Worldcoin to Airdrop to 1 Billion People? An In-Depth Look at OpenAI Founder's Web3 Project Worldcoin

This article, compiled by the author Jason Chen from the Institute of All Things, summarizes the basic introduction, purpose, applications, and challenges of Worldcoin, providing a quick understanding of OpenAI founder Sam Altman's Web3 project Worldcoin. If you are interested in the latest progress of Worldcoin, you can refer to this report: "OpenAI Founder's Worldcoin Project Progress! Launching Identity Protocol World ID, Mainnet and Tokens to Go Live This Year"; for insights into OpenAI founder Sam Altman's involvement in the cryptocurrency circle, please see: "Will the Super Chat AI Robot ChatGPT Issue Coins? Founder's Deep Roots in the Cryptocurrency Circle."

With the wave of AI enthusiasm triggered by OpenAI's ChatGPT release, OpenAI founder Sam is also simultaneously planning another Crypto wave that will happen in the first half of the year: WorldCoin.

As the man behind two world-class projects, ChatGPT and WorldCoin, Sam is also hailed as the next technology leader to succeed Elon Musk. Today, we will interpret the little-known project WorldCoin for you.

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What is Worldcoin?

Worldcoin is a crypto project founded by Sam in 2020, aiming to create an open-source protocol for global financial fairness and inclusivity. According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, over 4.4 billion people currently lack legal identity or cannot verify their identity digitally. Worldcoin's vision is to build the world's largest and most equitable digital identity and currency system. It achieves identity verification by scanning the irises of every individual on Earth, with millions of people's irises already scanned.

Worldcoin is currently in a testing phase and is expected to launch its mainnet in the first half of 2023. It is currently valued at $30 billion and is raising $1.2 billion. Behind Worldcoin are two entities: the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity. The Worldcoin Foundation supports and develops the Worldcoin ecosystem and community, while Tools for Humanity is a tech company dedicated to ensuring a fairer economic system and is the main development entity for Worldcoin.

Main Uses of Worldcoin

Worldcoin has three main missions: to create a global identity ID, a global currency, and a wallet that carries identity IDs and currencies. Users can use their own tokens, as well as other digital assets and traditional currencies, for payments, purchases, and transfers. These three missions correspond to three elements:

• WorldID: A digital identity focused on privacy and identity verification
• WorldCoin: The first token distributed for free globally, with a plan to distribute to 1 billion people
• WorldAPP: A wallet for global payments, purchases, and transfers

At first glance, it may seem ordinary, just like our common ecosystem trio: DID, Token, and wallet. However, a deeper look reveals the grand vision behind it and the technical challenges it aims to solve.

Worldcoin aims to create a global digital economy that every person worldwide can participate in and benefit from decentralized collective ownership. The first step is to have as many people as possible hold the same token. The more people collectively hold and use the same token, the greater the utility of the token for each participant. Therefore, Worldcoin aims to airdrop to 1 billion people globally to rapidly expand its financial network.

Challenges Faced by Worldcoin: Sybil Attack

However, to take the first step, the primary challenge to address is the Sybil attack, where an individual controls multiple addresses to profit. Speaking of which, it's interesting to note that the term "Sybil attack" comes from a 1973 novel called "Sybil," where a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder had 16 personalities. Hence, one person controlling 16 "people." This background sheds light on the term.

Recently, Arbitrum's airdrop has become a frenzy for many, sparking discussions on preventing Sybil attacks. The internet is already filled with identities that are hard to distinguish between real and fake. While obtaining a phone number and email for registration may not be easy, Web3 allows wallet addresses to be easily created without KYC, leading to a proliferation of fake accounts. Therefore, ensuring the fairness of token distribution is a crucial issue to address. It's essential to ensure that every person on Earth can only register one wallet in the network. While many are discussing methods like DID and data analysis, Worldcoin opts for a first-principles approach - verifying if the wallet address belongs to a real person through direct human verification! This approach aims to ensure the authenticity of the wallet holders. Kudos to Sam for his bold move!

Worldcoin's Biometric Device: Orb

For this purpose, Worldcoin has developed a biometric device called Orb, which verifies an individual's uniqueness by scanning their iris and ensures privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.

Orb is a spherical hardware device that, upon scanning an individual's iris image, locally generates an IrisHash value through a one-way function as a unique identifier, which is a short digital code. This value is then retrieved from the database to check if the person is registered. If not, registration is completed, and the individual receives a free airdrop. Each person can receive 25 tokens without the need to store or upload the original image, ensuring strict privacy protection.

For more technical details about Orb, you can refer to this article, showcasing Worldcoin's significant investment in this area.

