The goal is simple and humble: create a system that will eventually distribute tokens to all 8 billion people on the planet for free, as a kind of universal basic income (UBI). But because the rise of artificial intelligence will make it difficult to determine who is human and who is a digital forgery, Worldcoin first needs to create a system that allows everyone - everyone on the planet - to prove that they are, in fact, human.
Some Web3 projects are working to create better cryptocurrencies. Some are solving the problem of self-sovereign identity. Some are trying to distinguish between the real and the fake created by AI. Some are building better governance systems. Some are trying to improve the development of AI through the principles of decentralization. Some are trying to reduce global inequality.
Worldcoin is trying to do all of the above.
The goal is simple and humble: create a system that will eventually distribute tokens to all 8 billion people on the planet for free, as a kind of universal basic income (UBI). But because the rise of artificial intelligence will make it difficult to determine who is human and who is a digital forgery, Worldcoin first needs to create a system that allows everyone - everyone on the planet - to prove that they are, in fact, human.
To do this, they invented a physical device called "Orb" that can scan your eyeball. The goal of Orb is to eventually scan every eyeball of every human walking on the planet. If all goes well, everyone will be able to use open source and decentralized financial tools.
If Worldcoin was the brainchild of some random crypto bro, maybe it could be laughed off as paranoia. But the project has real intellectual underpinnings. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), who is perhaps the most central player in the development of artificial intelligence. Altman suspects that if or when AI becomes so advanced that it achieves AGI, or artificial general intelligence, meaning it truly surpasses human capabilities, the world will change forever.
Maybe that world is a horrible dystopia, Skynet-style extermination of species. But it’s also possible that AGI unlocks an astonishing leap in productivity that could bring financial benefits to the world. As Marc Andreessen recently put it in a bullish article on AI, “productivity growth across the economy would accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, new industry creation, new job creation, and wage growth, and leading to a new era of material prosperity on a global scale.”
If AGI does all the work, maybe we humans can enjoy a life of leisure, spending our time writing poetry or singing or, more likely, arguing on social media. If AGI truly benefits society in some meaningful way, how do we spread that benefit to the masses equitably? Enter UBI, Silicon Valley’s popular idea for an automated world. Enter Worldcoin.
You could say this is not only the most ambitious startup in crypto, but one of the boldest projects in history. It feels like a dorm-room hypothesis. “It sounded absolutely ridiculous,” admits Alex Blania, a 25-year-old genius theoretical physicist when he first heard the idea in 2019. Altman had emailed Blania to ask if he’d be interested in joining the project. “I honestly didn’t take it seriously for a long time,” Blania says. But he drove to San Francisco for an interview; he’s now co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, Worldcoin’s parent company.
For Worldcoin’s first year, Blania and his team focused on research. They built prototypes. In 2021, they announced Orb. Then they deployed it live. The project now claims 1.8 million registered users; the ultimate goal is 8 billion. (Full disclosure: CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris finds this prospect genuinely worrying.)
What if this happens? What if they actually pull off this crazy plan of giving everyone on the planet self-sovereign identity and universal basic income? When I asked him this question in a recent Zoom interview, Blania was almost speechless, arguing that this moment would represent “one of the most profound technological shifts ever.”
The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
What was your reaction when Sam proposed the idea of Worldcoin to you?
Alex Blania: I honestly didn't take it seriously for a long time. That's my honest answer. I think Max (Novendstern, the other co-founder) and Sam wrote a two- or three-page document that described a couple of ideas. That was the stage it was at.
An inside view of the Orb, Worldcoin's custom hardware that makes encrypted IDs based on iris scans. (Worldcoin)
What is the point of that document?
The idea was, one, AGI is going to happen. It's going to disrupt society in meaningful ways. And Sam was already convinced that UBI needed to happen eventually, and it was probably one of the most important things for society.
Two, Sam is actually a big believer in cryptocurrency as a whole, just a bit skeptical of a lot of what's happened in the industry over the last year. One thing he sees is that people always underestimate the importance of network effects and how crazy and profound they are when they work. So a lot of the things we need (like cryptocurrency) already exist, we just need to scale it to more people to actually drive adoption.
