All Things Research Institute: What is the Worldcoin that the founder of OpenAI wants to airdrop to 1 billion people?
Original author: Jason Chen,Institute of Everything
With the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, there was a wave of AI boom, but at the same time, OpenAI founder Sam is planning another Crypto boom that will also occur in the first half of the year:WorldCoin。
As the man behind ChatGPT and WorldCoin, two world-class projects, Sam is also known as the next technology leader who will succeed Elon Musk. Today, he will explain WorldCoin, an unknown project.
Worldcoin is a Crypto project founded by Sam in 2020. It expects to create an open source protocol for global financial fairness and inclusiveness. According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, there are currently more than 4.4 billion people who have no legal identity or cannot access digitally. To verify identity, Worldcoin's vision is to build the world's largest and fair digital identity and digital currency system. It realizes identity authentication by scanning the iris of everyone's eyeball on the planet, and has scanned the eyeballs of millions of people so far.
Worldcoin is in the testing phase and is expected to launch the main network in the first half of 2023. It is raising 120 million US dollars at a valuation of 3 billion US dollars. There are two main bodies behind it: the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity. The Worldcoin Foundation is used to support and To develop Worldcoin ecology and community building, Tools for Humanity is a technology company that aims to ensure a fairer economic system and is also the actual development body of Worldcoin.
Worldcoin has three main tasks, creating a global identity ID, a global currency, and a wallet that carries the identity ID and currency. You can use your own Token and other digital assets and traditional currencies for payment, purchase and transfer. These three tasks correspond to three elements:
WorldID: a digital identity based on the protection of privacy and proof of personality, which will be explained later
WorldCoin: The first Token distributed freely to people worldwide, plans to distribute to 1 billion people
WorldAPP: A wallet for payments, purchases and transfers worldwide
At first glance, it seems unremarkable, it is our common ecological three-piece set: DID, Token and wallet, but after in-depth research, you will feel the grand vision behind it and the technical problems to be solved.
WorldCoin wants to create a digital economy where everyone in the world can participate in the ever-growing digital economy and benefit from decentralized collective ownership. The first step is to let as many people as possible hold the same Token, collectively And the more the same Token is used to form a network effect, the more useful the Token will be to each participant, so WorldCoin will airdrop to 1 billion people around the world to rapidly expand its financial network.
But if you want to take the first step, you must first solve the problem of sybil attacks. Sybil attacks are the behavior of one person controlling multiple addresses to complete profits. Speaking of this, I just added a very interesting little knowledge. Understand why it is called the strange name of a witch attack. This naming method comes from a novel "The Witch" in 1973. In the book, a woman called a witch is diagnosed with schizophrenia and has 16 personalities, so one person controls There are 16 "persons", so it is immediately clear.
During this period, the Arbitrum airdrop has become a carnival for many lumao studios, but it also makes how to prevent sybil attacks a hot topic in the industry again. Mobile phone numbers and email addresses are still not so easy to obtain, but wallet addresses can be created extremely conveniently after Web3 does not have KYC, resulting in the proliferation of false accounts, so the fairness of Token distribution is the primary problem that must be solved. Everyone can only register one wallet in their network. When everyone is discussing DID, data analysis and other means, Worldcoin directly adopts the first principle. Isn’t it necessary to verify that the wallet address is a real person? That step is in place and directly verified by living people! Just ask Sam if he has Musk's demeanor and qualifications to take over haha
Worldcoin has custom-developed a biometric device Orb for this purpose, which verifies a person's uniqueness by scanning the iris, while ensuring the privacy of the verifier through zero-knowledge proof.
Orb is a spherical hardware device. After it scans the iris image of the human eye, it will generate an IrisHash value as a unique identifier locally through a one-way function, which is in the form of a short digital code, and then retrieve it in the database. You can check whether the person has registered. If not, the registration will be completed and the airdrop will be obtained for free. Each person can receive 25 Tokens. This process does not require storing and uploading original images, and does not require other personal information, so the privacy of users will be strictly protected .
For the specific technical details of Orb, you can read this article. It can be seen that Worldcoin has invested heavily in this area.
https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/opening-orb-look-inside-worldcoin-biometric-imaging-device
Worldcoin will recruit operators all over the world, requiring them to be legal companies registered locally, and it is clearly stated in the terms that they will not provide services to residents living in the United States and other countries with legal restrictions, so it can be seen that Worldcoin attaches great importance to compliance , after all, it is necessary to collect the biological information of the residents of the country, which is very sensitive in any country.
