Worldcoin: Unlocking digital identity with proof of personhood

[00:00:09] Savannah Fortis: Strategically placed in locations all around the world are a number of shiny metallic Orbs. If you spot such an Orb, you can walk up to it and let it scan your iris in exchange for a digital ID. This ID would let you prove you're a real and unique human without revealing any personal information and allows you to sign on to websites, mobile apps, and crypto DApps seamlessly. What we're talking about is not a vision out of the sci-fi novel but a reality for millions of users, thanks to Worldcoin. 

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, a podcast where we dive into all things Web3 and cryptocurrency. From challenges facing the industry to breaking news and in-depth dives into the culture of this space, today we are speaking with Steven Smith, the head of protocol at Tools for Humanity and a key contributor to Worldcoin, to better understand their vision for a world where you have more control over who has access to your personal data, powered by decentralized Web3 technologies. Welcome, Steven.

[00:01:15] Steven Smith: Thank you. Very happy to be on the call with you today.

[00:01:18] Savannah Fortis: We're very happy to have you. And we're so excited to understand a little bit more about Tools for Humanity and how you guys are contributing to Worldcoin. And basically, overall, the vision that Worldcoin has is not just in the decentralized space but in general for humanity.

[00:01:33] Steven Smith: All right. Well, very good. I mean, if you'd like, I can kind of launch right into discussing some of that. And then, certainly, if you have any questions about anything I mentioned, we can go into that deeper if you'd like.

[00:01:44] Savannah Fortis: Definitely, yeah. For listeners who might not be familiar with Worldcoin or even hearing it for the first time today, I would love to have an explanation straight from the source about the project and its primary goals.

[00:01:56] Steven Smith: Okay, well, we'll start at a very high level. Worldcoin is designed to be the world's largest human identity and financial network, giving ownership to everyone on that network and doing everything where the user's in control of their data and all their interactions with the network is done in a privacy-preserving way. The goal is to provide universal access to a global economy, regardless of a person's country or their background or whether they're banked or unbanked or economically disadvantaged in some kind of way. We do a lot of this, you know, the backdrop of AI, and we kind of refer to where we're at as kind of, it's the nascent age of AI, but we do recognize the potential impact AI has on the future for all people. So that's at a very high-level kind of the vision for the Worldcoin project.

[00:02:44] Savannah Fortis: Great. And I've heard that, you know, Worldcoin is kind of looking to bridge this gap between Web2 and Web3 because you did mention AI, and you are, you guys are also operating with a lot of Web3 tools that are running the entire protocol. So, I'm interested in hearing how you guys have this vision to use these tools to bring more people who are just in an ordinary, Web2 mindset basically seamlessly into the Web3 space using your tools.

[00:03:13] Steven Smith: All right, excellent question, but I'll kind of start, I'll give you like more background on Worldcoin, maybe a little bit, you know, kind of more of a not too deep of a technical dive, but just kind of a bit of the technical key aspects of Worldcoin, the project and the protocol. We have a concept we call proof of personhood, which essentially just means that it's a way to prove that you're a unique human, not which specific human you might be. Like in my case, some, you know, it's not Steven Smith; it's just that I am a unique human in the world. And that's a key enabler for participation in the Worldcoin network that we mentioned around, you know, the identity and financial network. The reason that's important is because if you look at like Web2, everything in Web2 is largely tied to you. And clearly I don't mean like googling something or browsing the internet. I mean, like, you know, your banking account or any account you might have with, let's say, just perhaps an airline or hotel rewards. It is tied to a specific person. And that would be you in this case.

[00:04:10] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, exactly.

[00:04:11] Steven Smith: In the case of Web3, Web3 is largely identity is kind of not a key primitive in Web3 for the most part. Like there's, inarguably people go to extreme lengths to not do that because, you know, for the most part, with the exception of a few chains — blockchains, by the way, networks, if you will, more generically — is largely transparent, which means all the information that occurs, your transactions, your history, etc. are recorded on the blockchain, which is this, you know, massive, immutable database where you can kind of correlate activity. And it would be pretty easy if that was tied to a specific individual to be able to determine, you know, their online, their buying pattern. It would be a horrific repeat of Web2 in a much more transparent fashion, which would be horrible. But what you do need is a way to prove uniqueness in a Web3 world and potentially in a privacy-preserving way, associate that uniqueness with certain activities you might want to perform, which is geared at combating bots, automation, AI, if you will. Prevent some of the games, the games that are played, airdrop farming, you know, things of that nature. But that's kind of, you know, the key primitive for us is a proof of personhood credential, which is, if you're familiar or your readers or listeners are familiar with a Sybil-resistant type of approach, it means you can't really have multiple personalities. You can't have multiple accounts and do something like claim an airdrop, for example, or vote in a governance proposal from some particular project.

