Last week, Worldcoin officials stated that over 200,000 Chileans have completed World ID verification, which is more than 1% of Chile’s total population of 19.5 million. BlockBeats reporters recently interviewed Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania to discuss the latest developments of Worldcoin and answer questions about Orb pricing, Worldcoin’s profitability, and how to deal with regulations.
Interview & Editor: Jack
Compilation: Joyce, Kaori
At the recent Token2049 roundtable conference in Singapore, Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania stated that due to regulatory issues, Worldcoin has not yet become a mainstream application. However, on the other hand, every time Worldcoin reaches a new high in registrations, it attracts wide attention. Last week, Worldcoin officials stated that over 200,000 Chileans have completed World ID verification, which is more than 1% of Chile’s total population of 19.5 million. Is Worldcoin the key to unlocking mass adoption of cryptocurrencies?
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In late July, Worldcoin released a signed open letter by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter stated, “Worldcoin has been established for over three years with the aim of creating a new identity and financial network owned by everyone. If successful, Worldcoin will increase economic opportunities, provide reliable solutions to distinguish AI from humans, protect privacy, promote global democratic processes, and ultimately demonstrate a potential path to achieve global basic income (AI-funded UBI).”
Related reading: “Sam Altman on Worldcoin: Expect to See Integration with ChatGPT Within 10 Years”
Two months have passed, so how is Worldcoin progressing now?
BlockBeats reporters recently interviewed Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania to discuss the latest developments of Worldcoin and answer questions about Orb pricing, Worldcoin’s profitability, and how to deal with regulations. The following is the original interview:
Over 2 million registered users, unexpected response from Asia
BlockBeats: How did you get started in the cryptocurrency field, or how did you meet Sam, and why did you decide to join the Worldcoin project? What are your main responsibilities at Worldcoin?
Alex Blania: Before joining Worldcoin, I was doing theoretical physics research at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, studying quantum systems using large-scale neural networks (what people now call AI). That was basically the area I focused on during my first two and a half years at Worldcoin. Before that, I also had a vertical farming company. At that time, I was an AI researcher, and I was very satisfied with the state of doing research.
The third co-founder of Worldcoin, Max Norenstern, contacted me. I suddenly received an email from Max at the California Institute of Technology, which included a paper written by Sam describing the Worldcoin project. The project sounded crazy at the time, even crazier than it sounds today. It had only a few rough headings, such as the need to solve the currency supply problem, the need to launch a new token, provide a large amount of incentives to develop the network, and eventually, we might be able to achieve a globally universal basic income (UBI) based on AI.
And in the future, as AI becomes more and more powerful, all of this will become even more important. This was three and a half years ago, which means that at the time, general artificial intelligence (AGI) and discussions related to AGI were not mainstream topics. So even if it is said that AGI will be achieved in the relatively near future, this statement seems very crazy.
After receiving that email, I replied saying that I was happy to come. I drove to San Francisco and had my first interview with Max and Sam. At that time, we didn’t discuss me running the company or doing any other work, I just went through multiple rounds of interviews as a software engineer. I eventually decided to say that I would not join as a software engineer because it was too early for me. I was likely going to go back to the field of physics and start my own startup later on.
Then Sam said, “Well, you can become a co-founder of Worldcoin.” They both extended an invitation to me as a co-founder, and I accepted and brought in other members who are now part of the founding team, many of whom were friends I knew from my research days. So it’s interesting that, for this reason, we have many physicists in our company. We started this work three and a half years ago, and the rest is history.
In the first year, I mainly focused on technical work. I designed the entire system and have been responsible for this project as the CEO. The work I have done has changed a lot over the years. Initially, I just needed to be responsible for a lot of research and technical work, and now, the company has grown quite large, with almost 200 employees. We have two main offices, one in San Francisco and one in Berlin. And the organization of the company is more decentralized, with many employees spread out in different locations.
All of this means that my current work mainly involves communication with external stakeholders, explaining our project, just like what I am doing with you right now. Communicating with politicians is a new thing in my life, and I enjoy it. The remaining work is managing and operating the company, having meetings with engineering teams, finance teams, and so on, just like running a company. Overall, there’s nothing particularly special.
BlockBeats: What role does Sam play in Worldcoin today? Because many people are interested in Worldcoin and its connection to ChatGPT and Sam himself. So many people may imagine that Sam still has some influence in the Worldcoin team?
