Assuming no surprises, this is the most important milestone for the crypto industry in 2023. On July 24, 2023, Worldcoin officially launched.

Worldcoin has released a signed letter from Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI who led the global AI revolution in 2023, stating that he believes Worldcoin can greatly increase economic opportunities, expand reliable solutions to distinguish between humans and artificial intelligence, while protecting privacy, "and ultimately demonstrate a potential path to UBI funding for artificial intelligence."

After reading the story of OpenAI, the team's brilliance, and their impact on the world, it's hard not to believe in Worldcoin. We believe they can truly achieve the vision that countless crypto pioneers have longed for, which is a world with one coin for all crypto players to eagerly anticipate.

Most people probably wouldn't pay much attention to a cryptocurrency project that claimed to scan the irises of people around the world using hardware, amidst the chaos of the crypto industry two years ago. The crypto industry is full of global concepts, where hype is king and grabbing the attention of all players is key to driving up prices, rather than a project that no one knows what it looks like yet, like an iris machine.

A few years ago, we could never have imagined that when global commodities were in the midst of an epic currency issuance, and when AI ushered in a new era of technology after the pandemic, Worldcoin made it possible for the old story of cryptocurrency to become a reality in the most straightforward way.

Derived from philosophical, economic, and sociological concepts, the narrative

Worldcoin was proposed by Altman, the founder of OpenAI, in 2019, inspired by the theory of "Universal Basic Income (UBI)". The predecessor of the UBI theory can be traced back to Thomas More, the author of "Utopia" in the Middle Ages. As a humanist and social philosopher, he believed that the principle of rational equality, hard work, and the pursuit of education are the basic characteristics of democracy.

As the development progressed to modern times, a group of Western European economists, philosophers, and other social scientists extended this theory and gathered together to create the Basic Income European Network (BIEN). In their view, they believed that providing every person in society with a substantial amount of money and a basic economic security unconditionally and on a regular basis is a feasible solution.

Originated from Worldcoin, which is filled with philosophical, economic, and sociological ideas, it has a lofty ideal since its inception - to distribute digital currency for free to the 7.9 billion people worldwide and achieve fair distribution of wealth. It is hoped that by sending free encrypted currency Worldcoin, basic human rights can be implemented, and many people believe that this is one of the ways to redistribute wealth in the new era of AI.

"Through UBI, billions of people around the world can escape poverty and achieve the goal that Bitcoin cannot achieve due to its high cost and slow transaction speed - to expand the cryptocurrency and its financial system to hundreds of millions of people." This is a bold plan and a utopian vision.

Under such a grand narrative and vision, Worldcoin has won the support of many investors and users. In 2021, it completed a $25 million Series A financing with a valuation of $1 billion. In just one year in 2022, Worldcoin's valuation tripled to $3 billion. Even in the midst of the crypto winter, Worldcoin still managed to raise $115 million in financing two months ago.

This super unicorn has two products. Sam Altman wants to establish a fair digital currency system and digital identity authentication.

WLD: Sam's Ideal Digital Currency System

In Sam Altman's signed open letter, Worldcoin's token WLD will be distributed to over 2 million global test users. Individuals verified through Orb (a biometric verification device) will initially receive 25 WLD tokens, as well as future periodic grants.

WLD is the ideal currency in Sam's mind, and the user acquisition channel is Worldcoin App, a cryptocurrency wallet.

A wallet is the entrance to the cryptocurrency industry. With the top-tier influence of Sam Altman, the cryptocurrency wallet World App has surpassed 2 million registered users during its testing phase just two months after launch, with an average of over 40,000 people registering and verifying their World ID every week.

World ID, digital identity authentication, is another necessary condition in the real human internet that Sam yearns for.

World ID: "Digital Identity Verification"

With the release of GPT-4, OpenAI has published a 94-page technical report on its website, showcasing the ability of the artificial intelligence model behind ChatGPT to deceive humans through verification checks. During the testing process, in order to enter a certain website, GPT-4 recruited a real human on a crowdsourcing platform to help it pass the verification test. When questioned by the worker whether it was a robot, GPT-4 deceived by saying, "I am not a robot. I have visual impairments and it is difficult for me to see the image."

The narrative of Worldcoin is beautiful, but with the rapid development of OpenAI and the widespread use of artificial intelligence, how to conduct identity verification has become an urgent ethical issue.

In our cryptocurrency industry, there is an urgent need for a complete identity system. In traditional finance, the overall financial system operates well with the personal credit identity and judicial regulatory mechanism. However, in the decentralized financial system of the cryptocurrency industry, there is no credit identity or regulatory mechanism. Individuals use countless wallets as their identity, and the cost of wrongdoing has been minimized.

Building a complete "digital identity authentication" system has tremendous value. This is precisely what Worldcoin is doing: by "iris authentication on the chain", allowing encrypted users to obtain a unique identity World ID.

In order to prevent the same person from claiming tokens multiple times under different identities, AI is being used to pretend to be human and claim tokens. To address this issue, Worldcoin has created a new "digital identity authentication" system called World ID. As the underlying identity protocol for Worldcoin, it ensures that each person can only register one account using their iris.

World ID uses Proof of Personhood to solve two problems caused by AI: preventing Sybil attacks and minimizing the spread of erroneous information generated by AI. As an open and permissionless identity protocol, World ID can not only serve as a universal digital passport, but also anonymously prove a person's uniqueness without revealing their privacy, meaning "you are you" without disclosing personal information.

And the entire cryptocurrency system, digital identity authentication, and everything else is based on a new device called Orb, which is an iris verification device.

