Dialogue with Worldcoin CEO: We are in an early stage of rapid growth, and it is reasonable for regulation to intervene at this time

Interview & Editing: Jack, BlockBeats

Organization: Joyce, Kaori, BlockBeats

At the recent Token2049 roundtable in Singapore, Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania stated that due to regulatory issues, Worldcoin has yet to become a mainstream application. On the other hand, every new record in registration numbers for Worldcoin garners widespread attention. Last week, Worldcoin officially announced that over 200,000 Chileans have completed World ID verification, which exceeds 1% of Chile's total population of 19.5 million. Is Worldcoin the key to unlocking mass adoption of cryptocurrency?

At the end of July, Worldcoin released an open letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter stated, "Since its establishment over three years ago, Worldcoin aims to create a new identity and financial network owned by everyone. If successful, Worldcoin will increase economic opportunities, provide reliable solutions to distinguish AI from humans, while protecting privacy, promoting global democratic processes, and ultimately demonstrating a potential path to achieve global basic income (AI-funded UBI)."

Two months have passed; what is the current progress of Worldcoin?

Recently, BlockBeats reporters interviewed Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania to discuss the latest developments of Worldcoin and answer various questions from readers regarding Orb pricing, how Worldcoin generates profit, and how it responds to regulatory challenges. Below is the original interview:

Over 2 Million Registered Users, Surprising Response in Asia

BlockBeats: How did you get started in the cryptocurrency field, or how did you meet Sam, and why did you decide to join the Worldcoin project? What are your main responsibilities at Worldcoin now?

Alex Blania: Before joining Worldcoin, I was engaged in theoretical physics research at Caltech in Los Angeles, studying quantum systems through large neural networks (what people now refer to as AI). This was essentially the focus of my work during the first two and a half years at Worldcoin. Prior to that, I had a vertical farming company. At that time, I considered myself an AI researcher and was quite satisfied with my research status.

Max Norenstern, the third co-founder of Worldcoin, reached out to me. I suddenly received an email from Max at Caltech, which included a paper written by Sam describing the Worldcoin project. The project sounded very crazy at the time, even more so than it does today. It had only a few rough headings, such as the need to solve the currency supply issue, the need to launch a new token, and to provide substantial incentives to grow the network, ultimately aiming for a globally universal basic income (UBI) based on AI.

As AI becomes increasingly powerful, all of this will become more important. This was three and a half years ago, meaning that discussions about artificial general intelligence (AGI) were not mainstream at that time. So even saying that AGI would be achieved in the relatively near future seemed very crazy.

After receiving that email, I replied that I would be happy to come. I drove to San Francisco and had my first interview with Max and Sam. At that time, we did not discuss my future role in the company or any other work; I just went through many rounds of interviews as a software engineer. I ultimately decided to express that I would not join as a software engineer because it felt too early for me. I was likely to return to the field of physics and later start my own startup.

Then Sam said, "Well, you can be a co-founder of Worldcoin." Both of them extended the invitation to me, and I accepted, bringing along other members who are now part of the founding team, many of whom were friends I met during my research. So it’s interesting that, for this reason, we have many physicists in our company. We started this work three and a half years ago, and the rest is history.

In the first year, I mainly focused on technical work, designing the entire system, and then I have been responsible for the project as CEO. The nature of my work has changed significantly over the years. Initially, I was mainly responsible for a lot of research and technical work, but now the company has grown quite large, with nearly 200 employees. We have two main offices, one in San Francisco and one in Berlin. The organization of the company is more decentralized, with many employees distributed in various locations.

All of this means that my current job mainly involves communicating with external parties, explaining our project, just like I am doing with you now. Engaging with politicians is a new aspect of my life, and I enjoy it. The remaining work involves managing and operating the company, holding meetings with the engineering team, finance team, and so on, just like running a company. Overall, there’s nothing particularly special about it.

BlockBeats: What role does Sam play in the current Worldcoin? Many people’s interest in Worldcoin is also related to it and ChatGPT, as well as Sam himself. So many might imagine that Sam still has some influence within the Worldcoin team?

Alex Blania: He is a co-founder, and his activity has actually increased since the project launched. He certainly focuses on OpenAI, as he is the CEO of OpenAI, not the CEO of Worldcoin. So most of his time is spent on OpenAI. However, he and I communicate almost every week. We have external meetings for the company together, and he participates in every important decision and helps handle the most critical workflows, such as fundraising activities or recent meetings with politicians, as well as recruitment matters, and of course, helping to formulate strategies. Worldcoin is actually one of the three companies he is currently involved with.

BlockBeats: Currently, Worldcoin has surpassed 2 million registered users. Congratulations.

Alex Blania: Yes. But I hope we can achieve faster growth in a relatively short time. I hope that when we talk next time, this number will be our monthly or weekly registration count, and I hope this is just a very early stage of what we aim to do.

BlockBeats: This is indeed a very rapid adoption rate, as people must use actual devices to register for the application. Can you share some insights about the types of users registering for Worldcoin, or describe the user demographics, such as which regions or areas have the most users?

Alex Blania: Before the launch, we made sure to understand all the major regions at least, knowing what challenges we might face in each area and how the adoption rate would be, so we conducted tests in each major region.

We conducted quite in-depth testing in Europe, primarily focusing on Portugal, as there are many developers there, and Lisbon might be the place with the highest density of crypto developers in Europe. Then we went to Latin America, mainly Argentina and Chile, which are currently among the fastest-growing countries for cryptocurrency adoption, making it a very interesting market. In Africa, we primarily went to Kenya, as it is a leading tech country and a very stable democracy.

When Worldcoin launched, we also went to some regions in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. The response in Tokyo was actually quite surprising. It gave me a rocket-launch-like surprise; we had very few devices in Asia, yet the download and registration numbers were very high, which was astonishing to me. I also found that many people recognized me when I attended Token 2049 and wanted to take selfies with me.

How Much Does an Orb Device Cost?

BlockBeats: Did you encounter any technical bottlenecks while developing the Orb iris scanning device? What was the most challenging part?

Alex Blania: Building the Orb device took a long time. It is a very complex device because it needs to meet multiple constraints simultaneously. First, it needs to be scalable to billions of people; otherwise, it would be meaningless. This means that aspects like image capture and uniqueness checks need to be sufficiently accurate, which most biometric scanners cannot achieve. Regular phones and other devices fall far short of this requirement; they can never accomplish it. Even commercial devices cannot do this because no one designs a device that can operate normally at the scale of billions of people; typically, such devices do not exist.

The second challenge is security. Typically, the use of this technology occurs with government involvement. It is conducted in a regulated environment with government personnel present, which means the actual risk of fraud in registration and other aspects is quite low. Worldcoin, however, must operate in a completely adversarial environment; we must anticipate that people will always attempt to commit fraud and attack the hardware. We cannot even trust the personnel operating the devices, so both the hardware itself and the software on it need to be very secure.

The third challenge is, of course, privacy, as this must be a decentralized protocol that is not under government control. So it needs to fully protect privacy, and there can be no compromise in this regard. Therefore, we essentially built the entire system from scratch to ensure it can only be so.

These are basically the three main challenges. Now the Orb device can overcome these challenges; it can reliably distinguish at least a billion people, and as the software progresses, we will be able to distinguish three to four billion people next year. However, our growth rate may not reach that level. So it can meet all these requirements; it is secure and capable of protecting privacy. The real issue now is production—manufacturing enough of these devices and launching them globally.

So the main problems we are currently working on are primarily operational issues. Two or three years ago, Worldcoin was mainly an engineering problem; now it is gradually shifting to being primarily an operational problem. How do we launch this product globally? How do we cover every country? How do we ensure compliance in the face of government restrictions? These are the main issues we are currently addressing.

BlockBeats: Vitalik has discussed some decentralization issues regarding hardware, such as potential backdoor problems. Given that manufacturers are mostly centralized, how does the team prevent those who manufacture the Orb devices from cheating or setting backdoors in the devices?

Alex Blania: I think Vitalik's article is very good. However, some media misunderstood it as negative. He was not expressing a negative sentiment; he was simply describing the engineering challenges we must overcome. I basically agree with his views in this regard.