Sounds easy enough!
Pretty simple, right? And then the last paragraph is about, what if we could issue tokens to everyone? [Editor’s note: Worldcoin tokens are not currently planned to launch in the U.S. due to regulatory issues.] Just by being human and aligning incentives with growing the network quickly. As a result, we will bootstrap a non-governmental and truly open identity and financial network.
It sounded absolutely ridiculous. But at the time I thought, well, [if this fails] I can always go back and get another job, so why not give it a try?
How would you describe Worldcoin’s goals?
The goal of Worldcoin is to issue currency by giving everyone ownership. As a result, giving them a world identity and giving them access to decentralized financial tools.
"Honestly, I haven't taken it seriously for a while."
How does it work?
So when you sign up as a user, now, you basically download a non-custodial wallet application called World App. You download the app. You show up in front of a physical device, and that physical device basically issues you your World ID, which is a digital identity that you can use to authenticate to different services anonymously.
Once you’ve done that, [in the future] you’ll get ownership of the actual tokens every week just by being a part of it. So there are three things. So World ID, World App, and Worldcoin. [Editor’s note: Worldcoin later reiterated that the token is not currently planned to launch in the U.S. due to regulatory issues.]
Why is proving identity so important to all of this?
The problem is very simple. The problem is that you need to make sure that everyone can get a unique identity that is completely private. That's the mission. And government IDs simply can't do that, because they might work well in the United States, they might work well in Europe, but there's no actual verifiable digital identity in most of the world.
Right, which brings us to the Orb. You mentioned that users need to be physically present in front of a physical device for the eye scan. Why is that necessary?
Initially, we didn't really want to solve the identity problem because the idea itself was so ambitious. But we realized there was no way around it. So when we think about proving identity, there are three big concepts about how to do it: you have trust networks, you have government KYC (like passports) of course, and then you can use a variety of different biometrics.
We built prototypes for all three areas. That's what we did in the first year.
You chose biometrics. Why?
A lot of the systems that are working now are going to be pretty challenged in the world of [improving AI]. It's going to be really easy to fake things on the internet. Asking someone to perform certain tasks, like CAPTCHA or more complex forms of CAPTCHA, will eventually break down. You fundamentally need to connect to the physical world and measure what it means to be human. That's what the Orb is.
To say Orb has become a polarizing morsel, especially on crypto Twitter, is an understatement.
I think that’s one of the biggest discussion points about the project. On the one hand, some people in the crypto space really hate it and are like “Oh my god, this is terrible, how can you call it an Orb?” But on the other hand, everyone is talking about it and it somehow sticks, right?
At least you provide great content to Twitter! So thank you for that.
Sam’s favorite quote about Worldcoin is the one he gave me in our first meeting, which is that the biggest risk of Worldcoin is that no one cares.
People care! Of course, people are concerned about what the Orb means for surveillance and privacy. How do you respond to those concerns?
So my high-level response is that something like World ID will eventually exist, meaning you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not. I think that will definitely happen as AI advances. It will probably happen in the next few years.
And I think Worldcoin is the only path we have right now that can be adopted by powerful actors and still be fully private and not rely on government infrastructure. And it’s all open source — all the things that cryptocurrencies theoretically like.
Why doesn’t something like Facial ID work like the one we use on our iPhones?
Using FaceID on an iPhone is just verifying that it's you who's showing up again. It proves that the same person is using the phone. This is a very easy task to solve because it's hard for me to look exactly like you. It's a one-to-one comparison.
But with Worldcoin, you have the opposite problem. When a user signs up for Worldcoin, you need to compare that user to all the other users who have already signed up. So the task becomes not “Do I look exactly like you” but “Do I look like a new human in the network?” Mathematically, you need a lot more information about each human to solve this problem. If you don’t have information about every user, you won’t be able to make comparisons after tens of millions of people have signed up. You’ll just hit a wall.
