Blockchain
Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin, which launched its World App earlier this week, will migrate the app from Polygon to Optimism’s ecosystem.
The Worldcoin Foundation (Worldcoin’s first custodian) and Tools for Humanity (Worldcoin’s main software provider) today announced a partnership with Optimism Collective. As part of the partnership, World App will migrate to Optimism’s OP Mainnet from Polygon. The World ID protocol will also be available on OP Mainnet.
“With over 1.6 million beta signups and 500,000+ monthly active World App users, the deployments on OP Mainnet will expand access and help Worldcoin achieve a values-aligned ecosystem of developers and users,” the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity said in the announcement.
Worldcoin’s commitment to the Optimism ecosystem
Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, co-founded Worldcoin in 2020 with the aim of empowering people to prove their humanity online. The eyeball-scanning orbs have sparked controversy — in addition to millions of dollars in venture capital funding.
Worldcoin said its alignment with the Optimism ecosystem dates back to December 2020, when it began work on Hubble, an Optimism update originally started by the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy and Scaling Explorations team. The World App beta was initially launched using Hubble. It then moved to Polygon’s proof of stake network because “Optimism and Arbitrum were too expensive given the scale of the project.”
World App gives users a way to manage their World ID, a tool to prove online personality, alongside a range of cryptocurrencies – including bitcoin, ethereum, dai, USDC and Worldcoin’s own future token. When the app was unveiled earlier this week, Worldcoin said the full version would run on an Ethereum package without disclosing which one.
“We are incredibly excited to see partners like Worldcoin choose OP Mainnet as their new home and build the Superchain with us,” Ben Jones, director of the Optimism Foundation, said in a statement. “Today we feel very optimistic about the future of decentralized governance and identity.”
Optimism’s Superchain Vision
Optimism’s Superchain is a proposed network of Layer 2s that share security and communications layers and the common OP Stack, according to the website.
Worldcoin began collaborating with Optimism almost a year ago through joint contributions to EIP-4844, an Ethereum enhancement proposal that aims to improve Ethereum scalability beyond what is available with Layer 2 networks. Worldcoin said that EIP-4844 would reduce Layer 2 costs by a factor of 10.
“EIP-4844 is now expected to be included in the next Ethereum hard fork. Its potential to accelerate adoption into the Optimism ecosystem could also significantly boost World App transactions across Ethereum L2s with the migration of the World App wallet to OP Mainnet,” said Worldcoin.
Coinbase also recently started contributing to Optimism’s Superchain vision through its Layer 2 network called Base. Once launched, Optimism’s Superchain would merge the Optimism Mainnet and other chains into a single unified network of OP Chains (i.e., chains within the Superchain) and mark a major step toward bringing scalable and decentralized computing to the world, according to Optimism’s website. .
