The Worldcoin orb resembles a bowling ball conceived by Steve Jobs or an oversized Magic 8 ball possessed by HAL 9000. Its glossy exterior envelops the sphere, save for a gaping black circle in the front that houses three sensors positioned in a triangle.
Making the object round was an engineering nightmare, but the symbolism was too vital to ignore. The orb isnt a perfect sphere but two halves that come together at an angle that matches the orbit of the Earthdesigned by Thomas Meyerhoffer, the first hire of Apple legend Jony Ive.
Architectural marvel that it is, the orb serves a simple purpose: It scans your iris and converts the biometric image into an impenetrable string of numbers, which Worldcoin refers to as an IrisCode. When combined with an algorithm, the code verifies youre a unique human.
Each week, about 40,000 people subject themselves to the scan. On a chilly Sunday in March, I became one of them, with an orb-carrying Worldcoin employee stopping by my cramped Brooklyn apartment.
After two years of reading about the company, I welcomed the opportunity to meet the orb face-to-face. Finally, once the technician wrestled it from a specially designed backpack and connected it to an internet hotspot, I was able to stare into its depths. The orb responded with beeps and bops, lighting up white and red as it scanned my iris and beamed the encoded results back to the mothership. After about 45 seconds, the World App on my phone illuminated, revealing that I had been successfully verified. I was myself, after all.
Karsten Moran for Fortune
Silicon Valley these days is short on fanciful ideas. Theres the Uber-for-X reprise, where the venture capital herd mentality has turned every app into a facsimile of some other company, but even that has ceded to the proliferation of business-focused products focused on infrastructure or payroll software.
Worldcoin, in contrast, might be original to a fault, starting with the orbperhaps the most iconic piece of hardware since the iPad. Then comes the pitch: There are 8 billion people on Earth. How do we prove each person is real? Worldcoins solution is cataloging every individual over 18 years old through a privacy-preserving protocol, rewarding each person with cryptocurrency, which in turn will become the new global monetary standard.
The word ambitious doesnt do justice to either the idea or cofounder Sam Altman, also the creator of OpenAI.
In the two years since details of Worldcoins plan first leaked, the company has been hit with criticism ranging from privacy concerns to potential labor abuses to just how strange it is. And plummeting crypto markets did not help Worldcoins globe-conquering strategy.
The stunning rise of OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool, which set records for user adoption and spurred a flood of venture funding, may have helped reverse Worldcoins fortunes.
Conversations with Worldcoin executives, investors, and users have illuminated the shared dream of a not-too-distant future between the two companiesone where artificial intelligence pervades society, and we need a countervailing force to keep humans in control of their destinies. As Worldcoin barrels toward that tomorrowland, the project will have to convince billions of people that its committed to preventingnot creatingsome dystopian nightmare.
Proving humanness
Alex Blania, CEO of Worldcoin parent company Tools for Humanity, was studying for a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2020 when he joined Sam Altmans latest brainchild, lured by the idea of an A.I.-powered system for evenly distributing money to the worlds population, a form of universal basic income.
The founding team early on settled on iris scans as the method to authenticate what Blania refers to as humanness. Fingerprints can be changed, he says, and faces are easy to reauthenticate but nearly impossible to compare against a larger set. A drivers license or a private key could be stolen or lost, copied or tampered with.
We know it sounds weirdand it sounded weird to us as well when we started the projectbut it is fundamentally the only way to solve that problem, Blania says.
The next dilemma was convincing people to sign up. Offering a reward is one solution: When a person is scanned, verified, and onboarded to Worldcoin, they are given 25 proprietary crypto tokens, which are also called Worldcoins. The tokens may carry the promise of future riches, but theyre worthless unless the project launches at scale.
One early adopter, a 30-year-old online entrepreneur living in Portugal, told me over Discord that he hopes his tokens will be worth millions, although hes been disappointed that Worldcoin keeps delaying the release.
Its very clear that its going to become more and more difficult to disentangle what was generated by a machine and what was generated by a person.
Eddy Lazzarin, CTO at Andreessen Horowitz Crypto
In Worldcoins trials, the company also experimented with other rewards, from cryptocurrencies such as wrapped Bitcoin and Tether to AirPods. That still wasnt enough.
Blania recalls running around Berlin with one of the earliest iterations of the hardware that would capture peoples irises, which at the time looked like a normal blue bowling ball. He couldnt get anyone to sign up. The team continued to iterate on the design, at one point testing out its sleek, silver exterior. Suddenly, people started coming up to him. The orb became a conversation starter.
The sheer audacity of Worldcoin attracted top investors, with the company reaching a valuation of $3 billion by early 2022. After Bloomberg first reported on Worldcoin in June 2021, the orb quickly became a lightning rod for attention and outrage. Part of that was by design, Worldcoins executives and investors told Fortune.
The surest way for Worldcoin to fail is for nobody to hear about it, says Jesse Walden, a cofounder and general partner at Variant Fund.
Karsten Moran for Fortune
Even so, the companys aspirationsa decentralized future where people are scanned and recorded by a Silicon Valley-backed companyhad the familiar whiff of colonialism, although Worldcoins parent company, Tools for Humanity, insists that the process will someday be fully open-source and run by the nonprofit Worldcoin Foundation. Unsurprisingly, the company has suffered a torrent of ridicule and exposes, including from Edward Snowden, who tweeted that the human body is not a ticket-punch.