Alex Blania: He is a co-founder, and his involvement has actually increased after the project launched. He is certainly focused on OpenAI because he is the CEO of OpenAI, not the CEO of Worldcoin. So most of his time is spent on OpenAI. But he and I communicate almost every week. We attend external company meetings together, he participates in every important decision, and helps with the most critical workflows, such as fundraising activities or recent meetings with politicians, as well as recruitment matters, and of course, he helps formulate strategies. Worldcoin is actually one of the three companies he is currently involved in.
BlockBeats: Currently, the number of registered users of Worldcoin has exceeded two million. Congratulations.
Alex Blania: Yes. But I hope that we can achieve faster growth in a relatively short period of time. I hope that the next time we talk, this number will be the monthly or weekly number of registered users, hoping that this is just a very early stage of what we have to do.
BlockBeats: Indeed, this is a very rapid adoption rate, as people must use actual devices to register the application. Can you share some information about the types of users who register for Worldcoin, or describe the user profile, such as which regions or areas have the most users?
Alex Blania: Before the launch, we made sure to understand all major regions and know what challenges we might face in each region, as well as how the adoption rate would be. So we conducted tests in each major region.
We conducted quite in-depth testing in Europe. Then we mainly focused on Portugal in Europe because there are many developers there, and Lisbon, Portugal may have the highest density of crypto developers in Europe. Then we went to Latin America, mainly Argentina and Chile, which are currently one of the fastest-growing countries in terms of cryptocurrency adoption, so it is a very interesting market. In Africa, we mainly went to Kenya because it is a cutting-edge tech country and a very stable democratic country.
Then when Worldcoin was launched, we also went to some regions in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. The response in Tokyo was actually very surprising. It gave me a rocket-like surprise. We had very few devices in Asia, but the download and registration numbers were very high, which was amazing to me. When I attended Token 2049, I also found that many people recognized me and took selfies with me.
How much does an Orb iris machine cost?
BlockBeats: Did you encounter any technical bottlenecks when developing the Orb iris machine? What was the most difficult part?
Alex Blania: Building the Orb device took a long time. It is a very complex device because it needs to meet multiple constraints simultaneously. First, it needs to be able to scale to billions of people, otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense. That is, image acquisition and uniqueness checks need to be accurate enough, which most biometric scanners cannot achieve. General phones and other devices are far from meeting this requirement, and they can never achieve it. Even commercial devices cannot do this because no one designs a device that can work normally on a scale of billions of people. In most cases, such devices do not exist at all.
Secondly, security. Usually, the use of this technology is done with the involvement of the government. It will be carried out in a regulated environment with government personnel present, which means that the actual fraud risk in terms of registration is quite low. However, Worldcoin must work in a completely adversarial environment. We have to anticipate that people will always try to defraud, try to attack the hardware, and we can’t even trust the personnel operating the devices. Therefore, both the hardware itself and the software on it need to be very secure.
The third challenge, of course, is privacy because it must be a decentralized protocol that is not controlled by governments. So it needs to fully protect privacy and cannot have any compromises in this regard. Therefore, we are basically building the entire system from scratch to ensure that it can only be like this.
These are essentially the three main challenges. Now Orb devices can overcome these challenges. They are able to reliably distinguish at least one billion people, and with the progress of software, we will be able to distinguish three to four billion people next year. But our growth rate may not reach this level. So it can meet all these requirements, it is secure and able to protect privacy. The real question now is production, producing enough of these devices and launching them globally.
So the main problems we are currently working on solving are operational problems. Two to three years ago, Worldcoin was mainly an engineering problem, but now it is gradually becoming mainly an operational problem. How to launch this product globally? How to cover every country? How to comply with regulations in the face of government restrictions? These are the main problems we are currently solving.
BlockBeats: Vitalik has talked about some decentralization issues with hardware, such as the possibility of backdoors. Given that manufacturers are mostly centralized, how does the team prevent cheating or the setting of backdoors by the manufacturers of Orb devices?
Alex Blania: I think Vitalik’s article is very good. But some media misunderstand it as being negative. He doesn’t mean to express negativity, he just describes the engineering challenges we must overcome. In this regard, I basically agree with his views.