[00:05:47] Savannah Fortis: Okay. And so when we talk about proof of personhood, this is essentially it's just verifying that I'm a human. Is the need to verify that I'm Savannah also there somehow, or is that completely, is that how the Web3 component comes into play? Because it doesn't necessarily need to be me. It just needs to be a verifiable human. And that's done through the iris scan.

[00:06:12] Steven Smith: Yes. It's not a… no need to prove that you are Savannah, just that you are a unique participant in whatever you might be attempting to do. Again, like maybe claiming an airdrop or voting in a governance proposal.

[00:06:25] Savannah Fortis: So then essentially, this leaves the user still to be as anonymous as they would like to be. To an extent.

[00:06:33] Steven Smith: Yes, that's exactly kind of the point. You can be anonymous, and then we can talk about the protocol in detail as well if you'd like, but we use technology that you may have heard of, you know, zero-knowledge proofs, zero-knowledge technology, to ensure that even though you're anonymized in the sense we just want to know that you're unique and not which specific human you are. We want to make sure that even the actions of this anonymous person are not correlated. You know, they can't be correlated. So, for example, if you claim an airdrop or vote in a DAO, those two activities, you know, you can't correlate and say, okay, well, that's from the same unique person even.

[00:07:10] Savannah Fortis: Oh, okay. So as decentralized as we can get in this sense.

[00:07:14] Steven Smith: Exactly. And I mean, one of our key goals is, you know, we've always been about privacy. And originally, we called the protocol the privacy-preserving proof of personhood, which was quite a mouthful. So we just dropped the privacy-preserving and.... but yeah, it's always been a key tenet of what we do. You know, adding privacy into a protocol after the fact is really hard. So it really helps to have that as kind of the key tenet of all your designs.

[00:07:41] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. And if that's kind of baked into the initial idea, you know, that does lay a foundation for what you build on. On top of that, I imagine... And yeah, the first name is a bit long. It's a bit of a mouthful, but proof of personhood also really ties into the Web3 space, as we have proof-of-stake, proof-of-work. I can even see it like being a good ring in our Web3 lingo. Yes, but you are head of protocol at Tools for Humanity. So, if you don't mind, I'm just curious a little more about Tools for Humanity specifically and like how it's tied to Worldcoin. We know it's a key contributor. What does that mean? And what's your role there as head of protocol?

[00:08:19] Steven Smith: So, Tools for Humanity is a key contributor, as you said. That's kind of how we describe the company, but it's actually the company that incubated the Worldcoin project. So before there was a Worldcoin Foundation, it was Tools for Humanity. And members of Tools for Humanity are now, they kind of left and went to Worldcoin Foundation. So some of the key people. But, you know, we designed the protocol, implemented the protocol. Of course, Tools for Humanity also has World App, which is, it's an app. It's kind of the first mobile app for the Worldcoin protocol. But that's kind of a Tools for Humanity-only thing. The Worldcoin Foundation is actually the steward of the Worldcoin protocol at the moment, and then we're one of the contributors to that protocol. But yes, TFH was the company that kind of incubated the Worldcoin project in a sense.

[00:09:05] Savannah Fortis: Gotcha. Okay.

[00:09:05] Steven Smith: So yeah. So my role.

[00:09:07] Savannah Fortis: Oh, exactly. No, that was going to be, yeah, I was going to say so your role, and I'm sure your role ties a lot into the more technical side of everything as well, which we're definitely interested in hearing about.

[00:09:17] Steven Smith: Yeah. So my role, you know, head of protocol protocol is pretty large at, you know, for the project. But it's essentially, you know, if you start at the most basic, everything to do with the Web3-specifics, meaning decentralization, blockchain, cryptography, smart contracts, all the normal things that you would think of as it relates to like a Web3 application, for example. The protocol, in this case, is multifaceted. It's one, it kind of picks up after the... And we can talk more about the tech stack in a bit, too. But once the system has determined, hey, here's a new unique human, then the protocol kind of takes over, makes sure that data is persisted onchain in a very kind of efficient, optimized manner. And then, make sure that information is broadcast to other chains that we partner with. So they have the same kind of access to what we call World ID, which is this proof of person and credential. So that's kind of the protocol footprint. Involved in that is also kind of a research aspect where we're always looking down the road for new, it could be cryptographic primitives to implement or new ways to do things that are more efficient, run faster, more privacy-preserving, if you will. We're always looking to improve things along those lines. So it includes kind of a research aspect as well for what we might be doing next in a year or two down the road.

[00:10:36] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. And you mentioned just a moment ago that ZK-proofs are involved in your guys's operations. So, can you elaborate a little?