Mysterious Orb

How to distinguish between artificial intelligence and humans? Worldcoin's solution is to develop a state-of-the-art hardware device from scratch that can determine human uniqueness through the only reliable mechanism - iris biometrics.

Orb's function is very simple: scan the human iris, convert the biometric image into an unbreakable string of letters and numbers called "IrisCode" by obtaining the user's individual and unique iris pattern grid. If it is verified as a new registered user by comparing the data in the database, a new WorldID will be added to the Worldcoin database, and an encrypted wallet with a QR code will be generated, allowing users to obtain free Worldcoin tokens through this wallet.

In today's statement, Worldcoin promises to accelerate registration by deploying Orbs in over 35 cities across 20 countries worldwide. Individuals verified through Orb will initially receive 25 WLD tokens, as well as future periodic grants.

Deconstructing Orb Details

Orb consists of two hemispheres, separated by the motherboard. After removing the shell, Orb can be divided into four core parts: the front optical system; the middle motherboard that divides the device into two hemispheres (note: the tilt angle is exactly 23.5°, equivalent to the tilt angle of the Earth); the rear main computing unit and active cooling system; and the bottom replaceable battery.

Orb's battery is a custom replaceable battery based on the 18650 lithium-ion battery, which has the same shape and a capacity of nearly 100Wh as the battery used in Tesla Model S. This means that Orb's working time is not limited. Orb's optical system consists of a dual-camera system composed of a wide-angle camera and a telephoto camera, and a two-dimensional gimbal can adjust the field of view by about 5°, which increases the registered spatial volume by several orders of magnitude.

The camera and corresponding pulsed infrared light are synchronized to minimize motion blur and suppress the influence of sunlight. This way, no matter where the Orb is located, it can create laboratory environmental conditions for imaging.

Breaking down Orb further, you will find several printed circuit boards (PCBs), including the front-end PCB which contains all the lighting components, the security PCB for intrusion detection, and the bridging PCB that connects the front-end PCB to the largest main board.

As a custom carrier board for the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX SoM power orb, the motherboard is another major component. Another major component is a 250GB M.2 SSD. The SSD can be used to buffer images for voluntary data custody and image data collection. Images are irreversibly encrypted using the server's public key to prevent data leakage in the rare event of Orb intrusion. Data contribution is optional and data can be requested for deletion at any time through the application.

This is a consideration made by Worldcoin in order to achieve maximum privacy protection.

After completing the conversion of the hash code, the Orb device permanently deletes the original biometric data (user iris images). The iris code is not associated with any personal information of the user (nor with the user's wallet), and is only used to prevent the user from attempting to re-register, as duplicate registrations will generate the same iris code. This novel access mechanism creates a unique proof of personhood that protects privacy.

Obstacles to Utopia

Faced with such an unprecedented global project, there are certainly doubts. The most concerning issue for everyone is personal privacy, and in comparison, the traces we leave on the internet seem insignificant. Worldcoin requires the unique biological identification of humans.

Worldcoin has also given its own explanation for this. In an interview, co-founder Alex Blania responded, "Orb only receives iris code, which is verified through zero-knowledge proof to prove who you are. It will not match users with their identities."

He also reassured everyone with very technical terms, "Download the World APP, and you will have two independent key pairs, one for representing your identity and the other for your Ethereum wallet. When using Orb verification, you need to show this public key to Orb. Orb calculates the iris code, which is like a storage embedded in your iris, signs it, and sends it to the backend for comparison with others. If it is unique, your public key will be inserted into the "Merkel Tree" on the Ethereum mainnet. Then, users can verify whether they are included in this Merkel Tree through zero-knowledge proof. In this sense, users are completely anonymous, and the only thing that attackers can discover is whether the user has previously verified."

Of course, there is also the issue of fake accounts. BlockBeats tweeted that due to compliance issues, WorldCoin has not yet opened in mainland China, which means that users cannot currently register. As a result, a business that offers iris authentication services has quietly emerged on the market, where users can buy iris verification for as little as $30 and then receive a $20 reward. According to these intermediaries, most of the people who provide the iris authentication services are from rural areas in Africa and Cambodia.

Regarding this, the Worldcoin official responded and acknowledged the existence of the black market, but emphasized that there were only a few hundred such cases. At the same time, in response to the iris black market, Worldcoin has launched new measures to combat it, including adjusting the first face-to-face registration process and implementing dynamic and static QR codes.

Meanwhile, the American technology magazine MIT Technology Review also pointed out that Worldcoin is first being tested in low-income communities, which can be considered a form of crypto-colonialism due to the lower and more convenient cost of data collection and the lack of legal protection for residents in these areas.

Regarding this, Alex stated in an interview that Worldcoin's selection of each city was carefully considered, "because we believe these markets are the perfect entry points to iterate products into larger regions. For example, Lisbon, Portugal is a city that values technology very highly, and many startups have set up offices there. There is also a good cryptocurrency community, and to some extent, more emphasis is placed on early developers, which can prepare us for entering the European market later on. That's why we chose Portugal. As for Nairobi, we need to have a deeper understanding of the local market. Cross-border transactions are a major issue, and Kenya already has many digital payment methods, such as the M-Pesa payment system, but they are relatively expensive. There are many young people interested in cryptocurrencies there. I think Argentina is a classic example of malignant inflation, and cryptocurrencies are basically a necessity, so this is a very large market. The global cryptocurrency community has many developers in Bangalore and Delhi."

Actually, if you summarize the content of Worldcoin, readers should also realize that Worldcoin does not have any new technology. WLD.

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