What is inside the sphere? The untold story behind Worldcoin

Original Title: Inside the Orb: The Untold Story of Worldcoin's Launch

Source: Coindesk

Compiled by: Mary Liu, BitpushNews

I went to Berlin to "see" the future. Or more accurately, I went to Berlin to see the "Orb"—literally to look at it—a device that some believe is humanity's greatest hope for taming or even harnessing the future power of artificial intelligence. Others think, similar to a plot from "Black Mirror," that this device is designed to track and control humans.

I am staring at the Orb.

The size of the Orb is comparable to a bowling ball. It is made of alloy material, shiny and smooth. I lean in and gaze at a black circle, just like you would at a machine at the optometrist's office. Then, the Orb uses infrared cameras, sensors, and an AI-driven neural network system to scan my iris and verify that I am indeed a human.

I am not the first person to try this. Over 2 million people have now looked at the Orb—the flagship device of Worldcoin, a crypto and AI project co-founded by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Alex Blania (currently CEO of the parent company Tools for Humanity).

Worldcoin has a bold premise: artificial intelligence will continuously improve and eventually evolve into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), meaning it will be smarter than humans, which will spur leaps in productivity and create wealth that should not be seized by elites but fairly distributed to all of humanity in the form of Universal Basic Income (UBI)—in fact, to everyone, empowering billions. UBI will manifest in the form of Worldcoin.

The benefits of UBI have resonated with Altman for years. In a recent Zoom interview, Altman said, "Even without talking about AI, UBI is interesting to me; the idea resonates with many people. If our society is rich enough to eliminate poverty, then we have a moral obligation to figure out how to do that."

So perhaps AI can succeed where political policy has failed?

Altman said, "In an AI world, for obvious reasons, it (Universal Basic Income) is even more important. I still expect there will be jobs in a post-AI world. But A, I do think we need some kind of buffer during the transition, and B, part of the excitement about AI is that it is a materially richer world."

Following this logic, Worldcoin may be key to providing that material richness. But there is a question. If the goal is to distribute tokens for free to everyone, how do we ensure that we are distributing the spoils to humans rather than AI-driven bots? (It’s only a matter of time before AI laughs at CAPTCHAs.) Or what if malicious actors use AI to create multiple wallets and deceive the system?

The team has also pondered this question, exploring all the ways to prove one is human, and then arrived at a painful conclusion—they had no choice. Blania said, "We really didn't want to do this; we knew it would be painful, it would be costly, and people would find it strange. But we felt it had to be done: we need to verify humans with biometric data." Blania stated, "For various reasons, we didn't want to go down this path, but it really is the only solution."

This is the untold story of that solution, and a journey to discover whether it is indeed a solution or a problem.

Iris Sphere

The design of the Orb is sleek and minimalist, with no controls or knobs, a style very "Apple." This is not a coincidence, as the chief designer of the Orb is Thomas Meyerhoffer, the first employee of Jony Ive at Apple. (Ive is the legendary designer of the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.) The Orb is designed to be as simple as possible; Meyerhoffer has said, "It has to be simple enough for all of us. For everyone around the world."

In the Berlin office, Blania showed me an old model of the Orb and told me stories from the company's early days when they first patched the hardware. The idea was originally conceived as a "Bitcoin project," aiming to distribute Bitcoin for free once people proved their humanity. Blania lifted an old version and laughed, as it had a slot that could spit out physical tokens, like a reverse piggy bank, complete with two eyeballs and a mouth.

The early Orbs even talked to people. Blania recalled, "This thing spoke to you in a robotic voice," and each early Orb could hold 15 physical tokens (which contained the keys to actual Bitcoin), with the idea being that if people had something in their hands, they would take cryptocurrency more seriously. (For obvious reasons, the team quickly abandoned this idea.) Blania said, "We tried a lot of things, like having the Orb vibrate when it told people something." They would rapidly iterate using a 3D printer each week, releasing new versions of the Orb.

Blania, 29, is tall and sturdy, with a doll-like face, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, showing no signs of a CEO demeanor. He leads one of the most ambitious projects on Earth, and this is his first job. After working at Caltech, Altman appointed him as CEO and co-founder, where he studied neural networks and theoretical physics. Blania admitted that at first, "besides the technical depth, I thought I was a terrible CEO."