[00:10:44] Steven Smith: Sure. Yeah. So, I came… just a bit more about my background. I came from, before joining Worldcoin, I'd been at the Electric Coin Company for a little over three years. The Electric Coin Company is the primary developer of the Zcash cryptocurrency, which is arguably the project that pioneered the use of ZK-proofs, especially in a production setting. I mean, ZK has been around since the 80s in terms of concept, but in terms of manifesting itself in a production environment at scale, the Zcash project actually did it. But you know, they were already doing zero-knowledge check when I got to, got to the Worldcoin Project. There's some incredibly smart people here, but we want to use it, or how it's used, if you will, is around in two ways. One is it is to make our interactions with the blockchain more efficient. So as we have, you know, new entrants into the Worldcoin system, again, we've determined that here's a new unique human to add to the network. It's for some efficiency around how we actually interact with the chain to get that done, which that's just kind of a simple… That's really not zero knowledge in the sense. It's more like an efficiency batching technique. Where the real concept of zero-knowledge proofs come in, and how we use it to preserve privacy is when you're a member of, you know, this network that we've talked about, and essentially, you're a new human, and you have a World ID, and you're using World App on your phone, you're able to prove from your phone, any application you might interact with, signing in with the World ID, or just claiming an airdrop in World App, that you are a member of this unique identity data set, if you will.

And that is a zero-knowledge proof that proves you are a member, but not which specific member even. And again, you know I don't mean Steven or Savannah in this case. I mean, just like I am a member, and my public key is in this identity data set, I can prove that I control one of those keys, but not which one. So we use zero knowledge in that sense to prevent any form of linkage between, maybe again, you're claiming an airdrop, maybe you're logging into a system, maybe you're voting in a DAO. So, none of those activities could be correlated in any way.

[00:12:53] Savannah Fortis: Right. And as I see Worldcoin, the whole idea of the project, you guys have, like, many different levels of technology and hardware that you've kind of had to build out. I imagine first we have the protocols, as we've been talking about, then you guys also operate with biometric scanning technology, if that's correct, to scan the irises, right?

[00:13:16] Steven Smith: No, that's exactly, yeah, that's exactly what it is. And yeah, it's one of my favorite areas to talk about, too. So, even though I don't work in the hardware area, I just am fascinated by the advancements in the technology there. So basically, you know, if we're going to rewind… Like, you know, the project was founded, and it was kind of the goals that we've described at a high level. Clearly, they'd been refined over time. But you know, roughly, that was it. And then immediately the question comes up, well, okay, great. How do you actually do a proof of personhood credential? How do you solve Sybil resistance at population scale? And, you know, I don't mean within my city, like, how could I do it within my city? I mean, at population scale, a billion people. What mechanism would allow you to reliably uniquely identify, and I should say, prove the uniqueness of 8 billion people not uniquely identified? So, a number of technologies were evaluated. And, you know, clearly, people are familiar with, like, you know, TV shows where it's like the fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, right? So that can uniquely identify you. There's fingerprints and palm prints and, you know, even more advanced technology, face recognition. But the team actually evaluated all those and then realized that, okay, while those do prove uniqueness within a limited set, they don't prove uniqueness at population scale. So they then looked at the iris, and the iris turns out is like is very unique like there's a lot of...

[00:14:46] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, that was my question. Why would fingerprints? What's the catch there? The irises are unique.

[00:14:50] Steven Smith: Yeah. So what we need to be able to do to again distinguish one human from another, you know, in a population level set is to be able to have some... The thing that is unique about that individual. So the more information we call it entropy, like the differences, the uniqueness about something we can use, then we can consistently use that as this kind of unique distinguishing factor. So if you look at the iris, it's actually, you know, there's a lot of information in it, a lot of entropy, a lot of uniqueness that we can use to distinguish people. Just like you'd look at fingerprint patterns, there's patterns in the iris, but it's much more involved, much more in-depth. So there's a lot of information there. So the team settled on the iris scan and then immediately went, okay, well, what are you know what? Iris scanners are available out there, and evaluated those and determined. Well, it's kind of like an older iPhone camera, right? It takes a picture, but it's not the clearest picture. And the new iPhones take a much better picture. Of course, just like anyone, it doesn't have to be iPhone; it could be Samsung or anything, but the fact is, the scanners that were out there were not at the, let's call it, the fidelity level enough that we needed. So we had to kind of create our own scanner. That scanner is what's, you know, referred to as the Orb in the Worldcoin project. So it's kind of this unique hardware device. It's got some incredible technology in it. Again, I don't work in hardware, but I'm fascinated by it. We've open-sourced those designs so other people could look at it and, you know, potentially even build Orbs themselves. But it's an incredibly well-developed tech; some very, let's call it, high-performance camera-type equipment in there. Yeah. So we had to develop our own Orb to be able to capture, you know, in clarity, the uniqueness of the iris. So then we could, in turn, be able to distinguish the uniqueness of one person over the others at this population scale.

[00:16:43] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. And I mean, I know you're not involved in hardware directly, but, you know, one of the novel things about Worldcoin, and I think it's a thing that intrigues people and also maybe makes them a bit skeptical, is that it is an Orb. Do you know about why, like any of the ideas behind the choice of making this technology and having this idea to essentially put everyone onchain as a unique human and a verified unique human, and the means to do that being a metallic Orb?

