Author: Nancy, PANews

Since Vitalik reset the direction for the Layer 2 roadmap this year, the survival competition in the L2 sector has become increasingly brutal. Star L2s like Base, Arbitrum, and OP Mainnet continue to vie for market attention and liquidity, while a large number of mid-tier, tail-end, and even emerging L2s have turned into "ghost towns," with many projects even forced to cut off limbs to survive.

As the L2 sector's divergence intensifies, World Chain has carved out a relatively independent growth trajectory. Although its on-chain ecosystem applications still appear thin, real user activity sustains high-frequency interaction demand. Meanwhile, riding the AI hype, WLD recently staged a relatively independent upward price rally.

Behind the monthly surge of over 130%, why is WLD charting an independent course?

As the investment frenzy in the AI sector continues to heat up, Worldcoin has become one of the investment targets chased by market funds. CoinGecko data shows that WLD has cumulatively risen 136.1% over the past 30 days, significantly outperforming most mainstream crypto assets.

Behind this rally, Worldcoin is primarily driven by a combination of multiple expectations and capital inflows.

On one hand, large institutional holdings have boosted market confidence. Nasdaq-listed Eightco Holdings publicly holds approximately 283 million WLD (about 8.4% of the circulating supply) and has included it in its treasury asset allocation. Meanwhile, because the company holds indirect equity in OpenAI (with an investment of about $90 million), it has, to some extent, amplified the market's imagination regarding the value of its token holdings.

On the other hand, incentive activities have stimulated WLD's trading activity. Late last month, Oku Trade integrated into World App and launched a WLD swap competition mechanism, directly stimulating user participation. Dune data shows that WLD's single-day trading volume on DEXs once exceeded $11 million, whereas it had previously hovered at the hundreds of thousands of dollars level for a long time, with volume directly multiplying dozens of times.

A more critical driving factor comes from improved expectations in tokenomics. According to the latest adjustment plan, starting July 24, 2026, WLD's daily unlock volume will decrease from approximately 5.1 million tokens to about 2.9 million tokens, a reduction of roughly 43%. Among this, community unlocks will drop from 3.2 million to 1.6 million, a 50% reduction; the unlock rate for the team and investor portions will decrease from 1.9 million tokens per day to 1.3 million tokens, a 32% reduction. This adjustment is widely interpreted by the market as a significant easing of medium-to-long-term supply pressure, helping to weaken expectations of sustained selling pressure.

Furthermore, as expectations for the IPO of AI giant OpenAI continue to heat up, market enthusiasm for the AI narrative further spills over. As a crypto project co-founded by its head Sam Altman, market attention on Worldcoin has intensified, further driving speculative capital inflows.

On-chain activity surges, capital growth relies on bridged inflows

While the token price rises, World Chain's on-chain activity is also climbing in tandem.

From the perspective of capital inflows, this round of growth mainly comes from bridged TVL. According to L2BEAT data, World Chain's Total Value Secured (TVS) has exceeded $610 million, growing approximately 122.6% over the past 30 days. Among this, standard bridge asset inflows dominate, with a scale of about $557 million, a month-on-month increase of 118.4%, becoming the main source of recent capital expansion.

Along with capital flows, its on-chain activity has also grown. GrowThePie data shows that over the past 30 days, World Chain's daily active addresses exploded by 649%. In comparison, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum One, Celo, and others saw limited gains over the same period, with some even experiencing negative growth.

However, World Chain's on-chain ecosystem has not undergone large-scale expansion. Compared to Base, which is backed by Coinbase's traffic gateway, and Arbitrum, which possesses a mature DeFi ecosystem, World Chain is still in an early stage of ecosystem building and has yet to form native protocols with scale effects and high-frequency usage scenarios.

DeFiLlama data shows that as of June 22, World Chain's TVL was only about $40.42 million, an overall scale that cannot rival other leading L2s. Although it nearly doubled in the past 30 days, the incremental liquidity is mainly concentrated in Morpho Blue-related vault configurations, with this protocol's TVL accounting for about 93% of World Chain's total.

In other words, a large amount of bridged funds remains primarily as parked assets, not effectively converted into DeFi lending, DEX trading, or complex application interactions. The depth of on-chain capital usage and the efficiency of retention and conversion remain limited.

Second only to Base, World Chain becomes a major Blob consumer

Despite insufficient external applications, its unique positioning as Worldcoin's exclusive L2 and the activity of tens of millions of real users mean that large-scale internal transactions are continuously pushing up World Chain's Blob consumption, making it a high-frequency L2.

Blobs are primarily used by Layer 2 Rollups to post transaction data to the mainnet at extremely low cost, achieving data availability. Since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, the Ethereum mainnet has cumulatively submitted over 19.53 million Blobs. Among numerous Layer 2s, World Chain has grown into the second-largest Blob consumer, its strong performance even surpassing veteran L2s like Arbitrum.

According to the latest statistics from Dune Analytics, since its launch in June 2025, World Chain has cumulatively submitted over 2.63 million Blobs to Ethereum, firmly ranking among the top network-wide, second only to Base in first place. Over the past 24 hours, it has submitted an average of 106 Blobs per hour, equivalent to writing about 13.3MB of data to Ethereum per hour, with a Blob fill rate as high as 99%, its data packaging efficiency leading most L2s.

In terms of cost and operational efficiency, World Chain also demonstrates strong competitiveness. Over the past 3 days, its fees for data availability (DA) were about $304, with cumulative historical fees exceeding $2 million, making it more efficient compared to veteran L2s like Base (cumulative ~$6.45 million) and Arbitrum (cumulative ~$3.51 million). Meanwhile, it submits a batch to Ethereum on average every 3 minutes and 45 seconds, with each submission transaction containing an average of 3 Blobs, showcasing a high on-chain interaction frequency.

From the perspective of data inflow scale, World Chain entered the top tier shortly after launch and has long maintained a leading position. As of June 15, its Blob data inflow accounted for 12.6% of the total network, second only to Base's 43.3%, firmly holding second place, while mainstream L2s like Arbitrum One, Soneium, OP Mainnet, and Unichain all ranked behind it.

While most L2s are mired in growth anxiety, World Chain's rise to the forefront of Blob consumption is not only due to the cost and throughput advantages brought by its underlying OP Stack architecture, allowing it to carry on-chain activity with higher efficiency. More importantly, after tens of millions of real World ID users migrated to the dedicated chain, they continuously generate high-frequency transaction demands driven by scenarios like identity verification, gas subsidies, and reward claims, enabling it to maintain robust data demand and Blob consumption even in the absence of a mature ecosystem.

Looking at a longer cycle, what truly determines an L2's long-term development is not short-term capital and trading heat. Only by effectively converting externally inflowing assets into on-chain liquidity and sustainable economic activity can World Chain move from being a high-frequency L2 towards a mature network capable of ecosystem self-circulation.