smart account infrastructure,” Safe Head of Network Thibaut Sahaghian said. “During the World Chain developer preview, developers can use Safe{Core} infrastructure to create exceptional user experiences for millions of verified humans on World Chain."

Wordcoin user transactions grow to more than 50% of OP Mainnet’s activity

The Worldcoin Foundation claims that Worldcoin user transactions have grown to more than 50% of OP Mainnet’s activity since it launched in July 2023 — one of the largest applications on any Layer 2 network of its kind. “During peak periods, this can rise to over 80% and at times exceeds the practical limits of the chain,” it added.

Scalability challenges are one of the key drivers behind its decision to migrate to its own chain, with the Worldcoin Foundation projecting that World Chain will be able to process approximately double the amount of work as compared to OP Mainnet before the fee market is impacted, and further optimizations will follow. This includes ultimately using Reth, the high-performance Ethereum execution client developed by Paradigm, for the World Chain sequencer.

“We are thrilled to help enable World Chain’s scaling roadmap with Reth, an SDK for building production-ready, high-performance blockchains,” Paradigm General Partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos said. “We look forward to working hand-in-hand with the Worldcoin Foundation, TFH, OP Stack and the rest of the community during the World Chain developer preview to achieve the ambitious mission of breaking through the 1GGas/s barrier and beyond.”

Worldcoin’s proof of personhood

The vision behind the Worldcoin project revolves around the idea that the future health of the internet will require a system that can distinguish between human and non-human actors.

The Worldcoin project is dedicated to assigning people World IDs after they prove they are human with an iris scan. People who sign up are given cryptocurrency in the form of WLD tokens.

World Chain is meant to "increase capacity so new people can continue to join at scale, and existing users can enjoy faster, cheaper, and more reliable transactions," the Worldcoin Foundation said earlier this year.

Last week, Tools for Humanity appointed four former Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla and X executives to its ranks, brought in to boost its privacy, security, hardware and digital ID divisions amid a series of regulatory challenges in several countries.