Author: LeftOfCenter

Author: LeftOfCenterAccording to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI founder Sam Altman is seeking a new round of financing of US$100 million for Worldcoin, another encryption project he founded, and is currently in the stage of in-depth negotiations. The Financial Times quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying that the new round of financing was supported by existing and new investors. As early as 2022, Worldcoin has received investment from institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Khosla Ventures at a valuation of up to 3 billion US dollars, which means that the valuation of the project has tripled in just one year. According to reports,In October 2021, Worldcoin completed a $25 million Series A round led by a16z

It is not an easy task to raise funds in the cold winter of encryption, and it is even more difficult to obtain such a huge amount. Why did Worldcoin, which was still unknown before, be favored by capital two years later? Is it worth the huge investment? What investment potentials do investors see in Worldcoin? What does Worldcoin mean to the wallet track and the encryption industry?

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Introduction to Worldcoin

Worldcoin was proposed by Altman in 2019. It was inspired by the theory of "Universal Basic Income (UBI)" proposed by economists. It is hoped that by sending free encrypted currency Worldcoin to achieve a fair distribution of wealth, the simple understanding is that the universal basic income (UBI) "Pay money" method to redistribute the wealth created in the AI ​​era.

Since it is sending money for free, a method is needed to determine the identity of the user and prevent the same person from receiving tokens multiple times with different identities. Therefore, World ID, as the underlying identity protocol of Worldcoin, can guarantee that each person can only Register an account with Pupil.

In addition, the team also developed a set of biometric devices to verify a person's uniqueness by scanning the iris, while ensuring the privacy of the verifier through zero-knowledge proof. The scanner, called Orb, which is currently in beta testing, uses an open-source design with a wide-angle and telephoto lens that works in conjunction with a neural network to capture high-resolution images of the pupil. Due to compliance restrictions, the hardware device is currently only available for trial use in certain regions, including Argentina, Chile, India, Kenya, Portugal, and Spain.

To sum up, Worldcoin is a product ecology built around UBI. It includes 3 products in total, a WLD Token that will be distributed to 1 billion people around the world free of charge, a verification protocol World ID used to determine real identities, and a token used to hold Wallet World App for storing tokens.

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From the narrative of a grand vision to the product form and user data that has taken shape

Worldcoin, which originated from the UBI theory, has a very lofty ideal since its inception - to distribute digital currency to 7.9 billion people around the world free of charge to achieve a fair distribution of wealth.

"By lifting billions of people around the world out of poverty through UBI, achieving what Bitcoin was too expensive and too slow to achieve - scaling cryptocurrencies and their financial systems to hundreds of millions of people" is a bold endeavor The plan is also a utopian vision. Although the vision is beautiful, it can easily become pure narrative empty talk. In the case of a small number of encrypted users, Worldcoin's ambition was once questioned as a "moon landing plan".

However, with two years of silent development, Worldcoin has begun to take shape in terms of product form and user growth. In addition to the ideal narrative logic, its business logic has also begun to become clear.

First of all, sending Free coins to users all over the world is not only a narrative technique, but also a very clever customer acquisition strategy. Every time a new account receives cryptocurrency, it will bring a new wallet user to Worldcoin, which will help Worldcoin seize Wallet entrance, and in the encryption industry, mastering the wallet is tantamount to seizing the traffic entrance.

The data shows that the ecological wallet "World App" launched a few days ago has already carried out a small-scale test. At present, there are nearly 1.7 million registered users, and it is still growing rapidly at a rate of one new user every 14 seconds. It can be called the world's largest growth rate. The fastest wallet. Users have completed more than 6.3 million login authentications for websites, mobile applications, and encrypted DApps through World ID, and the total number of transactions sent and transferred exceeds 690,000, with a daily transaction volume of 60,000.

At first glance, 1.7 million is not an eye-catching figure, however, for the encryption industry, 1.7 million is still a considerable figure.

The breakthrough of Worldcoin is not groundless. At least from the product design of the "World App" recently released by the ecology and the economic model of Worldcoin, we can see some fundamentals that can be followed.

In terms of product design, the team "precisely locates the target users and optimizes the usability of the product."

Objectively speaking, Worldcoin is facing compliance problems, and most of the currently open countries are in the third world countries and regions, which means that from the very beginning, Worldcoin took the route of surrounding cities from the countryside, which also coincides with the main goal of Worldcoin— —Inclusive finance, the so-called inclusive finance, of course, gives priority to covering those underdeveloped countries with weak financial infrastructure, that is, the vast number of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America currently covered by Worldcoin.

Since it is taking the route of inclusive finance, residents of those regions and countries that generally lack financial infrastructure should bear the brunt.