Regarding the centralization issue with manufacturing, currently it is indeed very centralized. It is currently manufactured by a very capable manufacturer, who is under our strict control. So in actuality, we can control the manufacturing process of Orb to ensure that there are no backdoors or other issues. However, in the next few years, there will be situations where other people will produce Orb devices, and it may not be companies that we control. It could be some large tech companies. I’m not saying we have already contacted them, but this is something that could happen.
There will be other large companies producing their own Orb devices based on the design, and the foundation will provide the keys required to activate these Orb devices, and we will conduct audits. So initially, there won’t be a large number of manufacturers, probably only about ten, and strict audit control will still be applied to all manufacturers. At some point in the future, of course, full decentralization can be achieved, decentralized audits can be conducted, and the number of manufacturers can be increased.
This issue is not a new problem. Of course, it is much more difficult to implement compared to decentralized financial products, but it is clearly not impossible. So we can accomplish it.
BlockBeats: Currently, what is the cost of manufacturing an Orb device? How many Orb devices have been deployed in the market?
Alex Blania: This is one of the interesting things. Production and manufacturing are not bottlenecks from a cost perspective or production speed perspective. Currently, the price of an Orb device is about $4,000. This number will continue to decrease in the next few years because the larger the manufacturing batches, the lower the cost. We are also developing a new Orb device that is more complex, more secure, and more advanced in all aspects. Therefore, all these costs will be reduced to below $1,000 in the next few years. But again, the main challenge currently faced by Worldcoin is actually deployment and promotion, not just cost.
Worldcoin is not yet profitable
BlockBeats: Where is the Worldcoin team currently investing resources?
Alex Blania: The biggest cost currently revolves around operational promotion, which involves a lot of work. When the product enters a country, it is necessary to conduct legal analysis of all local laws. In order to comply with local laws, minor modifications to the product may be required, which requires collaboration with different local advisors. In order to truly enter the market, it is necessary to hire a local team. So, if I tell you that we hope to enter Hong Kong in a few weeks, there are many teams in the background that need to concurrently handle 10 different things to achieve this goal. This is the first aspect of the cost.
The second biggest cost is the actual engineering work. The number of engineers is the highest in the company, including hardware engineers, protocol, application, and software engineers. This is the second largest cost area. There are also all the routine matters of the company, including various consulting fees, etc. Building and promoting the product is the biggest expenditure area.
BlockBeats: Where does the company’s main profit come from? Is it from the sale of Orb iris devices?
Alex Blania: This is very similar to other crypto projects. A digital asset that has a certain value will have investors who believe in its future. Our network is still too early to generate a lot of revenue at the moment, but there will definitely be revenue in the next few years. So, like other crypto projects, it’s just that for us, the scale is much larger, the ambition is much greater, and the speed is much faster.
Also, there was a period of time before the product was launched when there were some registration arbitrage situations, but these things are no longer possible now.
BlockBeats: Worldcoin faces regulatory pressure in different countries or regions, how do you view the regulatory issues for Worldcoin and cryptocurrencies, and how will you handle these issues in the future?
Alex Blania: I think there are some regulatory measures that can be understood for countries in the early stages of product launch. We have caused a sensation in many places, a positive sensation. People everywhere want to register on a large scale, and we appear in the news everywhere, becoming a hot topic in the global tech industry for weeks. So there is too much attention and too much registration, and regulatory agencies will raise questions to ensure that everything is done in the right way.
So for us, there is nothing to worry about in this regard. We just cooperate with regulatory agencies and answer their questions. There are mainly two aspects here. One is privacy regulatory agencies and the other is cryptocurrency regulatory agencies. For privacy regulatory agencies, there is nothing to worry about because we fundamentally prioritize privacy in everything we do. In fact, we only need to respond to (crypto) regulatory agencies, cooperate with them, and solve problems. Some markets and some countries have a hostile attitude towards cryptocurrencies, while others are more friendly. So this is not a particularly special situation for us, we will only stay away from countries that have problems with cryptocurrencies to avoid trouble.
BlockBeats: Besides Worldcoin, what other tools or infrastructure do you think are needed for “Proof of Humanity” in the AI world?
Alex Blania: I think regulation, especially sound regulation around artificial intelligence, is definitely the most important thing, and this is important globally. But this is not new, many people are talking about this issue. Another fundamental constraint is energy, and producing large amounts of energy in a cheaper and more scalable way is another important area that we will need to consider.
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