[00:17:13] Steven Smith: Right. I mean, it's the thing that attracted me to the Worldcoin project was two things primarily. One way I like working on really hard problems, and there's just a number to work on at Worldcoin. And we can go into some of those as you want later. But the other was just the ambition of the project, I mean, the sheer ambition of the undertaking. And it was also tackling a problem that I think people actually don't think about much, or they underestimate, or they don't think about it in practical terms, but it's onboarding to Web3. And the challenge is, you know, how do you onboard? Again, we want to build a network that's kind of agnostic to your background, your educational opportunities, you know, your economic status. How do you onboard people equally around the world when there's such a variance between the opportunities that people have and the technology they have access to? So one of the things that struck me and others, that when Worldcoin, when we first heard of Worldcoin, was one, the ambition, but then two, the mechanism to onboard people into this new economy. And that's something you'll see commonly taglines with projects, you know, bringing the next billion people onchain, which is great, sounds amazing. And everyone working together, I have no doubt that we'll get there. But do they actually have a mechanism for bringing those billion people onchain? I think Worldcoin actually does. So it's not just a cool tagline. It's not just you kind of hope people start using your technology. There's a methodology for bringing those billion people onchain and onboarding them into Web3. And the ambition of the project is what really struck me as really attractive. So that was one thing. Then the Orb, the Orb itself is, I love it. I think it's an incredibly elegant, beautiful design. It's very distinct. You know, if you know anything about Worldcoin and you know much about Worldcoin, you probably know about the Orb. May not understand much else about the project, but you definitely will not forget an Orb, just because of its, you know, kind of unique design.

[00:19:19] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, we don't have one in my location yet, so I have yet to see one in person, but I'm certain that I can't forget it already knowing about it. But I would be very curious to see what it's like in person, and it's a really good point that you raise because, yeah, you know, so much of Web3 is kind of siloed within itself. And, you know, we want to onboard billions of users, yet there's this huge learning curve to get people to come into the space and to, even if the project is fairly simple, you know. I think some of these terms that are, you know, unfamiliar to people or hard to grasp, like just the idea of Web3 that takes a second to explain what that even means. So it is even just, the sense of a physical Orb in a location that someone can interact with on a physical level, like they may not understand exactly what blockchain is, what Web3 is, what some of these protocols are. But it's a tangible thing in someone's city that they could walk up to, and that's actually really cool. And that's something that's very novel about it. And in my mind, like even that principle alone bridges Web2 and Web3. It also bridges physical and digital, which is a big trend in this space as well, with NFTs and different types of physical-digital collectibles. I don't know what they call those. Phygi-, physical, some funky name like that. But I've also, you know, writing about this and writing about a lot of different use cases in the Web3 space that claim to be this bridge, I see this one as a major one because, you know, you could essentially walk straight up to it and interact with it in your day-to-day life if it's near you.

[00:20:48] Steven Smith: Mhm. Exactly. I was in Argentina earlier this year, and one of the things that I, probably the highlight of my trip was I went out to a number of locations where, you know, they had Orbs in operation, and you know, it was just, it was very humbling to see because, you know, you had people, you had an operation and maybe it was in near, you know, a kind of a market like a local market in Argentina where people would go to buy fresh groceries or vegetables or whatever random goods they might need. So that was probably my favorite location. But we get a little bit hung up in, you know, kind of an echo chamber, and maybe even that echo chambers, you know, what people call Crypto Twitter. But I can almost assure you, the people that were, for the most part, at the locations I went to in Argentina are probably not on Crypto Twitter. And they don't know the lingo, they don't know the buzzwords, but they do have a very practical, real-world use case for what we're trying to do with the Worldcoin network, essentially. So that was very, like I enjoyed that as much as anything I've done, honestly, since I've been with the project, were those field visits in Argentina.

[00:21:56] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, I can imagine that. You know, it's always great to see your work, one, in action, two, having an impact. And it seems… I can imagine like that kind of coming together on a trip like that. And you did mention, though, that there are some unique challenges that you guys face within the protocol and even maintaining the protocol. And my next question is, what are some of those challenges? And after that, I would love to kind of expand on some of those surrounding privacy and data.

[00:22:22] Steven Smith: Yeah, I mean, you know, there are several, and they fall into kind of different categories. Some of them are a lot of them have to do with, you know… It kind of goes back to this whole premise, right? Like you want to do something at population scale, which is, you know, clearly a lot of people. So we did an exercise some time back where we took kind of analytics from the users that were using the project at the time. And we did this over a year ago. So a substantial number less than we have today in terms of folks that have been through the verification process. But we just looked at, you know, like onchain analytics. Like what, again, not what a specific person does, but hey, of this set of people using Worldcoin. Hypothetically, you sign up ten, and four become like really power users during the month, and they might, you know, do X number of transfers or swaps or claim airdrops or whatever. So you can kind of get some general analytics just like you can with, you know, with any app out there. That's just, that's the nature of a transparent blockchain. You can kind of get those stats, which is, you know, there's some good elements to that, of course. But anyway, we took that kind of transaction profile for the users we had. And then we, you know, back to the concept of bringing a billion users onchain, We just assumed no additional functionality.