At the product level, the team conducts product design based on the minimum software and hardware standards, so that the current user threshold is minimized. Only in this way can the original vision - most of the world's human beings be included and reach people in all regions of the world, including those who cannot access the new digital economy.

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Photo: "National Geographic"/John Stanmeyer Photographed on the coast of Djibouti on the evening of February 26, 2013, African immigrants raised their mobile phones to receive cheap signals from Somalia to contact relatives overseas.

In terms of the token mechanism, Worldcoin adopts a deflationary reward model and encourages activity by doing tasks.

According to the plan, Worldcoin is expected to issue WLD tokens by the end of June, with a total supply of 10 billion pieces, and more than 80% of the token supply will be distributed to the community and contributors through free distribution.

In addition, the collection of WLD tokens is not a one-time distribution, but a task. In the early stage, one token is collected per week. Later, the time interval for token collection will be increased over time, and it may be collected every month. 1, which helps to keep users active. Judging from the data, it has also achieved good results. With a total of 1.7 million users, the daily transaction volume reached 60,000.

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World ID: The antidote to fake content in the age of AI

The proliferation of fake and anonymous accounts on the internet will intensify as artificial intelligence becomes more widely used. Artificial intelligence is good at imitating human behavior by generating text, deep fakes (deep fakes) or bypassing commonly used verification methods, making human accounts and bot/fake accounts increasingly difficult to distinguish, identity verification has become a problem that needs to be solved urgently.

As an open and permissionless identity protocol, World ID can not only be used as a universal digital passport, but also can prove the uniqueness of a person anonymously, that is, "you are you" without revealing privacy.

World ID employs Proof of personality, which solves two problems raised by AI: preventing sybil attacks and minimizing the spread of AI-generated misinformation.

Now that we admit that AI will bring about industrial revolution-level changes in human society, solutions to the problems surrounding it will also be a real need.

If we say that the so-called inclusive finance and UBI in the early days of entrepreneurship still retain some idealistic narrative logic, then, today, two years later, Worldcoin not only has real products and real user growth, but also allows us to see clearly It has reasonable business logic, and stands on a higher level, and has real needs on the level of social significance.

Interestingly, Sam Altman, the founder of Worldcoin, is also the founder of OpenAI. OpenAI has contributed a lot to leading the AI ​​track and leading a new round of upsurge. It can be said that the success of OpenAI and ChatGPT has given Worldcoin a new opportunity. Not only does it mean that the aura of Sam Altman himself makes investors "digging" his other project Worldcoin, but on another level, the potential threat of artificial intelligence led by OpenAI to create and disseminate inaccurate information on a large scale can just be exploited. The latter is solved, and the real usage scenarios and use cases are output for the latter's business logic. To some extent, these two projects have achieved a perfect self-consistent closed loop.

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What does it mean for the crypto industry?At present, the fast-growing "World App", which acquires a new user every 14 seconds, can be said to be the fastest-growing wallet in the world. From the logic of "mastering the wallet is mastering the traffic entrance of the encryption industry", Worldcoin is The importance of the wallet track is beyond doubt, considering that transaction fees may be introduced in the future (According to Tiago Sada, Director of Product, Engineering and Design at Tools For Humanity

, World App probably charges a few basis points per transaction), mastering the flow of the wallet entrance will bring great commercial success to World App.

If Worldcoin can continue to expand steadily, meet the target expectations, and bring tens of millions of incremental users, it may accelerate the pace of large-scale adoption of encryption, which will benefit the entire industry and is also the most important value for the entire encryption industry.

Under the constraints of current compliance issues, Worldcoin is forced to give priority to those less developed third world regions and countries. For people in these regions lacking financial infrastructure, when they scan their eyeballs and complete a series of follow-up operations, The high probability is to have the first wallet in life, and WLD will be the first cryptocurrency in their life.

Then, every new user who receives WLD tokens is equivalent to successfully converting a user of the "World App" wallet, which not only allows WorldCoin to successfully occupy the key entrance of the encryption industry - the wallet, but also brings a new dimension to the encryption industry. To increase users, because every new World ID is likely to flow from the WorldCoin ecosystem to other corners of encryption, which will benefit the entire encryption industry.

The Worldcoin ecological wallet World App, which hosts new users, will transport these crypto novices to other crypto ecosystems through its broad encryption pipeline.

In fact, from the very beginning, Worldcoin, which focuses on openness and equality, has been inextricably linked with the encryption industry. This is not only reflected in the founding team and VC background, and the original encryption project genes, but also in ecological development, integration and expansion. On the Internet, the Worldcoin team is also very active in connecting and cooperating with various encryption ecosystems.

