The World ecosystem is undergoing a zero-to-one moment. With the launch of Mini Apps, builders can now use World Network to scale their apps to millions of unique users in a few days—with zero acquisition costs. Builders who start now have the first-mover advantage.
What Makes World Special:
World Network already has over 15 million users, with approximately 380K humans joining every week. Over 7.5 million of those users are verified as uniquely human.
Each new user is onboarded through a single app—World App—and every World App user is fully onchain with a self-custodial wallet, free transaction fees, and a World ID. Combined, we have something brand new: a large, growing, fully onchain, verifiably human audience that is instantly accessible to builders.
Why Now:
The World App opened to third-party builders last month with the launch of “Mini Apps,” a simple framework for building native-like applications that reach every user on the network. Mini Apps have unlocked a level of distribution that was previously inaccessible.
What To Build:
We are excited to see Mini Apps leverage World ID and World’s distinctive features in the following categories:
Payments: Whether it’s peer-to-peer, on-ramping and off-ramping, or merchant payments, the World ecosystem has the network effects and functionality to be the default platform for global payment applications. Builders can create apps leveraging the social graph, proof of personhood, free gas, and tokens on World Chain to make payments as simple as possible.
Credit: Undercollateralized credit has struggled to take off onchain because it requires decentralized identity and credit scoring. World provides the tools to fix this cold-start problem by delivering anonymous proof of personhood paired with additional zero-knowledge attributions so that builders can create new kinds of credit markets.
AI agents: World is the only network on which AI agents can know if they are interacting with a human or another bot. This unlocks experimental design spaces for agent-human interactions.
Micro-Earning: Proof of personhood unlocks polling, surveys, data labeling, and many other micro-earning opportunities that require verified humans (ideally with some work history and reputation scoring). Builders can create permissionless protocols that enable onchain work with instant payments.
Data networks: Data networks can be designed with the assumption that all users are human. Considering the global scale of the World user base, there are potentially interesting opportunities to build networks that leverage existing local devices to collect weather, mapping, imaging, and other kinds of data.
Art: Anonymous proof of personhood enables new ways to distribute and create art. You can distribute art freely but maintain scarcity of ownership by limiting how many editions each human can claim. Similarly, unique humans can create art, provided they have apps built around this experience.
Games: Human-verified leaderboards, tokens distributed to real players, and one play per human per day—by leveraging World ID, builders can design new kinds of games and supercharge existing ones. When we know all users are unique humans, much of the bot-created noise that worsens gameplay can be eliminated.
Airdrops: Freely distributing network ownership has been a killer use case of crypto. However, airdrops have become overwhelmed by sophisticated Sybil attacks, making the mechanism less effective. Anonymous proof of personhood overhauls the airdrop design space by assuring that actual humans can benefit from token distributions.
Information Markets: World ID allows projects to make freely distributed tokens scarce. Those tokens then can have value because they can be used by humans to signal preferences, creating information markets that have a signaling value. Read more from Nate or Vitalik on this concept.
Social: We want to see proof of humanity integrated into new or existing social experiences. This could limit noise on other social networks by preventing bots from crowding the platform, leading to higher-quality content and a more engaging experience.
How to Build:
The World Network is built on Ethereum.
World Chain is part of the Optimism Superchain, World App’s self-custodial wallet is a Gnosis Safe, and the network’s gas token is Ether. For all these reasons, the World Network will be familiar to any Ethereum builder.
However, the copy+paste model for new L2 deployment won’t be successful on the World Network. The builders finding the most success are the ones building from scratch for the context of Mini Apps. This is because Mini Apps have some unique characteristics, specifically:
100% mobile audience reached via World App
User population unfamiliar with crypto-native primitives & language
Mini App framework for building UIs
Requirement for using Permit2 to protect users
We are ready to help everyone build on World Chain, but we want to emphasize: the strongest product-market fit will go to builders who leverage what makes World Network special and build from the ground up. You can visit the Mini App documentation here and watch a developer overview here.
About the Authors:
Leighton Cusack is Head of Ecosystem at Tools for Humanity, which builds tools for World. Reach out to him on X if you are building.
Derek Walkush is an investment partner at Variant.
Disclaimer: This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Variant. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Variant has not independently verified such information. Variant makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Variant or its Clients and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Variant, its General Partners, its affiliates, advisors or individuals associated with Variant. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.
