In the Worldcoin plan, encryption technology, ZKP, and AI technology are not mutually exclusive options, but can be combined with each other as the next generation of network technology. The premise of all this is the need for sufficient users to generate enough user data, enrich the usage scenarios of Token, and ultimately support the advancement of productivity to meet the operational needs of UBI.
Author: Dark Side of the Moon
Worldcoin has recently become popular again. On the one hand, AI celebrity and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has close ties with it. On the other hand, Worldcoin announced plans for another $100 million financing plan. According to PANews, this round of financing has been highly sought after by institutions and has already exceeded subscription. In the Bear Market environment, it can be said to be a hot cake in the market.
Prior to this, a16z has already led a $3 billion valuation and a $100 million Token financing investment, and Worldcoin is now facing the moment of Token issuance. The current allocation of 20% of the shares is confirmed, with 10% allocated to team members and another 10% allocated to investors.
01 Origin: The challenges of Web3 and Altman’s UBI dream
In 2019, Altman initially proposed the idea of Worldcoin, which was being prepared as an ID project at the time. However, Alex Blania from the California Institute of Technology is actually its CEO, overseeing its daily operations, while Altman is its co-founder, with a focus on Open AI in his daily work.
Overall, both can be seen as the main operators of Worldcoin, because at the beginning, Worldcoin took on the responsibility of popularizing Web 3 globally, which is also an important reason why it can go hand in hand with AI. In a sense, only by combining with AI can Web 3 truly achieve Altman’s ultimate dream - UBI (Universal Basic Income).
At the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, and governments in Europe and America adopted quantitative easing policies and actively distributed consumption vouchers, subsidies, and even cash to stabilize society. Altman’s UBI concept also found a like-minded person. Around early 2020, Alex Blania and Sam Altman hit it off, ‘What if there was a way to distribute shares of digital tokens to everyone on Earth for free?’
The epidemic is the real catalyst for UBI, which has truly been widely practiced at the societal level, and has also guided Altman’s path choice. He also revealed in his blog that he hopes to use AI technology to conduct research on combating the epidemic.
And, using hardware equipment to ensure the real and credible of ID is gradually taking shape, “there is another point, you need to have a physical connection to the actual world, so you need hardware or real ID”, which is also the theoretical source of the iris scanning device Orb.
In this timeline, Altman almost simultaneously defined the technical route of Open AI and Worldcoin, that is, the LLM large model solution in the AI field and the hardware +ID route in the Cryptocurrency field, and then led Open AI, while Worldcoin was operated by Alex Blania.
This also fits more with Altman’s personal style in the investment field and actual business operation, that is, while personally operating a company, investment business will continue to expand, but the actual operation of other companies will be led by others, with less of a situation where Musk is the actual operator of multiple companies.
![]()
The Intersection of Crypto + AI 02
LLM is the victory of parameter quantity, and its power has conquered the world. However, the popularization of Cryptocurrency has not been confirmed, but Cryptocurrency does face the same dilemma as AI in the early stages - lack of users and scenarios, and few users have little to do besides trading.
For this issue, Worldcoin’s CEO Alex Blania’s view is that ‘allowing everyone to own the ownership of this new protocol will be the ‘fastest’ and ‘most popular’ path to the widespread adoption of Cryptocurrency and Web3 to date, and will be able to solve one of the main challenges of Web3: relative scarcity of users.’
And the logic of Crypto still needs time to be verified, implemented in specific product designs, Worldcoin is being developed by Tools For Humanity, and its product will be divided into three parts:
- World ID: Orb scans iris to establish personal identity;
- Worldcoin: Built on the OP superchain, the Token will play an economic role on it;
- World App: Built-in trading, identity recognition and UBI specific economic functions, hoping to retain Web 2 users here.
The introduction of Worldcoin has been written continuously in this article, not to outline its specific details, but to reveal the logic behind it and the product details of Worldcoin.
![]()
The productivity of the AI era will lead to the redundancy of social wealth. In an article in 2021, Altman believes that the wealth created by AI will be sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. He predicts that by 2031, AI could pay every American $13,500 per year.
After the successful implementation of the ChatGPT technical roadmap, this goal no longer seems like a distant dream. The core issue now becomes how to ensure the orderly distribution of wealth, which requires the verification of personal identity. Furthermore, to prevent common attacks such as impersonation, the off-chain DID becomes a necessity.
Proof of identity has become a basic prerequisite for individuals to participate in the distribution of public welfare in the era of UBI.
03 Middle Way: Miscarriage and Hidden Worries
Similar to P2E and other Web 3 native economic models, Worldcoin’s user base has steadily increased during 2021-2022. However, it has also encountered privacy issues, paid promotion controversies, and even temporarily faced a shutdown.
But thanks to the popularity of chatGPT, the current registration number of World App has exceeded 1.7 million, while by the end of 2022, the number of users has only exceeded 1 million. However, it should be pointed out that the registration number of the App and the number of people who have undergone iris scanning cannot be equated. According to data from March 2023, CEO Alex Blania revealed that only 450,000 people from 24 countries have completed the full biometric data collection.
04 Privacy dilemmas have not been completely resolved
According to its description, the data scanned by Orb will not be stored and maliciously utilized by Worldcoin, and will gradually adopt ZK technology for higher security protection. However, in some regions, its operating contractors will adopt incentive measures to encourage local residents to submit data, so users will be required to provide identification to prevent duplicate claims.
