African Gold Diggers: I help fellow countrymen with Worldcoin KYC, earning 20,000 yuan a day

Original: 《I Helped Chinese People in Africa with Worldcoin KYC, Earning 20,000 Daily》

Author: Jessy, Jinse Finance

Recently, Zhao Zhao (pseudonym), who used to find Black people in a certain East African country to do Worldcoin KYC and then resell the accounts to domestic users, has returned to China. The products that users see on Xianyu that have undergone Worldcoin KYC are sourced from third parties like Zhao Zhao in Africa.

But now this business is hard to do. With Worldcoin officially launched and the coin price being transparent, there is no gray area left. Additionally, due to the recent political instability in a certain East African country, he has paused the KYC business and returned to China.

This business lasted for more than three months, and at its peak, at a location where iris verification could be done, he could earn 20,000 a day. However, the most profitable days only lasted for two weeks, which was in May when Worldcoin was at its hottest in China. At that time, the growth of new users locally exceeded expectations, and soon the operators discovered the irregularities.

Here are Zhao Zhao's words:

This business became difficult to do later on. Before I returned to China, one of our employees was caught by local police and was released after paying nearly 250 yuan (the local minimum wage is about 900 yuan per month). The police used a charge similar to "disturbing public order" to arrest people.

What we did was act as agents for KYC, and we operated for about three months. I had a full-time job locally, and this business was part-time. The business wasn't hard; we found the locations set up by local operators for ground promotion, and the local employees I hired took the hired migrant workers to do the iris KYC verification. Initially, the wage for these migrant workers was 1 dollar, but later, as more teams started doing third-party KYC verification, competition became fierce, and their wages rose to 3 dollars.

Ninety-nine percent of this was driven by Chinese people behind the scenes. Competition was intense; local Chinese saw that there was money to be made and flocked to do this. On one hand, the wages for migrant workers were rising, and on the other hand, the head fees for local employees were also increasing. In the early days, the cost of getting an account was about six to seven dollars, but later it rose to nine, then twelve dollars.

The rising costs in the later stages mainly came from tipping store staff. They noticed that there was always one person bringing several people over to scan and then taking a few more people over, which was very strange. We had to tip the store employees for them to let us continue.

The peak of Worldcoin's popularity in China was in early June, when we could find about a hundred people to verify at each operating point every day, but this situation didn't last long—about a week later, local operators noticed something was off. The ground promotion model for Worldcoin is that one operator manages a large area, with a country divided into five or six large regions, each having a dozen or twenty stores. About every two or three stores were monopolized by a Chinese third party like me. Regional operators found that some stores had data far exceeding others, and upon investigation, they discovered the irregularities. To rectify this "gray industry," the verification business in the East African country I was in was temporarily suspended for a week. I estimate that there were about a dozen Chinese teams doing this, generating thousands of fake users daily.

The general public in this country has limited understanding of Web3, and the promotion of Worldcoin in my country was not well done. Before doing this business, I once passed by a location where they could scan irises, which looked like the kind of tent set up for community activities in domestic neighborhoods. At that time, I didn't realize what they were doing; I only understood it was a Worldcoin promotion point after seeing related content on Twitter when I got home.

Without us third parties finding people to register, a local store's actual registration volume was about ten a day; this data was what I observed there: about one real user could be seen verifying registration every hour. The reasons for the low number of real users are as follows: first, the local infrastructure is very poor, and the phones used by locals are not like our domestic smartphones. The operation of Web3 applications requires higher standards for phones and internet speed. Second, locals have little understanding of Web3; for example, the migrant workers we hired would not accept U as payment; we paid them in local currency.

From this perspective, the East African country I was in, as well as most of Africa, is not a suitable place for promoting Web3 applications. Previously, I also helped Debox promote in the area; they contacted Chinese people in various places to be product ambassadors, but the effect was also average. I lived there and hardly saw any other Web3 projects being promoted on a large scale. Locals are quite cautious, and if your project grows big, the local government will come to take a share.

We need to consider the cost-benefit ratio and also the market trends. Worldcoin started promoting in Africa around October last year, but at that time, the project had no popularity. It was not profitable to get in then, until OpenAI exploded in popularity in China this year, and the project was rediscovered. This business opportunity was entirely uncovered by Chinese people in May and June.

If you calculate it, when the cost is 6 dollars, selling an account for 40 dollars, and doing a hundred people at a promotion point, you can earn 20,000. At that time, we hired a general manager who led five teams, and these five teams ran around various points, with each point able to handle 80 to 100 accounts.

In the early stages, the project side also tacitly allowed our behavior of finding people to do KYC. After all, there was user growth, and the data looked good; early Web3 projects still needed data to attract investment. However, later on, the project side definitely wanted us to distance ourselves from this behavior and no longer allow so many fake users. The turning point was when the project side announced that the project would launch at the end of June. In these African countries, the data was rising too strangely. Moreover, Worldcoin itself emphasizes real KYC, where each person has only one iris.

There is a saying online that our behavior and Worldcoin's promotion in Africa is a new form of colonialism in Web3. I feel that those who say such things are "why not eat meat porridge"; one or two dollars is just a few meals for locals.

What Worldcoin is doing is indeed giving money to people in these third-world countries. I think from this perspective, this project is quite great. However, for the project to go far, there is still much to be done.

Having worked in Africa and observed the local Web3 ecosystem, I believe that a lightweight wallet is actually a more suitable Web3 project for promotion here. Lightweight can adapt to the local infrastructure level, and a wallet might meet the needs of locals. In some African countries, the local currency exchange rate is very unstable, and holding a certain amount of mainstream virtual currency can hedge against risks. This wallet can collaborate with the government during the promotion process and provide local users with certain rebates, which should yield good results.