Regarding the centralization of manufacturing, it is indeed very centralized at the moment. Currently, a very capable manufacturer is producing these devices, and they are under our strict control. So it can be said that we can control the manufacturing process of the Orb to ensure there are no backdoors or other issues. However, in the coming years, there will be situations where others will produce Orb devices, and they may not even be companies we control. It could be some large tech companies; I’m not saying we have already contacted them, but it is a possibility.

Other large companies will produce their own Orb devices following the design, and the foundation will provide the keys needed to activate these Orb devices, and we will conduct audits. So initially, the number of manufacturers will not be large, probably only about ten, and there will still be strict audit controls over all manufacturers. At some point in the future, of course, full decentralization can be achieved, allowing for decentralized audits and increasing the number of manufacturers.

This issue is not a new one. Of course, compared to decentralized financial products, its implementation is much more challenging, but it is clearly not impossible. So we can accomplish it.

BlockBeats: Currently, how much does it cost to manufacture an Orb device? How many Orb devices have been deployed to the market?

Alex Blania: This is one of the interesting things; production and manufacturing are not bottlenecks from a cost or production speed perspective. Currently, the price of an Orb device is about $4,000 each. This number will continue to decrease over the next few years because the larger the manufacturing batch, the lower the cost. We are also developing a new Orb device that is more complex, more secure, and more advanced in all aspects. Therefore, all these costs will drop below $1,000 in the next few years. But again, the main challenge Worldcoin faces right now is deployment and promotion, not just cost.

Worldcoin Has Not Yet Reached Profitability

BlockBeats: In which areas is the Worldcoin team currently investing resources?

Alex Blania: The biggest cost is everything currently surrounding operational promotion; there is a lot of work to be done in this area. When a product enters a country, it requires legal analysis of all local laws, and to comply with local laws, it may require minor modifications to the product, which necessitates working with different local consultants. To truly bring the product to market, local teams need to be hired. So if I tell you we want to enter Hong Kong in a few weeks, there are many teams in the background that need to handle ten different things in parallel to achieve this goal. This is the first aspect of the cost.

The second major cost is the actual engineering work. The number of engineers is the largest in the company, including hardware engineers, protocol engineers, application engineers, and software engineers, which is the second largest cost area. Then there are all the regular affairs of the company, including various consulting fees, etc. Building and promoting the product is the largest area of expenditure.

BlockBeats: Where does the company's main profit currently come from? Is it from the sale of Orb iris devices?

Alex Blania: This is very similar to other crypto projects. A digital asset that has certain value will attract investors who believe in its future. Our network is currently too early to generate much revenue, but there will definitely be revenue in the coming years. So like other crypto projects, it’s just that for us, the scale is much larger, the ambition is much greater, and the speed is much faster.

Also, before the product launch, there was a period of registration arbitrage, but those things are no longer possible now.

BlockBeats: Worldcoin faces some regulatory pressures in different countries or regions. How do you view the regulatory issues concerning Worldcoin and cryptocurrency, and how will you handle these issues in the future?

Alex Blania: I think some regulatory measures are understandable for countries in the early stages of product launch. We have caused quite a stir in many places, which is a positive stir. People everywhere want to register on a large scale, and we appear in the news in various places, almost becoming a hot topic in the global tech community for several weeks. So there is too much attention, too many registrations, and regulators will raise questions to ensure everything is being done correctly.

So for us, there is nothing particularly concerning in this regard. We are simply cooperating with regulators and answering their questions. There are mainly two aspects here. One is privacy regulatory agencies, and the other is cryptocurrency regulatory agencies. For privacy regulatory agencies, since all our processes fundamentally emphasize privacy, there is nothing to worry about. In fact, we just need to respond to (crypto) regulatory agencies, cooperate with them, and resolve issues. Some markets and countries are hostile toward cryptocurrency, while others are more friendly. So this is not a particularly special situation for us; we will simply avoid countries that have issues with cryptocurrency to avoid trouble.

BlockBeats: Besides Worldcoin, what other tools or infrastructure do you think will be needed for "Proof of Humanity" in the future within the AI world?

Alex Blania: I believe regulation, especially good regulation around artificial intelligence, is definitely the most important thing, and this is important globally. But this is not new; many people are talking about this issue. Another fundamental limitation is energy; producing large amounts of energy in a cheaper and more scalable way is another important area we will need to consider.