ChatGPT founder Sam's crypto project: Can WorldCoin rely on "iris recognition" to step into a "brave new world"?

Author: Nianqing, Chain Catcher

If you are a sci-fi fan, you might remember the close-up of the blue iris at the beginning of "Blade Runner," where the film opens with that enormous eyeball, alternating flashes of dazzling industrial scenery.

In this 1982 film, people confirm whether someone is a real human by observing their iris reactions.

Fast forward 30 years, iris recognition is becoming a reality around us. The crypto startup WorldCoin seems to be pushing the futuristic timeline from sci-fi closer to the present, embracing the vision of "Free coin to everyone." They plan to launch a universal, zero-threshold cryptocurrency to practice the so-called "universal basic income" social experiment, giving everyone a chance to enter the crypto world. But there is one condition: you need to provide your iris scan data.

Their official website states: "WorldCoin needs a more precise and secure way (iris recognition) to verify whether someone is unique and truly human (not a robot) to prevent fraud."

Since June of this year, WorldCoin has entered the public eye after securing $25 million in funding from well-known investment institutions like a16z and Coinbase Ventures. At the same time, criticism of iris scanning has surged.

Under related tweets from WorldCoin's official account and startup team members, negative comments far outnumber supportive voices—terms like "dystopian," "Big Brother-like," "surveillance coin," and "Sauron's eye" are rampant. Snowden also tweeted a warning: "The human body is not a ticket machine" and "Do not use biometric technology for anti-fraud. In fact, do not use biometric technology for anything."

After all, the eyeball is a metaphor for a dystopia too vivid, just as "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott deliberately uses the iris to symbolize "Big Brother's eye." Looking at the concept image of the iris scanner Orb developed by WorldCoin, you will find this association too natural.

However, while iris recognition has attracted most of the external fire, this is merely a superficial "highlight." The privacy crisis brought by biometric recognition has always existed. Another major point of contention is WorldCoin's plan to distribute free coins to everyone in the world, which has not been sufficiently discussed.

Despite the ongoing controversies, this project, backed by a host of big names, has not stopped its march toward a "Brave New World."

WorldCoin has three main characteristics compared to other digital currencies: first, it establishes a vast ground promotion network, incentivizing a large number of operators and operators to recruit users globally through tokens; second, it builds a personal identity system through iris recognition to ensure the authenticity and uniqueness of user identities; third, most tokens are distributed for free to qualified users, ensuring fair issuance.

In October of this year, WorldCoin announced that it would launch its mainnet next year and plans to cover 1 billion users by 2023. As of now, this number is approximately 130,000. This sounds challenging, with some commenting that its difficulty is comparable to the "moon landing program."

So, how does WorldCoin plan to achieve this grand vision? How will it ensure that iris scanning and other biometric recognitions do not threaten public privacy and security? How feasible is its universal basic income concept?

1. What exactly does WorldCoin want to do?

"Imagine a world. In this world, no matter who you are, everyone can participate in the ever-growing digital economy and benefit from decentralization and collective ownership."

This is the opening of the introduction on WorldCoin's official website.

One of the leaders of WorldCoin, Sam Altman, can be considered a star founder. He was the former head of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator and has served as the company's president since he was 28. Under his management, YC rapidly expanded its investment scale, having incubated over 3,000 startups with a total market value exceeding $300 billion, with top internet companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, and Twitch behind YC.

However, this time Sam Altman decided to undertake a bolder and more radical project; WorldCoin is his first blockchain company that he personally co-founded.

Altman enjoys continuously sharing his views on new world orders, taxation, wealth distribution, and government governance on Twitter. In March of this year, he published a lengthy article on his personal blog exploring the potential of new technologies like AI to bring about social change, especially how to use it to alter our economic system and improve wealth distribution disparities.

At that time, there was no mention of WorldCoin, but rather an idea similar to "American Equity Fund." Altman wrote:

The capital for the American Equity Fund comes from taxing companies valued above a certain threshold and private land, with all citizens over 18 receiving annual distributions in dollars and company stocks. People can spend according to their personal needs and ideas, such as better education, healthcare, housing, starting businesses, etc.

