What is the Worldcoin that OpenAI's founders are going to airdrop to a billion people?

原文标题：《 万物研究所：OpenAI 创始人要向 10 亿人空投的 Worldcoin 是什么？ 》

原文作者： 陈剑 Jason，万物研究所

With the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, there was a wave of AI craze, but at the same time, OpenAI founder Sam is planning another Crypto craze that will also happen in the first half of the year: WorldCoin.

As the man behind ChatGPT and WorldCoin, Sam is also being touted as the next tech leader to succeed Elon Musk. Today, he explains WorldCoin, a project that has yet to be announced.

Worldcoin is a Crypto project founded by Sam in 2020, hoping to create an open source protocol for global financial fairness and inclusion. According to the report of McKinsey Global Institute, there are currently more than 4.4 billion people without legal identity or unable to verify their identity through digital means. Worldcoin's vision is to build the world's largest and fair digital identity and digital currency system, and it implements identity authentication by scanning the iris of every eyeball on the planet, already scanning millions of eyeballs.

Worldcoin is in beta, expected to launch on the mainnet in the first half of 2023, and is raising $120 million at a valuation of $3 billion. There are two main entities behind it: Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity. The Worldcoin Foundation supports and develops the Worldcoin Ecosystem and community. Tools for Humanity is a technology company that aims to ensure a more just economic system. It is also the actual development subject of Worldcoin.

Worldcoin has three main tasks, creating a global ID, a global currency and a wallet to carry ID and currency. You can make payments, purchases and transfers using your own tokens, as well as other digital assets and traditional currencies. These three parts of the task correspond to three elements:

WorldID: A digital identity that protects privacy and personal identity. This article will focus on privacy and personal identity

WorldCoin: The first Token to be distributed free to people worldwide, with plans to send it to 1 billion people

WorldAPP: Wallet for making payments, purchases and transfers worldwide

At first glance, it seems to be unremarkable, which is our common ecological three-piece package: DID, Token and wallet. However, a deep study will reveal the grand vision behind it and the technical problems to be solved for it.

WorldCoin wants to build a digital economy where everyone in the world, no matter who, can participate in the continuous development and benefit from decentralized collective ownership. The first step is to let as many people as possible hold the same Token. After the network effect is formed by the more people collectively hold and use the same Token, The more useful the Token is to each participant, so WorldCoin needs to make airdrops for 1 billion people around the world, so as to rapidly expand its financial network.

But if you want to get your foot in the door, the first thing you have to deal with is witch-hacking. Witch-hacking is the act of one person controlling multiple addresses in order to make a profit. And here's an interesting tidbit. I never understood the strange name witch-hacking. In the book, there is a woman named witch who is diagnosed with schizophrenia and has 16 personalities, so one person controls 16 "people", so it is immediately obvious.

This period of time Arbitrum airdrop has become a carnival of a mass hair studio, but also let how to prevent witch attacks again become a hot topic of the industry, the Internet itself has been filled with true or false identity, but at least the registration of the required mobile phone number and mailbox is not so easy to obtain, However, without KYC in Web3, wallet addresses can be created very conveniently, resulting in the proliferation of fake accounts. Therefore, the fairness of Token distribution is the primary issue that must be solved. It is necessary to ensure that every person on earth can only register a wallet in its network. Worldcoin uses first principles directly, doesn't it need to verify that a real person is behind the wallet address? That's a one-step, direct live verification! Just ask Sam if he has the demeanor and qualifications of Musk.

Worldcoin custom-developed a set of biometric devices for this purpose, Orb, which scans iris to verify a person's uniqueness, while ensuring the privacy of the verified person through zero-knowledge proof.

The Orb is a spherical hardware device that scans the iris image of the human eye, locally generates a unique identifier via a one-way function, in the form of a short numeric code, and then runs it through a database to check whether the person has registered, and if not, to complete the registration and receive the airdrop for free. Each person can receive 25 tokens. This process does not require storing and uploading original images or other personal information, so users' privacy will be strictly protected.

See this article for the technical details of Orb, and you can see that Worldcoin is investing heavily in this area.

https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device

Worldcoin will recruit operators all over the world, which must be legally registered locally, and clearly states in the terms that it will not provide services to residents living in the United States and other countries with legal restrictions. Therefore, it can be seen that Worldcoin attaches great importance to the compliance, after all, it needs to collect the biological information of local residents. This is very sensitive in any country.

