About World Chain
Why World Chain?
The World App has undergone several transitions and it has lived on multiple chains over time. First it was Hubble, an open-source optimismtic rollup with BLS signature aggregation of ERC20 transfers, then it was Polygon PoS, recently OP mainnet and now World Chain. There were several motivating factors for all of these changes.
Onchain evolution
Originally, the main target use case of World App was payments and WLD grants (pre-launch beta version), but as we required other applications such as DeFi and identity, World App was migrated to Polygon PoS as it provided full EVM programmability and access to tools, infrastructure and applications like Safe smart contract wallets DEXes and liquidity like Uniswap, and plenty of others that directly provided utility to World App, World ID, their users and the wider Worldcoin ecosystem of applications and integrations. Another big motivating factor is cost, security, decentralization and ecosystem network effects which were the main motivators behind the switch from Polygon PoS to OP mainnet.
As the rollup-centric roadmap became the foundation of Ethereum scalability, solutions became adopted enough and reached a certain point of maturity, it made sense to migrate World App over as it benefits a lot from all of the other integrations, applications and infrastructure that were and are available on OP mainnet. We migrated over ahead of our launch on July 24th 2023 and over the upcoming year World App reached a peak of 60% of OP mainnet blockspace consumption (over a 30 day period).
As World App starts demanding more and more blockspace in order to support the goal of the largest digital identity and financial network with over a billion unique humans, it will require further scaling the network it operates under. Which is why World Chain exists, it has pristine blockspace for the World App and the World ID ecosystem of applications. For more details on World Chain you can read our Introducing World Chain blogpost.
World Chain will allow World App, World ID and their ecosystems to scale throughput, increase gas limits, data availability and its overall scalability as the OP Stack improves with better execution clients, higher Ethereum blob counts and sizes (more DA) and plenty of other technological improvements.
What is different about World Chain?
The main differentiating properties of World Chain compared to other L2s or other Superchain members are that World Chain is a blockchain made for humans, where the transactions of unique humans have priority and where they also have a free allowance, just for being a World ID verified unique human using proof of personhood. More on these features in the [Priority Blockspace for Humans] and [Free Gas Allowance sections] Compared to other L2s one other very big differentiator is the number of unique users that World App brings with it, and the possibilities for use cases and applications used by millions of unique humans will bring.
Further resources
If you want to learn more about World Chain, OP Stack and the Superchain, you can take a look at the resources below: