Author: Jeff Wilser
Interviewee: Alex Blania, Worldcoin CEO
Translation: hiiro
Some Web3 projects are striving to create better cryptocurrencies. Some are tackling the issue of self-sovereign identity. Some are trying to distinguish between the real and the artificially created. Some are building better governance systems. Some are attempting to improve the development of artificial intelligence through decentralized principles. Some are seeking to reduce global inequality.
Worldcoin is trying to achieve all of the above.
The goal is simple yet humble: to create a system that will eventually distribute tokens to all 8 billion people on Earth as a form of universal basic income (UBI). However, as the rise of artificial intelligence will make it difficult for people to determine who is human and who is a digital forgery, Worldcoin first needs to create a system that allows everyone – everyone in the world – to prove that they are indeed human.
To accomplish this, they have invented a physical device called the “Orb” that can scan your eyeball. The goal of the Orb is to eventually scan the eyeballs of every walking human on Earth. If all goes well, everyone will be able to use open-source and decentralized financial tools.
If Worldcoin were the brainchild of some random cryptocurrency sibling, it might be dismissed as a delusion. But this project has genuine intellectual backing. It was co-founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), who is arguably one of the central participants in the development of artificial intelligence. Altman speculates that if or when artificial intelligence becomes so advanced as to achieve AGI (i.e., artificial general intelligence), meaning it truly surpasses human capabilities, the world will change forever.
Perhaps that world is a terrifying dystopia with the species being wiped out Skynet-style. But it’s also possible that AGI unlocks astonishing leaps in productivity, which could bring financial benefits to the world. As Marc Andreessen recently put it in a bullish article about AI, “Productivity growth across the entire economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creating new industries, creating new jobs, and increasing wages, leading to a new era of material prosperity globally.”
If AGI does all the work, perhaps we humans can enjoy a life of leisure, spending time writing poetry or singing or more likely arguing on social media. If AGI truly benefits society in some meaningful way, how do we fairly distribute this welfare to the masses? Enter UBI (a popular concept in Silicon Valley to address the automation world). Enter Worldcoin.
You could say that this is not only the most ambitious startup in the blockchain field but also one of the boldest projects in history. It feels like a dorm room hypothesis. “It sounded absolutely absurd,” admits Alex Blania, who was a 25-year-old genius theoretical physicist when he first heard the idea in 2019. Altman had sent Blania an email asking if he was interested in joining the project. “Honestly, I didn’t take it seriously for a long time,” says Blania. But he drove to San Francisco for an interview; he is now a co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity (the parent company of Worldcoin).
In its first year, Worldcoin focused on research, with Blania and his team building prototypes. In 2021, they announced Orb and deployed it on-site. The project now claims to have 1.8 million registered users, with a final goal of 8 billion. (Full disclosure: CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris finds this prospect truly worrisome.)
What if this were to happen? What if they actually achieve this crazy plan of providing everyone on Earth with self-sovereign identity and universal basic income? When I asked Blania this question in a recent Zoom interview, he was almost speechless, believing that this moment would represent “one of the most profound technological shifts in history.”
For the sake of clarity, the interview has been compressed and lightly edited.
What was your initial reaction when Sam presented the idea of Worldcoin to you?
Alex Blania: Honestly, I didn’t take it seriously for quite some time. That’s my honest answer. I think Max (Novendstern, another co-founder) and Sam wrote a two to three-page document describing a few ideas. That’s where it was at.
Internal view of Orb, Worldcoin’s custom hardware for creating encrypted IDs through iris scanning. (Worldcoin)
What were the key points of that document?
The idea at the time was: one, AGI is going to happen. It’s going to disrupt society in a meaningful way. And Sam was convinced that UBI eventually needs to happen, it might be one of the most important things for society.
Two, Sam was actually a believer in cryptocurrencies as a whole, just skeptical of a lot of the things that happened in the industry last year. One thing he saw was that people always underestimate the importance of network effects and how crazy and profound they can be when they kick in. So a lot of the things we needed, like cryptocurrency, already existed, we just needed to scale them to more people to actually drive adoption.
Sounds simple!
It sounds simple, right? And then the last part is, what if we were able to issue tokens to everyone? [Editor’s note: Worldcoin tokens are currently not planned to be launched in the United States due to regulatory concerns.] Just because they’re a human being and align incentives with a rapidly growing network. And as a result, we’d be guiding a non-governmental and truly open network of identity and finance.
It sounds absolutely absurd. But at the time, I thought, well, [if this fails] I can always go back and find another job, so why not give it a try?
How would you describe Worldcoin’s goal?
Worldcoin’s goal is to issue currency by giving everyone ownership. As a result, granting them global identity and the opportunity to use decentralized financial tools.
“Honestly, I haven’t taken it seriously for quite some time.”
How does it work?
So, when you register as a user, now, you basically download an unhosted wallet application called World App. You download the app. You appear in front of a physical device, which basically issues you your World ID, which is a digital identity that you can use to anonymously verify different services.
Once you’ve done that, [in the future] you only need to be a part of it once a week to have ownership of actual tokens. That’s the three things. So, World ID, World App, and Worldcoin. [Editor’s note: Worldcoin later clarified that due to regulatory issues, the token is currently not planned to be launched in the United States.]
Why is proving identity so important for all of this?
The question is very simple. The question is that you need to make sure that everyone can have a completely privacy-protected unique identity. That’s the task. And government ID doesn’t really accomplish that because they might work well in the United States, they might work well in Europe, but most places in the world don’t have an actual verifiable digital identity.
Right, that brings us to Orb. You mentioned that users need to appear in front of a physical device for an iris scan. Why is this necessary?
Initially, we really didn’t want to solve the identity problem because the idea itself is very ambitious. But we realized there was no way around it. So when we thought about proving identity, there were three big concepts about how to do it: you have trust networks, you certainly have government KYC (like passports), and then you have various different biometric technologies.
We prototyped in all three of those areas. That’s what we did in our first year.
You chose biometric technology. Why?
Many systems that are running right now will face quite a big challenge in the world of [improved AI]. It will become very easy to fake things on the internet. Asking someone to perform certain tasks, like CAPTCHA or more complex forms of CAPTCHA, will eventually crumble. You really need to connect to the physical world and measure what it means to be human. That’s Orb.
To put it lightly, Orb has become a divisive topic, especially on crypto Twitter.
I think that’s one of the biggest points of contention about the project. On one hand, some people in the crypto space really hate it and are like, “Oh my god, this is so scary, how can you call it Orb?” But on the other hand, everyone is talking about it and it somehow persists, right?
At least you’ve provided great content for Twitter! So thank you.
Sam’s favorite quote about Worldcoin is the quote he gave me in our first meeting, which is that the biggest risk for Worldcoin is that no one cares.
People care! Of course, people are concerned about what 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 that you will need to verify [that you are human] on the internet, whether you like it or not. I believe that with the progress of AI, this will definitely happen. It may happen in the next few years.
And I think Worldcoin is currently the only path that can be accepted by powerful participants and still fully protect privacy without relying on government infrastructure. And it is all open source – something that theoretically all cryptocurrencies like.
Why can’t something like facial recognition work the same way as what we use on iPhones?
Using FaceID on an iPhone is just verifying that it is you appearing again. It proves that the same person is using the phone. This is a very easy task to solve because it is hard for me to look exactly like you. It is a one-to-one comparison.
But for Worldcoin, you have the opposite problem. When a user registers for Worldcoin, you need to compare that user to all the other users who have already registered. 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 more information about each human to solve this problem. If you don’t have information about each user, then after tens of millions of registrations, you won’t be able to make comparisons. You will hit a wall.