That transaction profile stays the same for every user that we add. What does that look like at a billion-person scale? And we realized, and we already knew this. So it wasn't like, oh my goodness, we never thought about this, but it was kind of really good to have the data because it was also very it was a stark reminder of what faces us in terms of scale. But that volume of transactions, you know, I would argue the current set of blockchain-related technologies will not scale to that level. Now, there's a lot being done. So if we had a billion today, we'd have nowhere to run it. So fortunately, as we scale up over time, we continue to do things to improve the scalability of the systems that we run on. So I have no doubt we will keep pace, but it's not going to be easy. And just being able to run that workload, that workload alone effectively, and in a, you know, kind of a highly performant fashion is going to be an incredible challenge, kind of at the protocol level. So that's kind of, you know, we announced something called World Chain back in April, and that's kind of where World Chain came from. It's our first step at creating kind of a home for the Worldcoin network. So it's a, World Chain is a layer-2 optimistic rollup built on OP Stack, which is from the, you know, Optimism Collective.

But yeah. So that was why we essentially are undertaking that project is to have an environment where we can control scalability. We have options for scalability, performance improvements, and we're collaborating with the Optimism teams to work together and contribute those back to everyone running that stack. But those are, you know, that's just kind of one of the unique challenges is around scale and performance. And I would say another large one is just generally around decentralization. Like Tools for Humanity incubated this project, like we discussed. We have the Worldcoin Foundation. So, we have multiple entities now, and the foundation is the steward of the protocol. But we want to build like a true decentralized protocol, meaning you get to the point where the users are participants. It's largely permissionless, and we've got a number of services that we rely on that have to be decentralized to get there. In order to be able to decentralize them, you've got to make, you know, kind of protocol-level changes. Another one that we did recently was we announced that we were doing this. We call it the uniqueness check. That's when a person comes, you know, to an Orb to go through the verification process. We can determine, oh, well, this new person has never been at an Orb before. Or we can say, well, you actually did this last week, so you can't do it again, and you can't reclaim, you know, the airdrop or whatever. But we call that process of determining whether a person is new or returning the uniqueness check.

Like, have we seen the person before in very simple terms? And with the SMOC, which is secure multiparty computation, it's kind of a cryptographic thing that allows us to do that comparison. But the parties participating in the protocol don't really see any information that might be, you know, sensitive if you will. In that case, they can just determine, I've got a piece of a thing, you've got a piece of a thing. My piece of a thing looks like it's unique. I don't know about your piece of a thing, but if we kind of, if someone else rolls all that together, you can make a determination. The key point is that all occurs encrypted. So there's no, like, sensitive information being used. Now, that's kind of a first step in, okay? Well, that is now a service that can be decentralized. Before it was, you know, we're doing comparisons in highly secured data centers, data encrypted in transit and at rest. You know, so definitely the right security and privacy controls you'd expect with any type of system that deals with any kind of personal information at all. So we've always had that in place. But how can we then, in turn, decentralize it? And that's where, you know, SMPC came from. And that breakthrough there that allowed us to do that at a level that was efficient enough to be able to run it in production.

[00:27:43] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. And, you know, on that specific note of, you know, uniqueness checks, so to say, this deals with a lot of personal sensitive data of a user in theory. Obviously, you know, as we've discussed, it's not tied to Savannah. It's not tied to Steven, but it is sensitive data. And, you know, something that we've seen occurring in different places where Orbs are available is countries wondering about the data management of users who are signing up for that. And I'm just curious. I know you're working as head of protocol, so it's not exactly your specific niche, but we've seen Worldcoin actively responding to all of these inquiries and, you know, putting new checks in place. As if listeners have been following along with those stories, you know, it seems that Worldcoin is directly responding to those things. And I'm just curious how the protocol is able to just ensure this privacy and security of its users. And what, on that same note, what measures are already in place that you guys have to prevent any abuse that could potentially happen within the network?