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

Biometric technology, including facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, and DNA testing, is already mature. However, Worldcoin opts for iris scanning due to its uniqueness, anti-fraud capabilities, and performance advantages. Iris scanning is harder to forge compared to facial recognition and fingerprints. Considering the airdrop for 1 billion people, iris scanning's performance is more advantageous than facial recognition database matching or DNA testing difficulty.

Worldcoin will recruit operators globally, requiring them to be locally registered legal entities. The terms explicitly state that services will not be provided to residents of countries with legal restrictions, such as the United States, emphasizing Worldcoin's commitment to compliance. Collecting biometric information from the local population is sensitive in any country.

After applying to become an operator, the Worldcoin team will conduct an audit and interview process, including KYC, compliance training, and operational areas. Once approved, operators receive an Orb device to begin their work, educating local users and conducting scans. Operators receive token rewards for each completed registration, following a ground-level marketing tactic similar to the tactics seen in the "war of the hundred groups" five years ago. If Worldcoin enters China, it seems that Meituan may become the largest operator.

Worldcoin's Total Supply

Worldcoin's total supply is 10 billion tokens, with the majority to be provided to users and operators. To incentivize early contributors, the number of tokens users and operators receive upon registration decreases over time. Less than 20% of the total token supply will fund early core developers of Orb, with 3% allocated to ongoing ecosystem development.

Currently, 1.3 million people across four continents have completed scan registrations, with Portugal alone having over 1% of its population registered. Portugal's openness to crypto is frequently mentioned, reflecting its high registration rate.

It's worth noting that Worldcoin is closely associated with the Ethereum ecosystem. The documentation reveals its use of Ethereum's optimistic rollup, inheriting Ethereum's account anonymity and transaction transparency. The SDK includes cross-chain capabilities to interact with Ethereum mainnet, other Layer2 solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum, and even non-EVM-compatible chains like Solana and Polkadot. The overall structure is illustrated below:

Given Worldcoin's data collection of billions of people's biometric data, many may instinctively feel panic. However, it's crucial to note that Worldcoin's accounts and transactions will never be associated with any biometric data from Orb. Iris scanning is solely for identity verification, generating a unique, irreversible IrisHash locally and sending it to the database. Even in the event of a database breach, the true identities behind each IrisHash remain unknown. Therefore, Orb from Worldcoin is only used for verifying a unique individual, without revealing their identity.

How to Obtain Worldcoin: Divided into Two Phases

Acquiring Worldcoin as a new user involves two stages:

Phase One: Registration and Uniqueness Verification

• Over 160,000 individual users are using it
• Peak daily users exceed 12,000, with an average daily active user count of over 1,100
• Approximately 8 million related transactions
• Over 37,000 average daily transactions
• Sequence nodes verify if IrisHash exists in the database. If not, uniqueness verification is conducted, saving IrisHash and public keys

Phase Two: Claiming Worldcoin

• Users generate a wallet address locally in the app
• The app verifies ownership of the registered public-private key pair in the first phase through zero-knowledge proofs
• The proof is sent to the sequencer, which verifies it and deposits tokens into the wallet address
• The results are sent, recording that the user has received the reward to prevent double claiming

Learn more about the Worldcoin App: Launching the World App ecosystem wallet! Get World tokens for free regularly

As a global currency, Worldcoin must gradually achieve decentralization, mainly through governance, development, and operations.

• Governance: Ensuring the project's governance structure allows decentralized decision-making. A foundation has been established, with plans to hand over IP and grants for foundation management, initiating DAO.
• Development: Ensuring Worldcoin is open source to accommodate a large number of developers for collaborative work. The protocol is already open source, with Orb in the planning stages. More protocols will be opened up, establishing community communication mechanisms, setting standards for third-party apps, and accepting community code submissions.
• Operations: Ensuring Worldcoin is operated by multiple teams to mitigate single-point failure risks. Most work is currently done by Tools for Humanity under foundation guidance, with plans to increase operator incentives and support third-party operation teams.

This concludes the interpretation of Worldcoin. Overall, it is quite exciting. If successfully implemented, it could become the foundation of a global digital citizenship infrastructure, enabling a world digital currency for financial inclusivity. However, Worldcoin faces significant implementation pressure. Whether it's digital identity, digital currency, or the more sensitive collection of biometric information, this poses challenges in any sovereign nation. Therefore, the majority of Worldcoin users are currently from third-world countries.

This content was written by Jason from the Institute of All Things and does not constitute investment advice or represent the official stance.

This article is sourced from PANews, authored by Jason Chen from the Institute of All Things.