So Altman helped him. He said, "Altman basically arranged for someone to meet with me every week, and they would tell me where I wasn't doing well. One of the CEO coaches was Matt Mochary, who had previously coached Altman and Brian Armstrong, teaching them the basics of management, like how to have one-on-one conversations, how to hold staff meetings, and how to give public speeches."

Blania has no hobbies, except for weightlifting and meditation. His work hours are split between San Francisco and Berlin (the two main offices of Tools for Humanity). When in Berlin, he starts his day at 9 AM and leaves the office at 10 PM, then goes to the gym. He said, "I try to work every hour I am awake."

This work includes leading 50 full-time employees, some of whom are tasked with creating a new crypto wallet from scratch. "The user experience in cryptocurrency is terrible," said Tiago Sada, the head of product and engineering, whom I also met in the Berlin office; Sada is another genius. (There are many such people in the AI circle.) He grew up in Mexico, built robots with friends at 14, and later founded a "Venmo for Mexico" startup, which he encountered Altman at the Y Combinator incubator.

Sada was initially skeptical about crypto technology because he found it difficult to get non-technical people to sign up easily. When he asked people to do things like download the MetaMask extension, they got stuck. Of course, crypto wallets work for those interested in crypto, but for many of the 8 billion people on Earth, they are a barrier. The core idea of Worldcoin is to make it easy for everyone to access cryptocurrency, regardless of their technical proficiency. That is, they should be able to accomplish things in the blink of an eye. Thus, they built WorldApp, which can sync with the Orb and allow for near-instant logins.

I tried it myself. In the Berlin office, I downloaded World App from the App Store. The app synced with the Orb sitting on the conference room table. Seconds later, as I stared at the shiny sphere, my account was verified, and I am now the proud owner of 1 Worldcoin. (If I had tried this in the U.S., it would not have been possible due to regulatory reasons; they have not launched the token in the U.S.—at least not yet.)

At least for me, the registration process was very smooth. Ignoring the whole eye-scanning process, this was undoubtedly the smoothest crypto onboarding experience I have had in over five years. (More details on that later.)

One reason the technology runs so smoothly is the embrace of AI; the paradox of AI, with its potential consequences—wonderful (productivity boosts) and malicious (deepfakes)—drives the company's mission, but on a more mundane level, the latest advances in AI make engineers more efficient. Sada said, "Without AI, Worldcoin wouldn't exist." Various machine learning models help power the Orb, and Sada indicated that AI (in fact) has begun training other AIs, further enhancing their productivity.

How does AI train AI?

Sada said, "People think we need a lot of data to train algorithms; in reality, many models allow us to generate synthetic data. Just as you can use Dall-E to create an image of Luke Skywalker dunking in the style of Caravaggio—and it returns in seconds—engineers can use AI to create data simulations. This allows us to use relatively little data and, by default, remove everyone's [biometric and iris] data."

This brings us to a question that has plagued Worldcoin since its inception: what exactly is Worldcoin doing with these eye scans?

In October 2021, after Altman posted about The Orb on Twitter, critics and skeptics hit back hard. Edward Snowden tweeted, "Don't classify eyeballs, don't use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don't use biometrics for any purpose."

Snowden acknowledged that the project uses ZK-Proofs to protect privacy but insisted, "Smart is smart, but it's still bad; the human body is not a turnstile."

David Z. Morris wrote, "For a private company to collect biometric data on everyone on Earth poses enormous risks; by the way, calling the device Orb—with strong connotations of Sauron's eye—is creepy."

Blania, Sada, and others at Worldcoin repeatedly told me that the Orb does not collect biometric data from eyeballs, or at least not unless users explicitly allow it.

The company's privacy statement reads, "Privacy is a fundamental human right. Every part of the Worldcoin system is designed to uncompromisingly defend it. We do not want to know who you are; we just want to know that you are unique," meaning that if users allow it, some data will be captured. The default setting is not to capture data; users can change this setting and allow data storage, which Worldcoin states is for the narrow purpose of improving its algorithms. (Why users would enable this feature is beyond my understanding.)