Let's see where Worldcoin has extended its tentacles:

Worldcoin's native token WLD will be issued on Ethereum. The World ID underlying protocol used to run on Polygon. It plans to move to the Optimism OP mainnet together with World App. In addition, Worldcoin is actively developing and building around cross-chains.

The native wallet World App specially built for Worldcoin not only supports the payment, purchase and transfer of Beta WLD, but also supports the corresponding functions of a variety of other tokens, including WETH, WBTC, DAI, USDC (more tokens will be supported in the future);

World App also supports CEX and decentralized applications, currently supported applications include Uniswap, ENS, Circle, Safe, Moonpay, RampNetwork.

The Worldcoin team has jointly tested, implemented and released the EIP-4844 proposal with the development teams of Optimism, Coinbase and Prysm. The goal of this proposal is to reduce the L2 fee by 10 times, so that more users can afford the use of DApp .

It can be said that Worldcoin is not only the entrance to the wallet, but also the entrance from the real world to the encryption industry. Entering the world of Worldcoin is equivalent to entering the encryption ecology such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Imagine a scenario where World App continuously delivers fresh blood to the encrypted world through Worldcoin. These new users who have their own wallets and digital identities for the first time will have the first life experience of using cryptocurrency to purchase and trade, and they will also Start to try more different encryption operations. In addition to passively receiving airdrop tokens WLD tokens, you will also use Ethereum and stable coins for more on-chain operations, transactions, financial management, and even release and collection of NFT.

As an encryption portal connecting to the real world, World App will connect to other blockchains and ecosystems such as Ethereum, bringing new users to the industry. From this perspective, it is not impossible for Worldcoin to leverage the encryption that Worldcoin leverages for widespread adoption .

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Of course, in the process of WorldCoin's development, there have been uninterrupted doubts about WorldCoin. The main arguments of the doubters mainly focus on privacy and security, unrealistic goals, and exploitation of vulnerable groups.

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Although the team claims that the personality proof solution that combines the identity protocol World ID and the biometric device Orb can perfectly solve the current problem of false accounts, but can iris scanning really guarantee the user's true identity?

according toaccording toTweets published by Block Rhythm

, due to compliance issues, WorldCoin has not yet been opened in mainland China, resulting in the current user being unable to register, so a business of swiping irises has quietly appeared on the market. You can buy an iris verification at a maximum price of 30 US dollars, and then you can Receive a reward of 20 US dollars. According to these intermediaries, most of the human iris brushed on behalf of them come from rural areas in Africa and Cambodia. Such a low-cost proxy brush makes us wonder, how much water are there in the so-called 1.7 million users?For this Worldcoin official, acknowledged the existence of the black market, but emphasized that there are only a few hundred such cases. At the same time, for the iris black market, Worldcoin launched new measures to combat the black market, including adjusting the first face-to-face registration process and the implementation of dynamic and static QR codes.

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Question 2: Privacy and Security

A common objection to Worldcoin is that Worldcoin's human iris scans could raise privacy and security concerns.

However, today we have higher requirements for the transparency of data privacy, such as where the data is stored, whether it is possible to share the data with a third party, and if so, who is sharing the data with.

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Posted by former Ethereum Foundation member Hudson Jamesontweetstweets

Questioned the possibility of WorldCoin's claim to create a fair global currency, and questioned WorldCoin's economic model, saying "Worldcoin's token economic model is problematic, and Worldcoin's goal is to allow people around the world to master and use the same currency , but only 80% of the tokens are distributed to users, 10% are reserved by the team, and the remaining 10% are given to investors.”

In addition, Hudson believes that the distribution of WorldCoin may cause huge local socio-economic problems, and these problems vary from region to region, but so far there is no public information showing the team's response to these problems. No working group was formed with the participation of relevant experts.

Therefore, Hudson believes that WorldCoin is impractical, and doubts whether it can bring tens of millions of new users in 2025.

Question 4: Snowden once questioned WorldCoin, MIT Technology Review wrote an article calling it encrypted colonialismAnd as early as October 2021,Snowden once questioned Worldcoin's ID plan

, worried about Worldcoin building a global pupil database.

Snowden said it appeared to be a worldwide database of human iris scans (hashed) generated under the pretense of "fairness," and dismissed the impact with "We deleted those scans!" Snowden also warned, "Don't use biometrics for fraud. In fact, don't use biometrics for anything."recent american science and technology magazineMIT Technology Review also wrote that

, Worldcoin was first tested in low-income communities, just because residents in these areas lack legal protection, data collection is cheaper and more convenient, it can be called a kind of crypto-colonialism (crypto-colonialism). According to technologyreview, as of March this year, Worldcoin's iris scanning has been opened to 24 countries around the world, of which 14 are developing countries and 8 are located in Africa.