Worldcoin or World Con? Sam Altman’s Newest Venture Draws Skepticism

If a technology service is free, you are the product — not the customer.

As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman officially launches his cryptocurrency project, Worldcoin, from the company Tools for Humanity, the above adage about the attention economy is worth remembering.

The eye-scanning startup announced Monday (July 24) that its biometric orb technology will emerge from years of beta testing to launch in 35 cities across 20 nations, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Mexico City, Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris, Bilbao, Manila, Bangalore and more.

While the San Francisco and Berlin-based company is facing regulatory hiccups in the United States, crypto exchanges Binance, Huobi, Bybit and OKX have since listed Worldcoin’s now-live WLD token, CoinDesk reported.

The Ethereum-based crypto token, which serves as a digital IOU to users who agree to have their irises and several other biometric data points scanned by the company, is trading up more than 30% as of Monday morning.

The Worldcoin project’s stated goal is to capture participants’ biometrics using its proprietary Orb to provide them with a “proof of personhood,” something that the company said “will become more important as increasingly powerful [artificial intelligence (AI)] models become available.”

Once users have proved they are not robots, they are issued Worldcoin tokens. Two million participants have signed up so far, a number that the company hopes to increase more than five times as it emerges from stealth and launches more than 1,500 of its iris-scanning Orbs into the world.

The company describes itself as building the world’s largest “identity and financial network” by creating a “collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.”

Today, we are proud to officially reveal Worldcoin, a new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible. We will launch by giving a free share of Worldcoin to everyone on Earth. To read more, visit https://t.co/85cEqNUHa1. pic.twitter.com/uMnwf7vCeb

— Worldcoin (@worldcoin) October 21, 2021

For now, observers as disparate as Edward Snowden and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have strongly criticized the project, while blue-chip venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Reid Hoffman have helped the nascent company raise about $250 million, TechCrunch reported.

This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans (for “fairness”), and waves away the implications by saying “we deleted the scans!”

Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.

Don’t catalogue eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021

at no time should a corporation or state own any part of the global financial system https://t.co/yGZbRuLB8U

— jack (@jack) July 24, 2023

See also: Finding The Digital Economy’s Product Market FIT

At the Intersection of AI and Crypto

The Worldcoin rollout comes as the two fundamental technologies powering its mission — crypto and AI — are diverging in both public and commercial opinion, with AI making major strides while crypto backslides into uncertainty around its real-world utility.

The lack of certainty around crypto in the U.S. means that Altman’s company is not launching its crypto token domestically, and the company is allegedly trying to move beyond the “crypto” moniker and rebrand itself as a digital identity provider.

“When we started thinking about this, we didn’t think it would end up as ‘world minus the U.S. coin’ and here we are,” Altman told the Financial Times (FT). “I’d say there’s 95% of the world’s population not in the U.S. The U.S. does not make or break a project like this.”

Central to the startup’s goal is its bold effort to bribe the world with a scan-your-iris, receive-a-digital-asset proposition.

Worldcoin’s Orbs take participants’ biometric data points and use an AI algorithm to cryptographically confirm they are human and unique in Worldcoin’s database.

“In a time of increasingly powerful AI, the most reliable way to issue a global proof of personhood is through custom biometric hardware,” the company’s whitepaper stated.

Altman has admitted that iris-scanning contains a “clear ick factor,” TechEconomy reported, and it has been a somewhat bumpy journey for the well-funded company so far.

Two recent issues, including the theft of login credentials for certain of the Worldcoin operators in charge of signing up new users, reported by TechCrunch, and black-market sales of World IDs, reported by Gizmodo, have fueled skepticism around the company’s security practices and drawn attention to the fact that beyond an iris scan, the Orbs also capture high-resolution images of participants’ bodies and faces.

Questions Grow Around Worldcoin’s Onboarding Practices

The project’s laudable goal is to one day support universal basic income (UBI) by being exchangeable for essentials like food and shelter in a near-term future where robots and AI have displaced much of human labor, Gizmodo reported.

But the company has been criticized for allegedly exploitative practices in countries including Indonesia, Ghana and Chile as it rolls out its identity technology, MIT Technology Review reported.

The report found “wide gaps” between Worldcoin’s public messaging, which focused on protecting privacy, and what users experienced during their onboarding practice, which observers have likened to a multi-level marketing (MLM) user acquisition model.

The company’s privacy policy permits the distribution of biometric data to third parties, and critics have honed in on the fact that despite its promises of fair distribution, the company is retaining control of 20% of its digital token supply.