Worldcoin Rebrands to World, Launches Layer-2 World Chain

Worldcoin announced the rebranding of the project to World, and the launch of a Layer-2 blockchain called World Chain.

On the morning of October 17, the Worldcoin retinal scanning project officially rebranded to World Network, or simply World.

Hello World pic.twitter.com/VIfL0wONbu

— World (@worldcoin) October 17, 2024

World Network founder and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared that the old name Worldcoin no longer reflects the scale and development vision of the project. World Network will focus on three main elements including World Chain, World ID and Worldcoin, with the ultimate goal of building a network that distinguishes between humans and AI-driven agents such as chatbots and virtual assistants.

With more than 10 million registered users in 160 countries, World Network has attracted great attention from the community. Of these, 7 million have verified their identity through the World ID digital identification system, a solution that allows users to prove their “identity” by providing biometric data via the Orb scanner.

However, this initiative has also encountered many legal obstacles, as it has attracted investigations in many countries, including Kenya, India, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong, etc. Recently, South Korea also fined World Network more than 830,000 USD for violating data privacy.

In addition, World Network also introduced Layer-2 called World Chain with the participation of major partners such as Alchemy and Dune.

World Chain is promoted as a “humans-only” community, where only verified users can participate. This solution will help authenticated users (individuals who own World ID) enjoy incentives during transactions and limit bot attacks for profit.

WLD price did not react positively immediately after the news was announced, even falling 6% before the information was released. At the time of writing, WLD price is hovering around $2.12, down 5.48% in the last 24 hours.