Worldcoin Confirms It Is the Cause of Mysterious Safe Deployments
According to a June 27 social media post by Tiago Sada, product lead at Worldcoin developer Tools for Humanity, Worldcoin is the cause of a series of safe deployments on the Optimism (OP) network over the past week.
The deployments had caused a stir on Twitter as users wondered who caused them and what their purpose was. Some Twitter users had speculated that it could be a Sybil attack or some sort of address farming technique intended to profit from coins sent to the wrong address.
Deploying more safes – steady lads https://t.co/W5DiQirrP0
— tiago sada (@tiagosada) June 27, 2023
A safe (formerly called “Gnosis Safe”) is a multi-signature smart – Contract purse. It’s commonly used by development teams to ensure that multiple team members need to sign off on every transaction that involves spending commonly held funds or updating an app. Safes are also used in some newer consumer wallets that use account abstraction, such as those that allow gas-free transactions.
Worldcoin is known to make extensive use of safes as it allows gas-free transactions for verified individuals. The Worldcoin team recently announced that they will be migrating their app from Polygon to Optimism.
Within six days, from June 21-27, Optimism address 0x86c5608362b3fbbeb721140472229392f754ef87 created over 50 sub-accounts, each of which performed between 10,000 and 15,000 transactions, most of which created new secure wallets. On the morning of June 26, on-chain researcher Spreek noticed the strange transactions and reported them to the community via a Twitter thread.
Spreek expressed confusion about the transactions, stating, “Maybe I misunderstood something here (Gnosis vaults are basically magic to me).” In response, Luigi.eth, a contributor to GnosisDAO – a decentralized autonomous organization – indicated that the DAO had alerted the Gnosis team even though the transactions did not appear “malicious”.
The thread was shared by Parsec Finance founder Will Sheehan, who cryptically mentioned, “I think there’s a high probability we can guess what that is.” This caused speculation among Sheehan’s followers. One user suspected the deployments could be a Sybil attack on the network, while another suspected it might be an attempt to spoof addresses that funds could be mistakenly sent to in the future.
It's a farm of all possible wrong-address sends, you m0rons. Imagine a DAO that, by mistake sends a cross-chain bridge swap from multisig to the same address on a different chain. Here all funds will be received by this minter. 100$ for a chance to get $10mln
— v3v3 (@vae_vic) June 27, 2023
Some users in the Spreek and Sheehan threads suspected that the deployments were not an attack. Instead, they theorized that these transactions could be caused by Worldcoin preparing to migrate its app to Optimism.
One user claimed “eyeball coin” could be the cause, which apparently meant Worldcoin, as the person stated: “People said eyeball coin but have no idea (or understand why).” Tools for Humanity is the developer of an Iris Identity verification scanner called The Orb built into the Worldcoin app.
After less than an hour of this speculation, Tools for Humanity’s Sada revealed what was really going on. He echoed Spreek’s original post, stating “provide more safes – stable guys,” implying that the transactions were indeed caused by the Worldcoin migration.
So it seems that Optimism users can breathe easy. The network does not currently appear to be affected by a massive Sybil attack or address farming scam, at least not one related to these transactions.
Optimism upgraded to the new “Bedrock” version on June 6th, which brings lower fees and faster deposit times. The number of transactions has increased dramatically since the upgrade.
