Scaling World Chain to 23 million people globally

The Challenge: Scaling Verification of Unique Humanness Onchain

As digital personhood becomes a cornerstone of the modern Internet, so does the need to scale verification of unique humanness. World was founded to address this problem. World is a network of real humans, built on anonymous proof of human technology, and powered by a globally inclusive financial network. Using secure and privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, World provides users with a provably-encrypted, on-chain proof of human that is both safe and anonymous.

World's rapid growth led the project to an exciting milestone: the system had grown to represent nearly 50% of Optimism mainnet's transaction volume. With ambitious plans for global expansion and unique features like priority blockspace for verified humans, it needed a dedicated solution that could scale.

"The World Foundation and Tools for Humanity had known for some time that World would eventually launch its own chain. But running blockchain infrastructure hadn’t been the project’s core focus up to that point—so it needed to find a team that could match our ambition."

The Decision: Why Build with Alchemy

With 15 million users at mainnet launch in October 2024 (which has since grown to 23 million at the time of this case study publication), the worst outcome for World Chain would be if chain infrastructure failed or couldn’t scale to meet surging user demand. Given the vision of Priority Blockspace for Humans, World Chain had to provide a world-class user and developer experience.

Alchemy supports leading names in web3, such as Chainlink, EigenLayer, OpenSea, and Polymarket. Handling over $100 billion in transactions per year, the platform has delivered enterprise-grade performance for 7 years without a multi-hour incident. Now, with Alchemy Rollups, teams can launch their own rollups, backed by this proven reliability and equipped with the full Alchemy developer platform.

The World Chain engineering team carefully evaluated their infrastructure options, considering both self-hosted infrastructure and various rollup providers. They ultimately chose to build with Alchemy Rollups for multiple reasons:

Proven Infrastructure Reliability

"Since launch, World Chain has operated continuously with 99.96% reliability, experiencing only one minor service disruption lasting one hour, without any interruption to overall availability,” the team emphasized*. This reliability proved crucial as World Chain handled traffic spikes and growing transaction volume, backed by Alchemy’s uptime guarantee.

Performance

As one of the most-used rollups in web3, World Chain depends on seamless scalability to meet its growing demand. The chain consistently ranks in the top 4 for user operations per second (UOPS) on all L2s. Alchemy has been instrumental in driving World Chain’s performance well-above EVM standards, delivering baseline throughput at 17 TPS and 5 Mgas/s while regularly testing above 100 TPS and 15 Mgas/s.

Security Mindset

In addition to implementing state-of-the-art privacy through the novel use of cryptography, World Chain has attracted significant liquidity, with nearly $400M in Total Value Secured (TVS) at the time of writing. Alchemy’s security-first engineering focus has kept World Chain safe as it quickly entered the top-10 largest rollups by TVS.

Comprehensive Developer Tools

Beyond just rollup infrastructure, Alchemy provided a complete suite of developer tools including Node API, Wallet API, NFT API, Smart Account Infra and Subgraphs that World Chain developers were already familiar with from their previous work on Optimism.

Strategic Partnership Approach

"World needed more than just a vendor—it needed someone who would be there for any challenge or new frontier," the team explains. "The excitement to support our mission and their demonstrated technical expertise made Alchemy stand out."

Building World Chain: A Collaborative Journey

World Chain and Alchemy are demonstrating how deep collaboration can accelerate a rollup into one of the most valuable and engaged communities in web3. Some key achievements include:

Performance and Scalability

• Achieved gas targets exceeding Optimism mainnet's performance (over 5 Mgas/s versus 3 Mgas/s on Optimism)

• Successfully handled significant traffic spikes without service disruption (up to an all-time high of 5.2M daily transactions)

• Managed chain growth to ~700GB in just 6-7 months while maintaining performance

Developer Experience

• Simplified external node setup for integration partners through dedicated support

• Enabled rapid debugging and issue resolution through direct engineering collaboration

• Provided comprehensive tooling for the World App ecosystem and Mini Apps

Community Impact

The World App, built on World Chain and used by over 23 million humans, leverages Alchemy's full suite of developer tools to power its ecosystem:

• Pull token statistics and Wallet data with the Token API and Wallet API integration

• Maintain real-time transaction monitoring with Custom Webhooks

• Specialized infrastructure developed for World App to support its global ecosystem of third party Mini Apps that integrate with World products

The Road Ahead

World Chain continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in anonymous proof of human technology. Future plans include:

• Pushing decentralization further with World Chain’s status as a Stage 1 rollup just around the corner

• Implementing and iterating on Priority Blockspace for Humans so that humans have block priority and a more frictionless experience 

• Increasing TPS and Mgas/s capability to lead the EVM ecosystem

• Expanding the Mini App ecosystem within World App

"Having someone by your side that can flex and adjust as World grows is crucial," notes the team. "We want the relationship between Alchemy and World Chain to be a model that the public can look to when thinking about how the industry supports each other. I think we've accomplished that so far, and we're excited to keep innovating together."