Worldcoin app to migrate from Polygon to Optimism’s ecosystem

Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin, which launched its World App earlier this week, is set to migrate the app from Polygon to Optimism’s ecosystem.

The Worldcoin Foundation (Worldcoin’s initial steward) and Tools for Humanity (Worldcoin’s lead software contributor) announced today a partnership with Optimism Collective. As part of the collaboration, World App will migrate to Optimism’s OP Mainnet from Polygon. The World ID protocol will also be available on OP Mainnet.

“With more than 1.6 million sign-ups in beta and 500,000+ monthly active World App users, the deployments on OP Mainnet will expand access and help Worldcoin reach a values-aligned ecosystem of developers and users,” the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity said in the announcement.

Worldcoin’s commitment to Optimism’s ecosystem

Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, co-founded Worldcoin in 2020 with the aim of allowing people to prove their humanity online. Its eyeball-scanning orbs have attracted controversy — in addition to millions of dollars in venture capital funding. 

Worldcoin said its alignment with the Optimism ecosystem goes back to December 2020, when it started with work on Hubble, an optimistic rollup originally started by the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team at the Ethereum Foundation. The World App beta was initially launched using Hubble. Then it moved to Polygon’s proof of stake network as “Optimism and Arbitrum were too expensive given the project’s scale.”

World App gives users a way to manage their World ID, a tool for proving personhood online, alongside a range of cryptocurrencies — including bitcoin, ether, dai, USDC and Worldcoin’s own forthcoming token. When the app was unveiled earlier this week, Worldcoin said the full version would run on an Ethereum rollup without disclosing which.

“We’re incredibly excited to see partners like Worldcoin choosing OP Mainnet as their new home, and joining us in building out the Superchain,” Ben Jones, director at the Optimism Foundation, said in a statement. “Today, we’re feeling 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 communication layers and the common OP Stack, according to its website.

Worldcoin began collaborating with Optimism nearly a year ago through joint contributions to EIP-4844, an Ethereum improvement proposal that aims to improve the scalability of Ethereum beyond what’s available with Layer 2 networks. Worldcoin said EIP-4844 would reduce Layer 2 fees by a factor of 10.

“EIP-4844 is now expected to be included in the next hard fork of Ethereum. Its potential to accelerate adoption in the Optimism ecosystem could also enable a significant boost in World App transactions across Ethereum L2s with the World App wallet’s migration to OP Mainnet,” Worldcoin said.

Coinbase also recently started contributing to Optimism’s Superchain vision via 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 significant step towards bringing scalable and decentralized computing to the world, according to Optimism’s website.

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