In two investigations, published on back-to-back days in April 2022 by BuzzFeed News and MIT Tech Review, journalists alleged that Worldcoin trials in developing countries were riddled with deceptive promises made both to orb operators and participants. Other allegations included privacy law violations and even corruption.
Blania called the reporting unfair, adding that the problems stemmed from the company still being in beta testing and hitting natural snags in the process. Obviously things have not been perfect, and many things needed to improve, he says. The company is still very early.
According to Blania and Tiago Sada, Worldcoins head of product, the process has since been perfected to ensure total privacy. After a persons iris is captured, the biometric data never leaves the orb, they explain, instead converting it into the IrisCode, which itself is only used to create a verification of a persons uniqueness through a convoluted system of zero-knowledge proofs and proto-danksharding. Eddy Lazzarin, the crypto CTO at Andreessen Horowitz, insists the IrisCode cannot be reversed to reconstruct the image of an irisor at least not yet.
If that all sounds like gibberish, the upshot is that, according to Worldcoin, the company has devised a perfect system to prove human uniqueness in a way that wont compromise privacy.
Crypto for the world
The bigger question is whether Worldcoin can achieve its almost impossibly ambitious scale. After last years spate of bad press, Worldcoin slunk into the background, further buffeted by the chill of the Crypto Winter. It continued to onboard new participants but was far off from its once-stated pace of having 20 million to 30 million registrants and 6,000 orbs by the end of 2022. Today, Worldcoin has signed up around 1.4 million people, with between 100 and 200 orbs operational at any given time. At the rate of 40,000 verifications a week, it would take almost 2,000 years to sign up half the worlds current population, although Blania says the company is far from operating at full capacity.
The explosion of OpenAI and ChatGPT has reignited hope for the project. The two companies always skated in parallel, part of Sam Altmans visionshared by Blania and his investorsthat in a world defined by A.I., there would have to be a fair and efficient way of dispersing a universal basic income.
The hope, Blania says, is that Worldcoin can actually distribute the upside of all this tech for as many people as possible. Put more simply, if artificial intelligence takes all our jobs, Worldcoin can be the mechanism of distribution to make sure ensuing capital creation is not hoarded by a select few.
The UBI aspirations for the project still seem half-baked. Both Variants Walden and a16zs Lazzarin demurred when I asked about the mechanics, and Blania answered vaguely about creating a so-called Windfall Clause where companies would have to share their revenues once they reach 2.5% of the global GDP.
The currency element itself is also tricky. While the Tools for Humanity team hopes Worldcoin will someday become bigger than Bitcoin, or even the U.S. dollar, the Worldcoin token will only have value if everyone agrees to adopt ita chicken-and-egg dilemma that could euphemistically be called social consensus and derisively a pyramid scheme.
One Altman entity manufactures a problem, and the other sells a solution to the problem they manufactured.
Elizabeth Renieris, senior research associate at Oxfords Institute for Ethics in A.I.
Complicating matters further is whether regulators in the U.S.and other key countrieswill ever permit Worldcoins crypto token. The Worldcoin employee offered to come to my apartment to prevent any impression that the company was operational in New York. The company plans to eventually offer the verification service in the U.S.without the token.
Outside its cryptocurrency component, a different feature of Worldcoin is more immediately suited to A.I.s rapid rise: proving humans are human. Everybody has seen deepfakes, and everybody hears voice synthesis, says Lazzarin. Its very clear that its going to become more and more difficult to disentangle what was generated by a machine and what was generated by a person.
To capitalize on the growing use caseand offer a more immediate route to monetizationWorldcoin launched a feature last week called World ID, a kind of badge you receive after being verified by Worldcoin that you carry around the internet proving that youre not an A.I. bot.
In the companys vision, World ID will joinor supplantusernames and passwords. Users logging onto platforms will use their World Apps, which, in an A.I.-saturated world, could be an elegant and relatively anonymous solution to proving ones identity.
Elizabeth Renieris, a privacy expert and senior research associate at Oxfords Institute for Ethics in A.I., says Worldcoin is just positioning itself to profit off an A.I.-dominated society created by Sam Altmans higher-profile company.
One Altman entity manufactures a problem, and the other sells a solution to the problem they manufactured, Renieris tells me. The relationship is a bit like pharmaceutical companies who place dangerous, highly addictive drugs on the market and then try to sell new drugs to treat the very addiction they helped create.
Blania denied the charge, saying challenges around artificial intelligence wont only originate from OpenAI. Altman did not make himself available for an interview.
For now, Worldcoin remains in beta. Despite its decentralized aspirations, it has yet to fully open-source its protocol, though most of the orbs schematics are available on GitHub. Blania hopes that someday other people will create their own verification objects, with Tools for Humanity receding into the background.
The parent company, however, has yet to release even the tokenomics of the projectthe breakdown of how Worldcoins will be minted and distributed. A person familiar with the matter said that upward of 70% of the tokens will go to Worldcoin registrants, with the rest going to Tools for Humanity and its investors. The token launch could happen in the first half of 2023.
OpenAI continues to conquer the internet, launching its newest language model system, GPT-4, last week. Worldcoin, meanwhile, is biding its time, manufacturing thousands of new orbs to disperse around the globe and betting that billions of people will be willing to stare into the future.
