Worldcoin joins the Ethereum layer-2 family by announcing World Chain: a possible new use case and appreciation for WLD

Worldcoin (WLD), the iris biometric scanning project led by Sam Altam, announced yesterday the launch of a layer-2 network called World Chain.

The new open source and permissionless network, which should be ready as early as this summer, relies on the security of Ethereum and is built through the OP stack.

We still don’t know if the WLD will be used as a gas token but for now, judging from the graphic reaction, it seems to have taken the news quite well.

Let’s see all the details below.

Worldcoin (WLD) announces its layer-2 network World Chain based on Ethereum and built with OP stack

The Worldcoin protocol and its founder Sam Altman are about to enter the layer-2 ecosystem, helping Ethereum to overcome its known scalability limits: just yesterday the launch of their own World Chain network was announced through an official statement from the development company Tools for Humanity.

According to reports, the chain will be protected by the internal security of Ethereum, and will be built using the OP stack operating framework, which is the same one used to develop Base last year.

The mainnet is expected to be launched this summer, with the 5 million users of the Worldcoin community who have completed the iris recognition system that will be at the center of governance issues.

World Chain has been conceived as an open source and permissionless infrastructure, open and usable by everyone, while pursuing the company’s ultimate goal of limiting the presence of bots in online environments.

For this reason, the layer-2 will offer priority access in block building to all verified real users, while bots will have basic access. This helps limit the presence of these unwanted entities that usually clog cryptographic networks.

As Tiago Sada, product manager, engineering and design at Tools For Humanity, explained:

“All these blockchains are working hard to reduce gas fees so that the network is more accessible, but this means that you start to see a lot more bot activity. This ends up increasing fees for humans and networks get clogged.”

World Chain will be open and permissionless. Anyone, including bots, will be able to send transactions. But transactions sent by verified human beings will have priority block space, so they will be processed more quickly.”

The announcement from World Chain raises some doubts about certain technical specifications of the new network: will WLD be the designated gas token? what will be the transaction processing capacity? how many validators will there be at launch and how will they be distributed within the community? what will be the first dapps to be launched on it?

Most likely, a detailed answer from the Worldcoin team will follow these questions in the coming weeks, while more precise details regarding the launch date will be revealed. 

What we can say for sure is that web3 developers after the launch of the chain will have an additional tool to build apps focused on real-world utility, contributing to creating a verified on-chain world closely connected to the off-chain counterpart.

WLD gas token of the new chain? Complete analysis of the crypto

Although the Worldcoin team has not explicitly guaranteed the role of gas token to WLD within the new layer-2 World Chain network, we can state how it will likely be the designated currency for fee payments.

After yesterday’s announcement, WLD did not experience significant graphic increases but at the same time managed to strongly limit losses at a time when the entire market, especially the AI sector, was experiencing intense red performance.

 As we can see in the following 4h chart on the WLD-USDT pair, the crypto, despite being in a bearish trend, has managed to keep prices above the $4.5 region, opening the door to reversal scenarios in the short term.

Unfortunately, the strong market shake of these days has detached the euphoric sentiment of the bulls that characterized the first months of 2024, so we could still expect an attack on new lows.

Anyway, given the solidity shown yesterday, WLD could jump from the current support and easily recover the 6 dollars, returning above the EMA50, especially if BTC and ETH were to hint at a recovery.

For now, eyes are focused on the extremes of the trading range, which goes from 4 to 5.5 dollars.

The inclusion of gas token within World Chain could give WLD that missing utility capable of adding value to the resource and increasing the demand for services related to Worldcoin.

Unfortunately, at the moment the ” utility ” factor is not the real problem for WLD: what weighs on the shoulders of the crypto is the aggressive vesting of new supply that will be introduced to the market and the inflation expected in the coming years.

According to the data from Dune Analytics, currently the circulating supply is barely 2% of the total supply of WLD, with many tokens waiting to be unlocked and distributed among the community, investors, team, and funds for internal development.

Already in August of this year, the first unlocks will occur for investors, who will probably aim to take their first profits. At the beginning of 2026, we will already have 50% of the total supply unlocked, with many of the new WLD tokens being liquidated, causing the depreciation of the crypto.

It is worth noting how starting from mid-December 2023, the curve of new coin emissions has begun to soar more and more, almost doubling the share of circulating tokens in just 4 months

Finally, we point out how, according to Dune, the top 8 holders of WLD hold a token share (mostly still locked) amounting to 90% of the total coin supply.

Not a good sign for the long term at all.