Sada said, "The coolest thing, and also the hardest thing, is that the Orb processes all computations and verifications locally to check if you are a unique human, and then it generates a unique 'iris code.' You can think of your World ID as a passport, and what the Orb does is stamp your passport to indicate its validity." He reiterated that no eyeball image is captured. It is just a code indicating you are a unique person, not your age, race, gender, or eye color.

On the day Worldcoin was publicly launched, Vitalik Buterin wrote a detailed blog post questioning its privacy statement. He raised concerns but gave it a decent review. He said, "Overall, while staring at a sphere and having it deeply scan your eyeball has a 'dystopian vibe,' the professional hardware system seems to do quite well in terms of privacy protection… However, the flip side is that professional hardware systems introduce greater centralization issues. So we think the cypherpunks seem to be in a bind: we have to weigh one deeply rooted cypherpunk value against another."

Once users have a WorldID (which Worldcoin insists is privacy-protecting), it can be used in the future as a universal key to access other applications and websites (like Twitter or ChatGPT). They have already begun testing this feature. WorldID recently announced integration with German identity and access management provider Okta, with more partnerships in the works.

WorldID is a form of self-sovereign identity, which is the holy grail for many in the Web3 space. In the optimistic and best-case scenario, the Orb could extend SSID and UBI to billions, wresting online "identity" from centralized corporate giants and helping poorer, marginalized communities gain more financial empowerment. That is the vision.

But who pays for this? Under the current system configuration, once you register with the Orb, you can claim 1 Worldcoin weekly. This is the early kernel of UBI. Who pays for the tokens that suddenly appear in everyone's wallets (or eyeballs) on Earth? On one hand, cryptocurrency does have precedents; it enters the world like magic and eventually appreciates, with Bitcoin being the best example. That said, part of Bitcoin's value proposition is its scarcity, with a supply cap of 21 million coins.

Tokenomics

The tokenomics of Worldcoin are more nebulous.

Jesse Walden, an early investor in the project and general partner at Variant, acknowledged that "who pays" is a good question, but he stated, "I don't know if there is a clear answer right now, nor do I know if there needs to be." In his view, most startups do not come up with a business model at first; they typically focus on growth, and the growth of the network will eventually generate use cases and value.

Altman has a more pragmatic answer. He stated that in the short term, "We hope that when people want to buy this token, because they believe it is the future, funds will flow into this economy. New token buyers are the way it effectively gets rewarded."

Of course, the longer-term, grander vision is that the economic returns from general artificial intelligence will benefit humanity. (The name of Worldcoin's parent company is thus named—Tools for Humanity.) How this will happen is uncertain. Altman said, "Ultimately, you can imagine various things in a post-AGI world, but we don't have specific plans for that. At this stage, that's not the focus."

Few are more capable than Altman of envisioning a post-general AI world; he is at a strange intersection between these two AI projects. As a core participant in AI development, Altman is a co-founder of a project whose partial aim is to curb the misuse of AI as much as possible. While he does not see it that way: "I think it's more appealing to describe this story as 'creating problems here and solving them there.'"

This is the development model in Altman's eyes: the world will continue to move forward. As the world progresses, the competitive landscape changes. There is much that should happen, but it does not feel like a solution to a problem. It is more like a co-evolving ecosystem. "I don't think one is a response to the other." (I admit Altman intellectually crushes me; he gives me the impression of being sincere and well-meaning, but I do find his answers somewhat hard to understand.)

The question I asked Altman is the same one I posed to Blania in our first conversation: if Worldcoin is completely successful and everything goes well, what would the world look like? Assuming billions of users have joined, and the financial benefits brought by AGI are fairly distributed to everyone. What does that future look like? What is the meaning of it all?

Altman said, "I think we will all become the best versions of ourselves, with more personal autonomy and agency. More time and more resources can be used to do things." He spoke quickly and without hesitation; these are thoughts he has been contemplating for years: "Like any technological revolution, people will find amazing new things for each other… but it is a very different, much more exciting world."

