The cryptocurrency project Worldcoin was launched on July 24th, 2023, by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with the core offering of a World ID, in other words, a “digital passport.”
The company behind the project, Tools For Humanity, believes that it will be able to prove that its holder is a real human online and not an AI bot. This they say will be necessary in the age of generative AI chatbots like the popular ChatGPT, which produce remarkably humanlike language.
The company also distributes a crypto token, the Worldcoin (WLD), to people “just for being a unique individual” they say as Worldcoin will function differently from market leader’s Bitcoin or Ethereum by offering people a token of the future currency without requiring that they invest any funds.
The company’s website described Worldcoin as an Ethereum-based “new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.” Everyone in the world would get a free share, the company suggested—if they agreed to an iris scan with a specially designed device that resembles a decapitated robot head, which the company refers to as the “chrome orb.”
We know by now that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t we?
ChatGPT and OpenAI
Altman and OpenAI, who are in fact the startup behind ChatGPT, have been in the spotlight since late last year and with interest in artificial intelligence growing by leaps and bounds attracted significant investors’ interest. In June, Tools For Humanity raised $115 million in a Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital and joined by a16z and other prominent investors from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Blockchain Capital.
Iris Scan
Undeterred customers who sign up and obtain a World ID, must do an in-person iris scan using Worldcoin’s ‘orb’, a silver ball approximately the size of a bowling ball. This scan is a way of ensuring that it is only humans that are able to sign up and once the person is verified by the orb’s iris scan their World ID is created (Source).
“Worldcoin is mostly trying to innovate on the authentication side,” said Jeremy Clark from the Canada-based Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering.
Anyone can use cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, Clark explained, signing up with as many identities as they want, but Worldcoin is “trying to get one and only one (address) to basically everyone on the planet.”
The Crypto Coin
This, it seems, is going well too, as since its beta period, which started in 2019, the project has 2 million users who have perhaps been enticed by the “free” tokens, and the worry of total control over their finances with the soon to be launched Central Bank Digital Currency. The result is that those who sign up in certain countries and the crypto token Worldcoin is scaling up “orbing” operations to 35 cities in 20 countries since its launch on Monday.
Additionally, WLD’s price rose in early trading on Monday, peaking at $5,29 on the world’s largest exchange, Binance, and at 1000 GMT was at $2.49 from a starting price of $0.15, having seen $25.1 million of trading volume, according to Binance’s website (Source).
However, the WLD token is subject to the same volatility as all other cryptocurrencies, and “there’s nothing to say that any company is going to accept this for payment or that you can do anything with it,” said Peter Howson, a crypto expert from Britain’s Northumbria University.
Altman and co-founder Alex Blania admited in a roll-out announcement that “Worldcoin is an attempt at global scale alignment, the journey will be challenging, and the outcome is uncertain.”
Universal Basic Income
The founders do, however, seem certain that they want the currency to act as a form of universal basic income that would allow more equitable access to the global economy. UBI social benefits program is usually run by governments where every individual is entitled to payments.
Yet he thought a world with UBI would be “very far in the future” and he did not have a “clear idea of what entity could dole out money.” He imagined that Worldcoin lays the groundwork for it to become a reality and believes that the reality could help to combat income inequality because AI “will do more and more of the work that people now do.”
Altman claims that Worldcoin can help address how the economy will be reshaped by generative AI “People will be supercharged by AI, which will have massive economic implications,” he said, and “We think that we need to start experimenting with things so we can figure out what to do,” he said.
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