World Chain’s users and transactions are soaring, but its token remains depressed, seemingly due to selling pressure from newly unlocked tokens entering the market.
Even as World Chain usage climbs and the Ethereum Layer 2 network records new highs in network activity, its native WLD token continues to lag the broader altcoin market.
Lucas Shin, a research analyst at Delphi Digital, noted the continued growth across the World Chain ecosystem in an X post on Aug. 4, saying that the ecosystem “is gaining momentum.”
The network recently hit an all-time high in terms of daily active addresses and transactions. According to Token Terminal, World Chain had over 604,000 monthly active users (MAU) as of Aug. 4, its strongest metrics since launching in October 2024.
Data from analytics platform growthepie also shows World Chain reached a peak in daily active users on July 27, with over 58,000 users. On July 28, it processed a record 1.69 million transactions in a single day.
Unlocks Pressure WLD
Still, the price of WLD tells a different story. The token has dropped about 38% in the past year and is down more than 91% from its all-time high, trading at a fraction of its peak value despite the surge in usage. As of press time, WLD is trading at $0.943, down 11.90% over the past seven days.
Much of the pressure may stem from inflationary tokenomics. Dune data shows that more than 330 million WLD tokens have entered circulation since May, increasing the token’s supply by nearly 19% in just two months.
As Shin noted, the inflation rate “has actually slowed down from 598% YoY,” though the community is still grappling with “~120% annualized inflation based on an avg of ~10% inflation for the past 2 months.”
“No matter how much adoption grows, this level of token emission continues to create serious headwinds for price appreciation,” he explained.
The analyst pointed out that the World Chain ecosystem keeps shipping new products like World ID credentials, but the network is still “fighting high levels of inflation,” adding that traders and investors should consider the project as a “long-term thesis about building the internet’s identity layer” rather than a “short-term token play.”
According to DefiLlama, WLD unlocks will accelerate through mid-2026, with reduced emissions continuing into the late 2030s.