What are the biggest risks and challenges to realizing this vision? Altman believes "it's too early to talk about major challenges," but he acknowledges that OpenAI and Worldcoin "have a long way to go to make it work," and "there is a lot of work ahead of us."

The heavy lifting includes launching the Orb, and this is where things get dangerous.

Use Cases

The goal of scanning 8 billion eyeballs is almost ambitious. In the long run, even without attaching any biometric conditions, providing a free "candy" for everyone on Earth is a daunting logistical challenge. How to reach remote areas? How to safely transport the Orbs? How to explain the complex relationship between the potential of AGI, the need for UBI, and the advantages of crypto?

Its pitch is essentially, hey, get some free cryptocurrency!

Over time, this message has been refined, modified, and nuanced, but it is the basic pitch: users can register for some free cryptocurrency, and the Orb is the way to prove you have not registered anywhere before.

Reflecting on Blania's first live test feels like a scene from a Judd Apatow comedy. In a park in Germany, Blania was holding the Orb looking for potential users when he noticed two young women. Should he approach them to talk? The Worldcoin team was watching from a distance. (In the Berlin office, Blania found a photo on his phone taken by someone of the scene: like a guy in a bar mustering the courage to hit on someone.)

At that time, they were still in the early "Bitcoin project" phase. So Blania approached one of the women, showed her the Orb, and said it could help her get free Bitcoin. He told her, "The only purpose of this device is to ensure you only get it [Bitcoin] once, but you got Bitcoin, which is something to be happy about."

The woman's response was simple: "Are you crazy?"

She chose not to scan her iris, but her friend was willing.

Blania half-laughed and said, "Actually, I think she just thought I was cute."

This is not surprising. Blania is a handsome young man, smart, and able to clearly and convincingly articulate the benefits, nuances, and reasons for the existence of Worldcoin (who wouldn't be impressed?). But how to scale Alex Blania? Perhaps if Blania could be cloned, he could personally get 8 billion people registered.

But back to reality, at first, Blania and a small team were just dragging the Orb around the streets of Berlin, showing it to people and trying to explain it on the spot. He said, "This was actually the early script; people would come close to us because of this shiny sphere, and they would ask, 'What is that?'"

The early Orbs spoke to users in a strange robotic voice, instructing them to come closer or move away, or possibly to move left. (Later, the team made a series of optimizations to automate this process.) The robotic voice confused onlookers, and sometimes they would take funny selfies with the Orb.

Neo-Colonialism Issues

Less amusing were the early attempts to recruit users in Nairobi, Sudan, and Indonesia. In April 2022, a MIT Technology Report published a 7,000-word feature titled "Deception, Exploitation of Workers, and Cash Handouts: How Worldcoin Recruited Its First 500,000 Test Users." The authors argued that despite the project's ambition, "so far, it has only built a biometric database based on the bodies of the poor."

The report described a poorly executed operation filled with misinformation, data errors, and malfunctioning Orbs. Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi wrote, "Our investigation found a huge gap between Worldcoin's public information focused on privacy and the user experience; we found that the company's representatives used deceptive marketing tactics, collected more personal data than they admitted, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent."

I brought up this report to Blania and Altman. Blania said, "The first thing to understand is that this article was published before the company completed its Series A funding." He acknowledged that this is not an excuse but emphasized that the project was still in its infancy, and since then, "actually everything has changed," with operations and protocols becoming stricter. Of course, the possibility of such mistakes occurring—no matter how good the team's intentions—makes people uneasy about sharing their biometric data.

Blania was also angry that the article characterized the project as (in his words) "colonial practices trying to get poor people to sign up worldwide." He stated that this is misleading because at that time, over 50% of registered users came from wealthier countries like Norway and Finland. Their goal was to test registrations in both developed and developing regions, in hot and cold climates, urban and rural areas, to better understand what works and what doesn't.

Altman believes that mistakes are a natural part of the growth process for any large-scale project. "With any new system, you will face some initial fraud, which is part of why we have been doing this [slow testing phase] for a long time. Understanding how the system faces abuse and how we will mitigate that. I don't know of any system that can achieve such scale and ambition without facing fraud issues. We hope to think deeply about this."