As demand and services expand, businesses and industries will also develop accordingly. Consequently, the country will operate better, and each citizen will receive more money from the fund. Therefore, every citizen will increasingly enjoy the freedom, rights, and opportunities brought by economic self-determination. Poverty will be significantly reduced, and more people will have the chance to live the lives they desire.

Regarding the founding of WorldCoin, Altman began to conceive it as early as the end of 2019. In an interview with Bloomberg in June of this year, he mentioned that the inspiration for using cryptocurrency to achieve fair distribution came from the economist's theory of "universal basic income (UBI)." In simple terms, UBI is a welfare system that provides sufficient funds to maintain normal living standards to everyone indefinitely.

UBI is not a new theory, but it has been repeatedly brought to the agenda by different countries in recent years. The reality is that automation and the pandemic have led to a general increase in global unemployment rates and a decline in people's economic conditions. By distributing no-threshold basic income, it can enhance people's economic status and social stability.

"Is there a way to use technology to improve all of this on a global scale?" This is a question Altman often contemplates.

Altman dropped out of Stanford University, where he studied computer science and worked in Stanford's AI lab. He is "extremely optimistic" about technological progress and firmly believes that new technologies like AI will create a better society.

Even when WorldCoin faced intense criticism over iris scanning, he responded on Twitter: "I underestimated people's feelings about using biometric technology for identity verification. I personally love FaceID, but I was surprised to hear someone say they don't like it."

Altman ultimately chose blockchain and cryptocurrency as the means to achieve a utopian society.

In fact, there are several projects in the crypto industry focused on building UBI mechanisms, such as Proof of Humanity and Circles UBI, where users can continuously receive token rewards after identity verification on these platforms. However, WorldCoin is fundamentally different from these projects; UBI is one of the initial goals of the project's co-founders, but not the entirety.

"In the long run, I am personally very excited about UBI, but implementing it now is very difficult," said WorldCoin co-founder Blania in an interview. "We believe we are building a vast interpersonal network where entrepreneurs can join and build applications, and UBI is one of them."

From official materials, WorldCoin positions itself as a collectively owned global digital currency and hopes to reach a larger user base through its ground promotion network, aiming for at least 1 billion users. In their view, the larger the network of users, the more powerful the cryptocurrency becomes.

"The internet is powerful because of its vast network. Email, social applications, and marketplaces are examples of such networks. The more participants they have, the stronger they become," WorldCoin states. "If cryptocurrency is widely adopted, it will greatly increase access to the internet economy and enable applications that are currently hard to imagine."

WorldCoin's early functionality will be a digital wallet, allowing users to store their cryptocurrencies and make payments. But the larger goal is to attract developers who can build applications on its system through a massive user base.

This vision may be the main reason for attracting a series of top venture capitalists, as the crypto industry urgently needs a broader user base and lower entry barriers to expand the scale of the crypto economy.

Currently, WorldCoin has been testing in twelve countries across four continents—Africa, South America, Europe, and Asia—through more than twenty operators, verifying over 130,000 users, and plans to have over 1 billion users by the end of 2023.

However, when facing user groups in developing countries, how to encourage them to further acquire crypto knowledge and learn crypto skills after obtaining a one-time free cryptocurrency will be one of the biggest challenges to the project's vision.

2. Is "iris recognition" really that evil?

To achieve the goal of "fairly distributing tokens to as many people as possible," WorldCoin has adopted "iris mining," distributing no more than 80% of the token share to users and operators who have undergone iris certification, allowing users to receive tokens for free simply by scanning their irises.

To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of iris recognition, WorldCoin has launched a dedicated biometric device called Orb, which is the size of a basketball, silver, and resembles a giant eyeball (or a surveillance camera). It costs up to $5,000 and its main function is to capture detailed images of the human eye and convert them into unique personal identification codes.

However, even though WorldCoin claims it will only store iris hash data used to check identity uniqueness through technologies like blockchain zero-knowledge proofs and will not store the original iris images, concerns about privacy risks continue to grow.

Moreover, WorldCoin has outsourced user acquisition and ground promotion tasks to different regional operators. Such a vast amount of privacy data, handled by so many people, inevitably raises questions.