[00:28:46] Steven Smith: A good question. I'll provide a little context on how the unique, a little bit more detail on the uniqueness checks. So, that kind of serves as a basis for my response. So, you know, when you go to an Orb, you clearly take in, you know, a picture of your iris, it scans it, and then that information is on the Orb is turned into what's called an iris code. And an iris code is just a digital representation of the uniqueness of your iris. And that's a concept that we didn't invent, that it's actually a concept that was invented by a gentleman named John Daugman back in the 90s. I think it was, or maybe early 2000. Anyway, it predates Worldcoin substantially, but we improved upon it. So we made like we have like John Dogman's iris code was one thing, and we're like, great concept. And we're going to use the key tenets of what we're doing. But we, given the fact that we have the incredible cameras now, we can create a more, we'll call it a feature-rich iris code, if you will. Like more information, which, again, ties into this population-scale uniqueness check that we're doing. And the uniqueness check occurs by comparing, you know, a new iris code that comes in with the existing iris codes we've seen from other users. And then, you know, if there's no match, then we add this person to the identity data set, as I described earlier. So that's kind of the uniqueness check now.

So we don't, like when you sign up, we don't take your image and compare it to other images, for example. It's just the iris code itself. So the iris code is what's considered in data protection terms like biometric template. And you know, if you did a fingerprint scan somewhere, there's a, you know, an equivalent biometric template for that. It's the digital representation of your fingerprint, or your palm print, or your face. But in this case, an iris code is a biometric template. And, you know, there's nothing per se in the iris code itself that… you know, it's not like DNA where you could determine you might have a propensity for a certain health condition or, you know, something along those lines. For the most part, like DNA is incredibly informative. And but, in the case of an iris code, it's really just the uniqueness for the most part. And that, you know, kind of the digital representation of that uniqueness, which then allows us to compare it to other iris codes that we've seen. So fundamentally, what we're looking to do is just make that comparison, biometric templates, in as private and secure fashion as we can. And the whole SMPC protocol, for example, that I mentioned earlier is geared at doing that, basically allowing that comparison to occur in protocol terms, what we call the encrypted domain, meaning the data is encrypted as it's being compared. It doesn't need to be unencrypted for that comparison to work accurately. So those are kind of the key tenets. So that's kind of the basics of the system.

Now, honestly, a lot of people, you know… Full disclosure, before I joined Worldcoin, I had never really looked at biometric templates in great detail. So I don't think it's, I don't even think most people in Web3 — are probably, just forget Web3 for a moment, in technology, unless you've had a reason to work in a related field — have an understanding of like biometric templates and kind of what that means, and even how you might go about comparing one with another. But I think, you know, part of what we do is like work with, you know… And again, I'm in protocol, so I don't get involved in data protection matters directly other than answer questions for the team here that does on occasion, you know, is like, you know, helping people understand, well, how does Worldcoin work and how, you know, what's this process, what's involved? You know, a person goes to an Orb, what happens next? How does that work? What are the protections in place? So I think we've done a really good job of working with different groups around the world, different departments or different data protection authorities, if you will, in providing them information they need, performing a good bit of education. And yeah, I think it's, you know, hats off to that team that work incredibly hard at doing that. And they're doing an excellent job. And it's all enabled by, we have an incredibly private protocol. Like our data handling processes and procedures at the protocol level are incredibly solid.

[00:32:45] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, I mean, it seems like things are, you said they're doing really good work. And, you know, as I mentioned before, I've seen Worldcoin actively respond to a lot of concerns that anyone has and either, you know, put new checks in place or open-source things or, you know, try to be as transparent with how you guys work, with what data you guys take in and inform people. And in observing all of that, it seems to be working in a sense because over the last year, the Worldcoin user base has shot up. You guys have, correct me if I'm wrong, millions of users in the Worldcoin ecosystem now and a growing number of use cases where people are involving themselves with Worldcoin and using it to do things locally in their lives. And I would love to kind of get into some use cases that you have seen and some success stories that you've seen with the community of Worldcoin, you know, that have gone through all of this process and have signed up for a unique ID, have proved their uniqueness and are actively participating in the network. So I'm not sure if you have any success stories of users who have shared those either with you guys or you know of from Crypto Twitter, or the online space in general. I would love to hear some of those.

[00:34:01] Steven Smith: Yeah, I mean, we have grown, like we just launched the project, launched officially in July of last year. So coming up on a year, but less than a year at this point. And, you know, I wish I knew off the top of my head like how many we had at launch. I am almost positive I was here when we crossed the 1 million mark of verified humans. Definitely, when we crossed 2. And now we're at, you know, roughly 5.7 million. So, we've grown tremendously over the course of the year. We've done, you know, over 100 million wallet transactions by World App users. We're doing, you know, 300,000-plus daily transactions, you know, a day, 39 countries we've operated in. And yeah, so it's just an, you know, it's an incredible kind of incredible growth. We've done some polls of users of World ID, if you will. And overwhelmingly, people are supportive of the value that it brings in general and their uses of World ID. In terms of specifics, one of the key things is if you just look generically, it's like — and that was also in some of the polls that we did — they just want some assurance that an interaction that's occurring online is a human and not a bot. So, a clear way to distinguish humans from bots online and to segue for a bit, and this will date myself, but there's a gentleman named Bill Joy. He's one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. I mean, this is the burgeoning, you know, kind of nascent start of the internet as we know it. You know, companies like Sun Microsystems and a few others. But back in the early 2000s, late 1990s, actually early 2000, Bill published an article on, you know, the six webs, he called it. It was kind of a, you know, it was incredibly forward-looking. But the short version is he said, hey, there's this internet that you know about. There's going to be intranets that people use within their companies. There's going to be what we would call the mobile web today. There's going to be a streaming web. There's going to be an Internet of Things. And he kind of called all these in advance of really people even understanding what the internet was. So Bill was, you know, an incredible visionary. And one thing that struck me, and I was thinking about this over the holidays, and I read an article somewhere that kind of reminded me of that article. And as you look at like, kind of, again, the age of AI, if you want to call it that, or the evolution of AI or the advances in AI, it really you need to identify, I think, a seventh web to bootstrap or to add on maybe to what Bill said, and I kind of call it the human web.

