Interview & Editing: Jack, BlockBeats

Organizing: Joyce, Kaori, BlockBeats

At the recent Token2049 roundtable conference in Singapore, Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania stated that due to regulatory issues, Worldcoin has yet to become a mainstream application. However, on the other hand, every time Worldcoin's registration numbers reach a new high, it receives widespread attention. Last week, the Worldcoin official announced that more than 200,000 Chileans have completed World ID verification, which is 1% of Chile's total population of 19.5 million. Is Worldcoin the key to unlocking mass adoption of cryptocurrencies?

At the end of July, Worldcoin released a signed open letter from Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter stated that "Worldcoin has been established for more than three years, aiming to create a brand new identity and financial network that everyone owns. If Worldcoin succeeds, it will increase economic opportunities, provide reliable solutions to distinguish between AI and humans, protect privacy, promote global democracy, 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, how is the progress of Worldcoin now?

BlockBeats reporter recently interviewed Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania to discuss the latest developments of Worldcoin and answer readers' questions about Orb pricing, Worldcoin's profitability, and how to deal with regulation. The following is the original interview:

Registered users exceed 2 million, surprising response in 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, and what are your main responsibilities at Worldcoin currently?

Alex Blania: Before joining Worldcoin, I was conducting theoretical physics research at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, studying quantum systems using large-scale neural networks (what people now refer to as AI). This was essentially the field I focused on during my first two and a half years at Worldcoin. Prior to that, I worked for a vertical agriculture company as an AI researcher, and I was very satisfied with my research work at that time.

Max Norenstern, the third co-founder of Worldcoin, contacted me. I suddenly received an email from Max while 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 does today. It only had a few rough titles, such as the need to solve the currency supply problem, the need to launch a new token, and provide a lot of incentives to develop the network. Ultimately, we may be able to achieve a global basic income (UBI) based on AI.

And in the future, as AI becomes more and more powerful, all of these will become even more important. This was three and a half years ago, which means that discussions about general artificial intelligence (AGI) and related topics were not yet mainstream. So even if the idea that AGI will be achieved in the relatively near future is true, it still 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 job, I just went through several rounds of interviews as a software engineer. I ultimately decided to decline the offer to join as a software engineer because it was too early for me. I was likely to return to the field of physics and start my own startup company later on.

Then Sam said, "Okay, you can become a co-founder of Worldcoin." They both invited me to be a co-founder, and I agreed and brought in other members who are now part of the founding team, many of whom are friends I met while doing research. 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 worked on the technical aspects and designed the entire system. Then, as the CEO, I was responsible for the project. The work I have done in these years has changed significantly. Initially, I only needed to be responsible for a lot of research and technical work. Now, the company has grown quite large, with almost 200 employees. We have two main offices, one in San Francisco and one in Berlin. The company's organization is more dispersed, and we have many employees distributed in various places.

All of these situations mean that my current job is mainly to communicate with external personnel and explain our project, just like what I am doing with you now. Communicating with politicians is a new thing in my life, and I enjoy it. The remaining work is to manage and operate the company, hold meetings with engineering teams, financial teams, and so on, just like running a company. Overall, there is nothing particularly special.

BlockBeats: What role does Sam play in today's Worldcoin? Many people are interested in Worldcoin because of its connection to ChatGPT and Sam himself. So, many people may wonder if Sam still has some influence within the Worldcoin team?

Alex Blania: He is a co-founder and has been more active since the project was launched. Of course, he focuses 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 communicates with me almost every week. We attend external company meetings together, and he participates in every important decision and helps with the most important workflows, such as fundraising activities or recent meetings with politicians, as well as recruitment and strategy development. Worldcoin is actually one of the three companies he is currently involved in.

BlockBeats: Congratulations on Worldcoin's registered users exceeding two million.

Alex Blania: Yes. But I hope 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 number of registered users per month or per week, and I hope this is just a very early stage of what we need to do.

BlockBeats: This is indeed a very fast 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 launching, we made sure to understand all major regions, know what challenges may be faced in each region, and how adoption rates would be, so we conducted tests in each major region.

We conducted extensive testing in Europe. We focused mainly on Portugal in Europe because there are many developers there, and Lisbon in Portugal may have the highest density of encryption developers in Europe. Then we went to Latin America, mainly Argentina and Chile. Currently, Argentina and Chile are among the countries with the fastest adoption of cryptocurrencies, so it is a very interesting market. In Africa, we mainly went to Kenya because it is a cutting-edge technology country and a very stable democratic country.

When Worldcoin was launched, we also went to some regions in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. The reaction in Tokyo was actually very surprising. It gave me a rocket launch-like surprise. We had very few devices in Asia, but the download and registered user numbers were very high, which was amazing to me. When I attended Token 2049, I also found that many people knew me and took selfies with me.

How much does an iris recognition machine cost?

BlockBeats: Have you encountered any technical bottlenecks in developing the Orb iris device? What is the most difficult part?

Alex Blania: It took a long time to build the Orb device. It is a very complex device because it needs to meet multiple constraints at the same time. First of all, it needs to be able to scale to billions of people, otherwise it makes no sense. That is to say, in terms of image acquisition and uniqueness check, they 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 do it. Even commercial devices cannot do this because no one will design a device that can work normally on a scale of billions of people. Usually, such devices do not exist.