So if you try to solve this human proof problem — this unique human problem among a billion people — with a face camera or something like Face ID, you’re going to fail after tens of millions of registrations. The iris is very unique. It’s very hard to forge. It’s fairly stable over time. It has a lot of properties that make it the best way to solve the problem.
[Note: At this point in the Zoom call, Rebecca Hahn, Chief Communications Officer at Tools for Humanity (Worldcoin’s parent company), chimed in to clarify what The Orb does not collect.]
Rebecca Hahn: What happens is that The Orb captures an image of your iris and then creates a unique identifier. The identifier says that you are human and that you are unique. It's not that you are Rebecca or Jeff or male or female or any other characteristic. It's those two things that really matter, human and unique.
You currently have 1.8 million registered users. Given what you just said The Orb captures, does that mean you know nothing about those registered users other than that they are unique and human? You don't know that 30% are from Europe, or that 55% are male, etc.?
Alex Blania: We can count which Orbs have how many registrations [at different locations] and so on. So there's some metadata in the actual registration process. But the most important part is that you show up in front of The Orb, and the first thing it does is actually verify that you're a real human being.
There are a number of sensors. There's a thermal imaging camera. There's a 3D time-of-flight camera. These are all checking that you're not a display, but a real human being. And then imaging and calculating the iris code, as Rebecca just mentioned.
It's signed by The Orb, and then uniqueness checked in the cloud. And here's what's cool - the uniqueness check is separate from the user's proof of knowledge. Basically, the user just has to prove that they are included in the set of other unique users without actually giving away their information or keys or anything, right?
You end up in a situation where you have a pseudo-anonymous unique identifier that can be used across different platforms. And by the way, you don't even have a global identifier. It's all about the user. So, as a user, you decide how much information you want to share with different platforms.
Rebecca Hahn: So part of the conversation is maybe a few years from now, there's a world where the financial upside from AI is distributed. But right now, for now, as basic as it seems, there's a world where you can just take World ID and build it into Twitter and then solve a lot of problems.
You didn't use those words, but you were actually trying to address self-sovereign ID or SSID. Is that correct?
“This is a shift that’s deeper than social networks, deeper than Facebook.”
Alex Blania: Yes.
Again, keep it simple! Let’s say you succeed. You succeed perfectly at everything you build. You did it. You cracked the code. World ID and Worldcoin are everywhere. Universal Basic Income is available to everyone around the globe. What would that world look like?
[pause.]
[Longer pause.]
Alex Blania: Honestly, I think it's very, very difficult to get to that point and predict, right? Because once we pass, let's say, 3 billion registered users, that's probably one of the most significant technology shifts ever.
Because this is not just a social network, it's not just Facebook. You have a network with identity and the original nature of a fundamental currency. It's a profound shift. So making predictions... I find it quite difficult.
But I can talk about some things that I’m excited about and that I think are possible.
Of course, I'll accept it.
Alex Blania: First, cryptocurrency. I was into cryptocurrency very early; I read the Bitcoin white paper a few weeks after it came out. [Editor’s note: Blania was about 14 years old in 2008.] It was very inspiring. The idea of having a decentralized financial network.
The idea back then was about peer-to-peer cash transactions. Now we just say it’s a store of value, but the idea was different back then.
So I think what's really exciting if you go that far [in the future] is that you're going to see true peer-to-peer usage. And it probably won't even be Worldcoin, right?
It's just that these users finally have public and private keys and identities. So they will start using cryptocurrencies in their daily lives. Just like Tesla accelerated the transition to electric vehicles, I think Worldcoin will greatly accelerate the transition of all of these products.
I think that in itself is inspiring. Exciting. And I’m sure whatever happens around [AI development] and Worldcoin is going to be really cool. That is, hopefully, Worldcoin users will actually be able to have an impact on the development of some of the largest [AI] systems deployed around the world.
And if we reach 8 billion users, you will definitely log in and get universal basic income through your World ID.
It's all so profound, I can't even... What do you think is going to happen?
You're the expert! I'm just here to enjoy the process. But I can't wait to find out.