One mitigation measure is changing how Orb operators are compensated. Currently, there are 200 to 250 active Orbs in the field, with about a few dozen operators, each employing their own sub-teams. Initially, Worldcoin paid operators based solely on the number of original registrations, which led to some hasty and shoddy practices.

Blania stated that operators are now incentivized not only by the number of registrations but also by the quality of registrations and the users' understanding of what is happening; after the Orb scans a few weeks later, if users do indeed use Worldapp, operators will receive more compensation. (The main way you "use" Worldapp now is to claim your weekly 1 Worldcoin.) I spoke with two operators in Spain, Gonzalo Recio and Juan Chacon, who largely endorsed this new agreement, but whether this process is being strictly followed globally remains an open question.

How do people trust that Worldcoin is indeed addressing these issues? Altman has heard these questions; he knows he is unlikely to win over skeptics, but he seems not to mind. He believes the more compelling answers do not come from him, Blania, or the company, but from the early users of Worldcoin. He said, "You can try to answer a bunch of questions and do all these things, but that's not how it really works."

"What really works is the first million people, early adopters, moving forward—convincing the next ten million. Then the next ten million are closer to the norm. They convince the next billion. These are indeed the norms that convince the other billions."

Policy and the Future

In our first conversation, Blania told me that if WorldID and Worldcoin's UBI were to be widely adopted, it would "potentially be one of the most profound technological transformations in history." If that is indeed the case, would it create a series of new complex legal, policy, and even existential issues that governments need to consider?

As I wrapped up the meeting in the Berlin office, the last question had been bothering me. It almost feels like this project is so ambitious, so wild, and so transformative—at least in theory—that those in power have not fully considered its consequences. If the compensation humanity receives is not through the sweat of labor but through general artificial intelligence, does that not represent a fundamental shift in the structure of the world? Wouldn't governments insist on regulating this? Assuming the answer is yes, how will Worldcoin address this issue?

Blania leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. He said, "This is obviously a major discussion point, and I will start with what is most important right now. And the most important thought is actually far less complex than all the things you just mentioned." Blania said they are focused on the basic points of regulatory uncertainty in the U.S.; Worldcoin "is likely the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history."

Altman countered the notion that policymakers are clueless or just grinding away. He said, "I've been to about 22 countries, met with many world leaders, and people are more aware of this than I imagined, and they take it very seriously." (It is unclear whether what he referred to as "it" pertains to Worldcoin's specific ambitions or the broader challenges posed by AI.) "I am now spending more and more time not on technical issues but on policy challenges. Ultimately, for the world to navigate through all this to a better place, it has to be a solution that consists of both technology and policy. In a sense, the policy part may become more difficult."

Policy barriers are one of the risks Worldcoin faces. The risk of not scaling quickly enough is a risk Worldcoin faces. More mistakes in the field (like those highlighted in the MIT Technology Report) present another risk. Or iris data could be leaked. Or there could be a failure in tokenomics. Or the erosion of trust could hinder future registrations. Or there are logistical challenges when bringing the Orb to trickier corners of the world. Or technical and manufacturing failures. Or discovering the Orb has been compromised to some degree. (As Vitalik Buterin pointed out, "The Orb is a hardware device, and we cannot verify that its construction is correct and has no backdoors.")

Or perhaps the value of Worldcoin will never exceed a few cents, so no one cares. There are many, many risks on the long road to widespread adoption of Worldcoin; the project remains a moonshot.

But as the company's think tank believes, the biggest risk is not the risk of Worldcoin itself. For them, the most chilling risk is that something like biometric WorldID will be developed, just not in an open or privacy-protecting way.

The original logic Altman articulated before ChatGPT became mainstream remains compelling: ultimately, AI will become so good that it can easily pretend to be human, so we need a way to prove our humanity. Perhaps biometric proof is inevitable. Who should be the steward of that solution? "Something like WorldID needs to happen," Blania said. "You need to verify yourself online. Similar things will happen. The default path is that it is fundamentally not online, it does not protect privacy, and it is fragmented by governments and states."

For Blania, the non-privacy version of biometric scrutiny is the real "Black Mirror" plot. He said, "This is the default path, and I think Worldcoin is the only way."