So, a way to distinguish in this interrelated web of activity, which is some humans, some bots, what is the human web like? How do you determine human activity in this new world we find ourselves in, where AI plays in the mix, and we look at World ID as really infrastructure for the human web? And that's what resonates with a number of our users. They want technology solutions that allow them to distinguish humans from bots and level the field. Because, you know, a person cannot compete against an automated bot for much of anything, like voting in a DAO or claiming airdrops equitably and fairly. So that's a big use case. Another one is just like something as simple as logging on to Discord or Telegram and having a badge that says, okay, well, I'm actually interacting with a human. Doesn't mean you have to agree with him. It doesn't mean they see things the same way you do. But at least you know you're not like interacting with a bot whose mission in life is to contradict you, or frustrate you, or spam the channel. So just, you know, simple things like that, which then in turn, you know, leads to reduction in fraud and things along those lines. Yeah.

[00:37:39] Savannah Fortis: I was just going to say, yeah, fraud is, you know, bots are one thing, which is a growing problem. And as you said, with AI, it's going to only increase. But fraud as well. I mean, I personally have had fraud on Discord where someone created an entire Discord account claiming they were me and trying to get partnerships with companies to write an article about them, so I could see this also being a use case of verifying myself as a unique human and having you get a little badge if you participate with your World ID in this sense, for example.

[00:38:14] Steven Smith: Yes, and I’m no Discord, you know, person in terms of you know how it operates. But I know I've signed in to a few different systems with World ID, essentially, and proved to Discord that I was a unique human, and then I'm tagged or flagged or have a badge or something in Discord that indicates, yes, this is a unique person.

[00:38:34] Savannah Fortis: And this is like multiple steps up from like the blue check verification systems that we have in, let's say, the Web2 world on like Twitter or X.

[00:38:43] Steven Smith: I mean, I think so I could go, you know, I could have multiple Twitter accounts, and I could pay the fee and have a blue checkmark on all, you know, all ten of them or five of them, and it'd still be me. So it's just one person with five voices in a conversation or, you know, and if you look at automating that, my goodness, you know, you could have, you know, an incredible number of accounts. And the thing about AI is people that are somewhat even; you don't even have to be an expert in AI. But if you're familiar with AI and you think about the progression in AI, and you know, everyone's probably used ChatGPT in some sense or something similar, and just I mean, it's very impressive. I mean, you have to be impressed. Quite honestly. It is. Yeah. I mean, you look at like people talk about AGI and what's really going to happen, then when, you know, AI reaches superhuman intelligence. But the thing that we encounter well before that is what we call superhuman influence, right? Like the ability for an AI to convince you of something, to influence an election, to counter-argue a point with you. And so I will reach the level of superhuman influence well before it reaches the level of superhuman intelligence. And arguably, you could say we're kind of there today a little bit, depending on how it's used.

[00:40:02] Savannah Fortis: Yeah. Oh, I would also say arguably. Yeah. I mean, even if you look at AI-generated media, for example, now, it's, I mean, this is, as you said already, we are in the nascent stages, but like it's even if this is the beginning, then I can only imagine what's yet to come. Because, you know, some videos that we see now on X are questionable, even if it's created by AI, if it's manipulated by AI, that certainly shakes up people's thoughts and opinions about things, right?

[00:40:30] Steven Smith: Absolutely.

[00:40:31] Savannah Fortis: And speaking of X, I wanted to know if you had any insight. I found this to be a really funny use case, which also got a lot of like steam on social media, but there was a Worldcoin user who, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you know this story, who used his World ID or was communicating with the Worldcoin community and was able to purchase goats with his tokens.