Next is security. Typically, the use of this technology is carried out with the involvement of the government. It will be carried out in a regulated environment with government personnel present, which means that the actual risk of fraud in registration and other aspects is quite low. However, Worldcoin must work in a completely adversarial environment, and we must expect people to constantly try to cheat and attempt to attack hardware. We cannot even trust the personnel operating the device, so the hardware itself and the software on it must be very secure.

The third challenge is, of course, privacy, because this must be a decentralized protocol that is not controlled by the government. So it needs to fully protect privacy and there can be no compromise in this regard. Therefore, we are basically building the entire system from scratch to ensure that it can only be this way.

These are basically three main challenges. Now, Orb devices can overcome these challenges, and it can reliably distinguish at least one billion people. 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, can protect privacy, and the real problem now is production, to manufacture enough of these devices and launch them globally.

So the main problem we are currently working on is the operational aspect. Two or 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 situations where government restrictions are imposed? These are the main issues we are currently addressing.

BlockBeats: Vitalik has talked about some decentralized hardware issues, such as the possibility of backdoors. Given that most manufacturers are centralized, how does the team prevent those who manufacture Orb devices from cheating or setting backdoors in the devices?

Alex Blania: I think Vitalik's article is very good. However, some media misunderstand it as negative. He is not trying to express a negative meaning, he is just describing the engineering challenges we must overcome. In this regard, I basically agree with his views.

Regarding the centralization issue in manufacturing, currently it is indeed very centralized. The devices are manufactured by a manufacturer with very strong capabilities, who is under our strict control. Therefore, it can be considered that 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 other people producing Orb devices, and it may not be a company that we control. It could be some large technology companies. I'm not saying that we have contacted them, but this is a possibility.

Other major companies may produce their own Orb devices following the design, and the Foundation will provide the keys needed to activate these Orb devices, which will be audited. So initially, there may not be many manufacturers, perhaps only about ten, and all manufacturers will still be subject to strict audit control. At some point in the future, of course, full decentralization can be achieved, and decentralized audits can be conducted, with an increase in the number of manufacturers.

This is not a new problem. Of course, it is much more difficult to implement than decentralized financial products, but it is clearly not impossible. So we can accomplish it.

BlockBeats: What is the current cost of manufacturing an Orb device? How many Orb devices have been deployed to the market?

Alex Blania: This is one of the interesting things, production and manufacturing are not bottlenecks from a cost or production speed perspective. Currently, the price of each Orb device is about $4,000. This number will continue to decrease in the coming years as the manufacturing batches get larger and the cost gets lower. We are also developing a new Orb device that is more complex, more secure, and more advanced in all aspects. Therefore, all of these costs will drop to below $1,000 in the next few years. But again, the main challenge currently facing Worldcoin is deployment and promotion, not just cost.

Worldcoin is not yet profitable

BlockBeats: What field is the Worldcoin team mainly investing resources in now?

Alex Blania: The biggest cost is currently everything surrounding operations and promotion, and there is a lot of work to be done in this area. When a product enters a country, it is necessary to conduct legal analysis of all local laws, and to comply with local laws, small changes may need to be made to the product, which requires cooperation 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 handle 10 different things in parallel to achieve this goal. This is the first aspect of the cost.

The second largest cost is the actual engineering work. The number of engineers is the highest in the company, including hardware engineers, protocol, application and software engineers, which is the second largest cost area. Then there are all the regular affairs of the company, including various consulting fees and so on. Building and promoting products is the biggest expense area.

BlockBeats: Where does the company's main profit come from currently? Is it from selling Orb iris devices?

Alex Blania: This is very similar to other cryptocurrency projects. It is a digital asset that has a certain value, and there are investors who believe in its future. Our network is still too early to generate a lot of revenue, but there will definitely be revenue in the coming years. So, like other cryptocurrency projects, it's just that for us, the scale is much larger, the ambition is much greater, and the speed is much faster.

And before the product was launched, there was a period of time when there were some registration arbitrage situations, but these things are no longer possible now.

BlockBeats: Worldcoin is facing regulatory pressure in different countries or regions. How do you view the regulatory issues related to Worldcoin and cryptocurrencies, and how will you handle these issues in the future?

Alex Blania: I think it is understandable for countries in the early stages of product launch to have some regulatory measures. We have caused a sensation in many places, which is a positive sensation. People everywhere want to register on a large scale, and we are appearing in news from all over the world, almost becoming a hot topic in the global technology industry for several weeks. So with too much attention and too many registrations, regulatory agencies will raise questions to ensure that everything is done in the right way.

So for us, there is nothing worth paying attention to in this regard. We simply 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 place great emphasis on privacy in every aspect. In fact, we only need to respond to (cryptocurrency) regulatory agencies, cooperate with them, and solve problems. Some markets and countries hold a hostile attitude towards cryptocurrency, while others are more friendly. So this is not a particularly special situation for us, and we will only stay away from countries with issues related to cryptocurrency to avoid trouble.

BlockBeats: Besides Worldcoin, what other tools or infrastructure do you think are needed for "Proof of Humanity" in the AI world in the future?

Alex Blania: I believe that regulation, especially good regulation around artificial intelligence, is definitely the most important thing and this is important globally. However, this is not new and many people are discussing this issue. Another fundamental limitation 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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