And there have been cases of data buying and selling, according to its company spokesperson, there have been instances of collecting local villagers’ iris in Southeast Asia and selling them to personal encryption users for $30 or less to help complete app registration, and the driving force behind this is the potential Token Airdrop.
What is more serious is the contradiction between regulatory intervention and data processing.
Worldcoin has a registered subsidiary in Germany, and according to the principles of the GDPR regulation, any data processing or involving EU residents within the EU is subject to EU regulations. However, there is a conflict between Worldcoin’s global operations and EU regulations in practice. For example, it claims that 1% of the population in Portugal has become its users, but how to handle global data has not been adequately clarified. According to GDPR regulations, ‘failing to adequately protect data may result in fines of up to 4% of global revenue or €20 million’.
Next is the hidden issue of ‘digital exploitation’ of the Third World, limited by the regulatory policies of various countries. Currently, residents of countries like China and the United States can register their app, but cannot be verified through World ID. According to official data, most of the registered locations for Worldcoin are in poor countries, such as Africa and Latin America. Currently, 24 countries and regions are participating in the testing, with 14 of them being developing countries and 8 located in Africa. The specific distribution and per capita GDP are as follows:
- Africa: Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Uganda;
- Latin America: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico;
- Europe: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway;
- Asia: India, Indonesia, Israel, Turkey
![]()
In early May, it has been hacked and leaked some passwords. Although it was the fault of its dealer for not taking proper confidentiality measures, if the data before being uploaded to the blockchain cannot be guaranteed, the privacy of the data after being uploaded will also be compromised.
Not only is it easy for hardware devices to have problems, but its underlying chain architecture has also undergone multiple changes, seemingly not a completely self-developed project.
05 Underlying architecture technology has been changed multiple times
Although Worldcoin aspires to be the first encryption project for global users, not all of its technologies are self-developed. Instead, they are based on existing mature technologies to avoid scattered focus, but focus on identity recognition and operators.
Taking the underlying architecture as an example, Worldcoin chose to cooperate with mature existing products. In the early stage of the project, it was Hubble, but it was mainly used in payment scenarios and could not meet the requirements later. Then it switched to Polygon, but as Worldcoin carried more scenarios, it eventually turned to Optimism’s superchain architecture. Worldcoin first came into contact with Layer2 such as Optimism in 2020, but it didn’t really start cooperation until its solution matured.
![]()
To some extent, Worldcoin doesn’t focus much on Cryptocurrency, but more on popularization and user acquisition. What it really cares about is how to combine existing technologies to bring billions of people into the Web 3 domain.
In its plan last year, it planned to use ZKP technology for offline identity proof, called PPPoPP (Privacy-Preserving Proof-of-Personhood Protocol), mainly by performing ZK calculations on offline information and then uploading them to the chain to meet the needs of privacy protection. However, it still adopted Hubble’s solution at that time. After switching to the super chain, the data throughput can be further amplified, and the use of Gas Fee will be reduced.
Moreover, after collecting the data, it can be used for machine learning through the ZKML scheme, using ZK-protected data without compromising personal privacy, to explore more use cases based on the collected data.
![]()
To summarize, in the Worldcoin plan, encryption technology, ZKP, and AI technology are not mutually exclusive options, but the next generation network technologies that can be combined. All of this is based on the need for sufficient users to generate enough user data to enrich the use cases of tokens and ultimately support the progress of productivity to meet the operational requirements of UBI.
06 Conclusion: Is UBI Worth It?
Unlike the rapid development of AI, UBI and Cryptocurrency still face many doubts, especially whether using Cryptocurrency as a means of promoting UBI can be effective, which is still an unpredictable problem.
The logic of UBI is not complicated. Currently, the total production of human society exceeds the total demand. However, due to uneven distribution, there is widespread inequality between poor and rich countries, high-income and low-income groups, and even between men and women, and generations. The idea of UBI is to redistribute social wealth in a relatively gentle way.
For example, ImpactMarket on Celo has already made attempts to provide financial and educational services to residents of the third world, increasing their livelihood and living standards through Crypto UBI.
UBI does not need to forcefully change the current distribution relationship, but rather gives everyone equal access through the new Token issuance method. Similarly, Chinese economist Zhai Dongsheng has also envisioned the Chinese version of UBI in his publication ‘A Preliminary Exploration of a New Redistribution Scheme in the Era of Starting Point Income and Shared Prosperity,’ where ‘the central government provides funding support in the form of Digital Money for Chinese residents aged 0-35, using domestic currency debt and tax revenue as the financial source, and provides one-time education or skill training assistance for Chinese residents aged over 35.’
Whether successful or not, Worldcoin will be the first large-scale UBI experiment for all mankind. Previous attempts have not gained widespread follow. For example, previous projects like Circles also fall under the UBI category, but the current number of participants involved in governance is less than k people, still belonging to small-scale experiments.
With the help of Worldcoin, Cryptocurrency will face for the first time a global attempt with hundreds of millions, if not millions, of ordinary users, most of whom were not Web 3 users before. From this perspective, at least in terms of popularizing Cryptocurrency, it has taken a step towards true mass adoption.