In fact, biometrics technology has been very mature, including face recognition, fingerprint recognition, DNA testing, etc., but Worldcoin chose iris mainly because of its uniqueness, fraud prevention and performance. Iris is more difficult to counterfeit than face and fingerprint, and considering the need to airdrop for 1 billion people, Whether it's a face recognition database or a DNA test, Iris has the edge.

Then, after the enterprise applies to be the operator, Worldcoin team will enter the audit and interview process, including KYC, compliance training and operation area. After providing a set of Orb equipment, it can start to work. The operator will complete the popularization and scanning of local users, and the operator will get Token reward after each registration. Is this a very familiar play? Lol, so if Worldcoin does enter China, it seems that Meituan will become the largest operator.

The total supply of Worldcoin is 10 billion, most of which will be provided to users and operators. In order to encourage early contributors, the number of tokens received by users and operators for each registration will decrease over time. Less than 20% of the total Token supply will fund Orb's early core developers, and 3% will be allocated to ongoing ecosystem development.

At present, 1.3 million people in four continents have completed scanning registration, among which Portugal alone has more than 1% of the population completed registration, I often hear many friends mentioned to me Portugal's degree of openness to Crypto, it seems so.

It is worth noting that Worldcoin is currently very closely related to the Ethereum ecosystem. We can see from the documentation that WorldCoin adopts optimistic rollup of Ethereum and inherits the characteristics of account anonymity and transaction openness of Ethereum. Moreover, SDK has built-in cross-chain capability that can be used with Ethereum main network, other Layer2 such as Optimism and Arbitrum, and even non-EVM compatible chains Solana and Polkadot. The overall structure is shown as follows:

Since Worldcoin will collect billions of people's biometric data, many people will subconsciously panic. However, it should be noted that Worldcoin accounts and transactions will never be linked to Orb's biometric data. The iris scan will only be used for personality verification. Moreover, only one-way irreversible IrisHash generated locally is passed into the database, and even if the database is leaked, there is no way to know the real identity behind each IrisHash, so Worldcoin's Orb is only used to verify that this is a unique person, who does not need to know.

A new user gets Worldcoin in two stages

Phase one: Registration and testing uniqueness

1. The user generates a key pair on the mobile APP

2. The user sends the hashed public key to the Orb through the QR code

3. The Orb scans the user's iris and calculates the corresponding IrisHash locally

4. The Orb sends the user's public key and IrisHash to the sequencer node

5. The sequencer node verifies whether IrisHash already exists in the database. If it does not exist, IrisHash and the public key are saved through uniqueness detection

Stage 2: Claim Worldcoin

1. The user generates a wallet address locally in the APP

2. The APP verifies that it has the public and private keys registered in the first stage by zero-knowledge proof

3. Send the proof to the sequencer, which verifies it and saves the Token to the wallet address

4. Send the saved result to record that the user has obtained the reward, so as to avoid the second claim

As a global currency, Worldcoin must gradually realize decentralization, which is mainly divided into three parts: governance, development and operation.

Governance: Ensure that the governance structure of the overall project allows for decentralized decision-making. The foundation has been established and will be administered by the foundation for IP and grants to complete the launch of DAO.

Development: Ensure that Worldcoin is open source, allowing for a large number of developers to collaborate, the protocol is already open source, Orb is in the works, more protocols will be opened, community communication mechanisms will be established, standards will be set up for third party apps, and community code submissions will be accepted.

Operations: Ensure that Worldcoin is operated by multiple teams to offset the risk of a single point of failure. Most of the current work is done by Tools for Humanity under the guidance of the Foundation. Next, there will be increased operator incentives, with the Foundation supporting third party operators.

The above is the interpretation of Worldcoin. On the whole, I still feel very excited. If it is successfully implemented, it will become the infrastructure of world-class digital citizens and build the world digital currency to achieve financial inclusion. As mentioned above, whether it is digital identity, digital currency or more sensitive biological information collection, it is very contradictory in any strong sovereign country, so the vast majority of Worldcoin users are from the third world countries at present.

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