In most exposures, the project is simplified to "WorldCoin wants to scan the irises of a billion people with free coins," among other sensational phrases. CoinDesk published a commentary article on October 26 titled "Why Does Everyone Feel Angry About Sam Altman's WorldCoin?" describing WorldCoin as "sucking data from users like a vampire squid," while mocking the founders and investors as "big data enthusiasts of surveillance capitalism."

Some professionals criticize that the AI and machine learning methods embraced by Sam Altman are essentially expressing "we will use user data," which is clearly contrary to the spirit of Web3. Facebook and Google have both faced condemnation for abusing user privacy data, and this "data-hungry business model" no longer belongs to the new era.

Furthermore, WorldCoin's ambition is to cover the globe. Controlling a biometric database of hundreds of millions is extremely dangerous.

Although Alex Blania responded that "the iris code itself is the only thing that leaves the orb device. There is no large biometric data database," the outside world is not convinced. Especially given the project's privacy policy, which allows sharing iris hash data with third parties, concerns about iris data leakage have arisen.

So, why must it be iris recognition? In the face of such a significant controversy, can other identity verification solutions, such as fingerprint recognition, which are more easily accepted, be used instead?

"Unfortunately, fingerprints and other identity recognition solutions are not sufficient to distinguish over a billion people. If we use other identity solutions, we can only identify unique identities for a few hundred thousand people, which is far from supporting this vast identity system," WorldCoin told Chain Catcher.

In WorldCoin's view, promoting WorldCoin globally requires a massive database, and a precise identity system must be established to prevent identity fraud, forgery, and witch hunts. High-resolution imaging is key to a large-scale biometric system, which is why they have sunk high costs into developing the Orb with high-definition scanning capabilities.

Indeed, from a biological perspective, fingerprint recognition is not the most secure.

Compared to fingerprints, facial recognition, and other biometric identification methods, iris recognition has more identifiable points and boasts higher accuracy, lower false recognition rates, no need for repeated registration, non-contact, and extreme difficulty in forgery, making it the "most reliable biometric technology" aside from DNA. No two people in the world have exactly the same retina, even identical twins.

The WorldCoin team claims that iris scanning is the best result after evaluating many different solutions. Because compared to facial recognition, fingerprints, and DNA sequencing, iris recognition meets the three standards of uniqueness, anti-fraud, and ease of operation (compared to DNA sequencing).

WorldCoin faces such significant controversy also because it is the "first to eat the crab."

In September 2013, the iPhone 5S was released, the first phone to widely use fingerprint recognition. Looking back now, we can still find many opposing voices; the public pressure Apple faced back then was not less than what WorldCoin faces today. Only this time, it is iris scanning.

From the moment fingerprint recognition was widely adopted, the Pandora's box of biometrics was already opened. Perhaps, people are more willing to embrace new technologies than they imagine.

Of course, like all biometrics, iris recognition also faces legal risks such as privacy breaches. Currently, WorldCoin is testing in twelve countries across four continents—Africa, South America, Europe, and Asia. Most of these are developing countries and regions that have not yet established comprehensive "Biometric Information Protection Laws."

WorldCoin has also specifically stated that there are no plans to promote the project in the United States and China, likely due to the emphasis on privacy protection in these two countries. As other countries gradually put privacy legislation on their agendas in the future, WorldCoin still has much work to do in this area.

When asked how to protect users' privacy, the WorldCoin team responded that they have recognized the risks of transferring biometric information collection rights to these small operators and stated that WorldCoin will make the process as transparent as possible, allowing users to see how their data is used.

3. Still to be observed

Overall, compared to traditional hardware mining mechanisms or liquidity mining mechanisms, WorldCoin's solution does not require users to purchase any equipment or provide any funds, significantly lowering the entry barrier for users into the crypto world and avoiding the problem of excessive centralization in the distribution of most cryptocurrencies.

Compared to the grand vision of "achieving fairness," WorldCoin's current contribution to popularizing crypto knowledge is more tangible. This feels more like a revolution in crypto knowledge because to get people on the lower side of the knowledge gap to accept virtual tokens, crypto knowledge must first be popularized. Orb Operators (promotion volunteers) in different regions will educate users through lectures, social media sharing, and other methods.

However, the challenges WorldCoin faces are particularly prominent, such as privacy protection, user retention, and the sustainability of the economic model, all of which will require more observation after the mainnet launch in a few months.