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Worldcoin confirms it is the cause of mysterious Safe deployments

June 27, 2023No Comments


Worldcoin is the cause of a large number of secure deployments on the Optimism (OP) network over the past week, according to a June 27 social media post by Tiago Sada, head of product at Worldcoin developer Tools for Humanity.

The deployments had caused a stir on Twitter, as users wondered who was causing them and what their purpose was. Some Twitter users had speculated that it could be a Sybil attack or some kind of address farming technique used to profit from coins sent to the wrong address.

A safe (formerly called "Gnosis Safe") is a multi-signature smart contract wallet. It is often used by development teams to ensure that multiple team members must approve each transaction that pools funds or updates an app. Vaults are also used in some newer consumer wallets that employment account abstractionsuch as those that offer transactions without gas.

Worldcoin is known to use a lot of safes, since offers transactions without gas to verified humans. The Worldcoin team recently announced that they were migrating their application from Polygon to Optimism.

Over the course of six days, from June 21 to 27, the Optimism address 0x86c5608362b3fbbeb721140472229392f754ef87 created More than 50 sub-accounts, each of which made between 10,000 and 15,000 transactions, most of which created new secure wallets. On the morning of June 26, chain investigator Spreek noticed the strange transactions and reported to the community through a Twitter thread.

Spreek expressed bewilderment at the transactions, stating: "I may be misunderstanding something about this (gnosis safes are basically wizardry to me ngl)." In response, Luigi.eth, a contributor to GnosisDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, fixed that the DAO alerted the Gnosis team, even though the transactions did not appear "malicious."

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the thread was shared by Parsec Finance founder Will Sheehan, who cryptically mentioned that "I think we can guess with high probability what this is." This sparked speculation among Sheehan's supporters. an user thought the implementations could be an attack by Sybil on the network, while another thought it could be some kind of attempt to harvest addresses to which funds could be sent by mistake in the future.

Some users of the Spreek and Sheehan threads assumed that the deployments were not an attack. Instead, they theorized that these transactions could be due to Worldcoin preparing to migrate its app to Optimism.

an user reclaimed "eyeball coin" could be the cause, apparently meaning Worldcoin, as the person said, "people were saying eyeball coin but I don't know (or understand) why." Tools for Humanity is the creator of an iris scanning device used for identity verification, called "the Orb", which is integrated with the Worldcoin app.

After less than an hour of this speculation, Sada from Tools for Humanity revealed what was really going on. Resharing Spreek's original post, he claimed, โ€œMore vaults rolling out, stable guys,โ€ implying that the transactions were in fact caused by the Worldcoin migration.

So it looks like Optimism users can breathe a sigh of relief. The network does not appear to be in the grip of a massive Sybil attack or address harvesting scam at this time, or at least not related to these transactions.

Optimism updated to its new version "Bedrock" on June 6, bringing lower fees and shorter deposit times. Your transaction count has increased dramatically since update.