In fact, biometric technology is very mature, including face recognition, fingerprint recognition, DNA testing, etc., but Worldcoin chose iris mainly because of uniqueness, fraud prevention and performance. Iris is more difficult to forge than face and fingerprint, and Considering that it is necessary to airdrop 1 billion people, whether it is the difficulty of face recognition database comparison or the difficulty of DNA testing, the performance of iris is more advantageous.
Then, after the enterprise applies to become an operator, the Worldcoin team will enter the review and interview process, including KYC, compliance training, and operation area. After providing a set of Orb equipment, you can start working. The operator will complete the popularization and scanning of local users. , the operator will get Token rewards after each registration is completed. Are you familiar with this method? Five years ago, the local push tactics of the Hundred Regiments War haha, so assuming that Worldcoin really enters China, I feel that Meituan will become the largest operator.
The total supply of Worldcoin is 10 billion, and the vast majority will be provided to users and operators. In order to motivate early contributors, the number of Tokens received by users and operators for each registration will decrease over time. Token Less than 20% of the total supply will be used to fund Orb's early core developers, and 3% will be allocated to continued ecological construction.
At present, 1.3 million people in four continents have completed scanning and registration, among which more than 1% of the population in Portugal has completed registration. I often hear many friends mention to me how open Portugal is to Crypto. It seems that this is true .
It is worth noting that Worldcoin is currently closely related to the Ethereum ecosystem. From the documentation, it can be seen that it adopts Ethereum’s optimistic rollup, inherits Ethereum’s account anonymity and transaction disclosure features, and the SDK has built-in cross-chain capabilities that can be used with The overall structure of Ethereum mainnet, other Layer 2 such as Optimism and Arbitrum, and even non-EVM compatible chains Solana and Polkadot is as follows:
Because Worldcoin collects biological data of billions of people, many people will subconsciously panic, but it should be noted that accounts and transactions on Worldcoin will never be associated with any biological data of Orb, and iris scanning is only used for personality Verification, and only one-way irreversible IrisHash generated locally is passed into the database. Even if the database is leaked, it is impossible to know the real identity behind each IrisHash, so Worldcoin's Orb is only used to verify that this is a unique person. As for who it is, there is no need to know.
A brand new user gets Worldcoin in two stages
Phase 1: Registration and detection of uniqueness
1. The user generates a key pair on the mobile APP
2. The user gives the hashed public key to Orb through the QR code
3. Orb scans the user's iris and calculates the corresponding IrisHash locally
4. Orb sends the user's public key and IrisHash to the sequencer node
5. The sequencer node verifies whether IrisHash already exists in the database, if it does not exist, it passes the uniqueness check and saves IrisHash and public key
Phase 2: Claim Worldcoin
1. The user generates a wallet address locally in the APP
2. APP verifies that it owns the public and private keys registered in the first stage through zero-knowledge proof
3. Send the proof to the sequencer, the sequencer will verify it and deposit the Token into the wallet address
4. Send the deposit result and record that the user has received the reward, so as to avoid secondary claim
As a global currency, Worldcoin must also gradually realize decentralization, which is mainly divided into three parts: governance, development and operation.
Governance: Ensure that the governance structure of the overall project allows for decentralized decision-making. A foundation has been established, and IP and grants will be handed over to the foundation for management to complete the launch of the DAO.
Development: Make sure that Worldcoin is open source, allowing a large number of developers to work together. The current protocol has been open sourced, and Orb is planning to open more protocols, establish a community communication mechanism, and set standards for third-party APPs, and Accepting community code submissions.
Operation: Ensure that Worldcoin is operated by multiple teams to offset the risk of a single point of failure. At present, most of the work is done by Tools for Humanity under the guidance of the Foundation. Next, incentives for operators will be increased. The Foundation Support third-party operations teams.
The above is the interpretation of Worldcoin. Overall, I am still very excited. If it is successfully implemented, it will become the infrastructure of a world-class digital citizen and build a world digital currency to achieve financial inclusion. However, Worldcoin is also facing great pressure to implement it. As mentioned above, whether it is digital identity, digital currency or more sensitive biological information collection, this is very contradictory in any strong sovereign country, so the vast majority of Worldcoin users are third world countries.
