Liam Horne

World Chain

Written in October 2024

The reality is that bots run by trading firms dominate transactions and fee revenues on blockchains. Although being “onchain” is becoming more popular, there are still very few actual people using blockchain-based applications.

To help with this, I’ve been advising the World Foundation this year on the launch of World Chain. Today, I’m proud to share that the public mainnet for the network is officially open! The chain is launching with nearly 15M humans migrating from OP Mainnet.

You can actually see live grant claims happening on Index Supply here.

Real world adoption

Like I wrote about earlier this year, I think that stablecoins are the killer app of the blockchain industry. In countries all over the world, but especially in those where local currencies are failing or capital controls are strict, stablecoins have become a way for people to access a stable form of money.

In the recent report Stablecoin: The Emerging Market Story by Castle Island Ventures and Brevin Howard Digital, they found that significant numbers of people are using them for dollar savings, currency conversion, and for yield generation. Also, they found that in emerging markets in particular, they use stablecoins for currency substitution, to pay for goods and services, and for cross-border payments.

From my vantage point, this is a really big deal! Ethereum is enabling people all around the world have better financial access and to achieve a baseline of financial security that many of us take for granted.

So, this is why I was excited by World’s insane user growth since it launched last year. The project has onboarded millions of people in precisely those regions where stablecoin adoption was highest, and that was a major opportunity! Nearly 7M verified humans and 15M total app installs holding ~$100M of assets, and more total USDC holders than on any other blockchain. It made total sense for the project to scale onto its own blockchain to better cater to those users.

In addition to World Chain launching, World App (how most of the 15M humans interact with the project), is launching Mini Apps too. Kind of like WeChat, it’s way to distribute apps inside of an app. For Ethereum developers, you can build applications that will go directly to the mobile phones of millions of people in places where real world crypto adoption is actually happening.

Prioritizing humans over bots

World Chain is the first blockchain that prioritizes anonymous verified human interactions over bots and AI.

That sounds nebulous, so let me explain what that means precisely.

Since World Chain is built on Optimism, transactions are submitted to and sequenced by a server run by the World Foundation. Since every person that has a valid World ID is identifiable by their public address on the chain (i.e., they are anonymously verified humans), the World Foundation can build blocks that put those transactions above all others, regardless of all other factors.

This is an incredibly simple, but valuable feature. While the industry is trying to figure out how to distribute MEV to users through different kinds of exotic mechanisms, World Chain can simply differentiate between human and other transactions and prioritize those human-originated transactions first.

Since retail traders, the ones on the major “order flow aggregators” (i.e., the websites and mobile apps) are the ones most often losing out because of sophisticated trading firms running bots, this sequencer-level prioritization is doing them a massive service. It’s putting humans first over algorithms and bots. As the OP Stack develops, it might also be possible soon to enshrine this in the fault proof too.

World Chain even goes one step further. Humans will be given a gas allowance for their transactions, meaning for them gas will be free up to a certain point. This is better than $0.01 or even $0.001 fees, it’s literally $0 for humans. The way this can be sustainable over time is that the non-verified addresses (i.e., the bots) will still pay for fees like on other blockchains, and the revenue from those fees will be put back into the free gas allowance for users.

Built with Optimism

This is one of the first projects I’ve gotten to work on since stepping back from OP Labs last Summer, and it’s been great to orient some of my focus away from infrastructure and more towards real world blockchain applications. Of course, it’s made even better that World Chain will be built within the Optimism Superchain and using the OP Stack that has become industry standard.

This launch means that the World project is able to reach millions of real humans today with real world applications, build a blockchain that prioritizes humans over bots, and directly benefit from all of the work that has been put in to scale Ethereum over the years!

You can learn more at world.org/world-chain.