Therefore, if you want to use something like a facial camera or Face ID to solve this human proof problem – this problem of being a unique human among a billion people – then after tens of millions of registrations, you will fail. The iris is very unique. It is hard to forge. It is quite stable over time. It has many properties that make it the best way to solve the problem.
[Note: At this point, in a Zoom call, Rebecca Hahn, Chief Communications Officer of Tools for Humanity (parent company of Worldcoin), interjected to clarify that The Orb did not collect anything.]
Rebecca Hahn: What happened is that The Orb captured an image of your iris and then created a unique identifier. The identifier indicates that you are human and that you are unique. It doesn’t say that you are Rebecca or Jeff or male or female or any other characteristic. The two important points are human and unique.
You currently have 1.8 million registered users. Given what you just said about what The Orb captures, does this mean that you know nothing about these registered users other than that they are unique and human? You don’t know that 30% are from Europe or that 55% are male, for example?
Alex Blania: We can calculate how many Orbs [in different locations] have registered, and so on. So there is some metadata in the actual registration process. But the most important part is that you appear in front of The Orb, and the first thing it does is actually verify that you are a real human.
There are many sensors. There is a thermal imaging camera. There is a 3D time-of-flight camera. These are all checking that you are not a display, but a real human. Then it takes an image and calculates the iris code, as Rebecca just mentioned.
It is signed by The Orb, and then undergoes uniqueness verification in the cloud. And this is the cool part – uniqueness verification is separated from user knowledge proof. Basically, users only need to prove that they are included in another unique user set without actually releasing their information, keys, or anything else, right?
In the end, you find yourself in a situation where you have a pseudonymous 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 users. So as a user, you can decide how much information you want to share with different platforms.
Rebecca Hahn: So part of the conversation is perhaps a few years from now, there is a world where the financial boom brought about by AI will be distributed. But for now, as it stands, there is a world where you can incorporate World ID into Twitter and solve many problems.
You didn’t use these words, but are you actually trying to address self-sovereign ID or SSID? Is that right?
“This is a transformation that goes deeper than social networks, deeper than Facebook.”
Alex Blania: Yes.
Once again, simply put! Let’s say you succeed. You have achieved perfect success in everything you have built. You did it. You cracked the code. World ID and Worldcoin are everywhere. Everyone in the world can have a universal basic income. What would that world look like?
[Pause.]
[A longer pause.]
Alex Blania: Honestly, I think it’s very, very difficult to walk to that step and predict, right? Because once we surpass, for example, 3 billion registered users, it could be one of the most significant technological shifts to date.
Because it’s not just a social network, it’s not just Facebook. You have a network with the nature of identity and basic currency. It’s a profound transformation. So making predictions… I find it quite difficult.
But I can talk about some things that excite me and that I think are possible.
Of course, I would be happy to hear.
Alex Blania: First, there is cryptocurrency. I got involved with cryptocurrency very early; I read the Bitcoin whitepaper a few weeks after its release. [Editor’s note: Blania was about 14 years old at the time.] It was very inspiring. The idea of a decentralized financial network.
The idea back then was about peer-to-peer cash transactions. Now we only talk about it as a store of value, but the idea back then was different.
So I think if you go that far [in the future], what’s really exciting is that you will see true peer-to-peer usage. And it might not even be Worldcoin, right?
It’s just that these users will eventually have public and private keys and identities. So they will start using cryptocurrency in their daily lives. Just like Tesla sped up the transition to electric cars, I think Worldcoin will greatly accelerate the transition of all these products.
I find this to be inspiring. Exciting, even. And I am confident that whatever happens in the [AI development] and Worldcoin space, it will be really cool. In other words, I hope that Worldcoin users can actually have an impact on the development of some of the largest [AI] systems deployed globally.
And if we reach 8 billion users, you will definitely log in and receive universal basic income through your World ID.
All of this is so profound that I can’t even… What do you think will happen?
You’re the expert! I’m just here to enjoy the process. But I can’t wait to find out the answers.
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