[00:40:58] Steven Smith: Oh, right. Yes, I am familiar with that story, actually, and that's an excellent example of a use case for Worldcoin and the tie between the Web2 world and Web3 world. So the person had been to an Orb, got verified, was able to begin then claiming the — and I don't work in the economics area, but basically, if you sign up, there's like a welcome rally. You know, welcome to Worldcoin. And we know you're a unique human now. And as a unique human, you can participate in the Worldcoin network, this financial and identity network. And we give you a grant of Worldcoin tokens. And then every, I think, the cycle’s every two weeks now, you can you get another airdrop, and you can claim that one, and you can accumulate Worldcoin, and you can do whatever you want with it. At that point, you can hold it. You could send it to your friends or your family. You could exchange it for fiat in your local currency or whatever you want it to do. In this case, this individual is, you know, I mean, he wanted to basically acquire goats for a variety of reasons. You know, that people are farmers and, you know, they might have cattle or sheep or goats or chickens or whatever they might have.

And for him, I guess in his area it was goats is what he was interested in. So he took his Worldcoin and sold it for fiat and acquired goats, and posted it. You know, this was an example where you had someone who was on Twitter as well and just said, hey, here's, you know, thank you, Worldcoin. Here's what I did with my tokens. And I have a goat. And it kind of caught fire because people, people were, you know, I mean, people were like, oh my God, it's a goat. And so people then people were like, hey, what's your address? We're going to send you funds, and people, you know, it was basically like, tell me what you mean to name the goat. And people were naming goats after their friends or their family or whatever. And he just... And then he's like, I've got to build a bigger, like, goat pen, you know, to hold the goats or whatever. And so it really grew into this like small enterprise for goat farming. And yeah, so it's definitely the tie, it's a very practical example of the Web2 and Web3 worlds like intersecting and the very tangible use case of how this benefits people.

[00:43:12] Savannah Fortis: Yeah, definitely how it benefits a goat farmer. Do you remember exactly where that Orb was located? I can't remember.

[00:43:19] Steven Smith: I believe it was in Kenya, but I'm not positive on that.

[00:43:24] Savannah Fortis: That does ring a bell. I was either going to say, do you have Orbs in Nigeria? No. possibly.

[00:43:29] Steven Smith: Possibly, but I don't…

[00:43:31] Savannah Fortis: Possibly Kenya. Yeah, it sounds like it's right. I remember that, and I'm also curious. Actually, it was a question that I've been waiting to ask. But how do you get Orbs in these locations? I'm sure there's a logistics team that has the really fun job of taking an Orb out to Kenya, let's say, or Argentina, as you said. But I'm curious: you've been to Argentina, you've seen an Orb in action. Do you know about that process of getting it there?

[00:43:55] Steven Smith: You know, I mean, I know a little bit about it at a high level. And so essentially when you, and I'll just kind of give you my understanding of how we would get into like a, you know, let's just say a country that we've never operated in before we ever went there. The work would start well ahead of time between our team and the data protection authorities in the region operate. And that's so data protection, the legal right to operate in a country, you know, the whole we need a business license or do we need an entity in the country or whatever? So people, you know, we have plenty of smart people that figure all that out. But then, at some point, it's like, okay, well, we're good to go, and we can know this is going to work. And the team basically looks for, and depending on the size of the country, like a series of people like, you know, call them country managers or if the country is big enough like regional managers that work under country manager, but people that are from the area and understand the nuances of the culture in a given area because we want to do things the right way and the way you might…

Some of us may be totally different than how you would do it in Kenya or how you might do it in Argentina or Chile or Ecuador, for example. But so it kind of starts there, and then it's kind of, you know, massive planning. Like, okay, well, where would be the best locations to reach the most people for what we want to do? And then, you know, it's kind of this analysis of, well, how about these cities and then within the cities, how about these locations? And that might be like city center kind of things like subway stations or malls or something, you know, where there's some foot traffic and then areas outside of the city center. Like the ones I visited in Argentina were in like small markets. They were heavily trafficked because they kind of served, you know, a larger neighborhood, if you will. But well, outside this, you know, city center, what we might call the central business district. So there's, you know, just kind of a determination made. Then there's a recruiting of operators to operate those locations, a lot of education for them, you know, in terms of, well, one, how do you even operate an Orb? I mean, very fundamental things.

But then two, educating them on Worldcoin the project, the goals of the project, the intent, the measures that, you know, the project goes to to preserve privacy and protect their data so they can, you know, be very well informed and then in turn inform the people that come to sign up. And yeah, it's just kind of that process. And then logistically, Orbs are shipped to the locations. And so you have Orbs and backup Orbs and backup batteries and parts and yeah. And then, of course, there's the whole the World-, you know, Worldcoin branding, if you will. Like we want the locations to look somewhat uniform, you know, without being too restrictive. But we don't want someone walking around a mall with an Orb in their hand, you know. Like, it kind of has to be a booth with the standard learn about Worldcoin. You know, those type of posters or placards or whatever. But I mean, that's kind of roughly — it's logistical. We have some great logistical folks here and fleet management teams that manage the Orbs and make sure they're operating properly and ensure that there's plenty of backups and backup parts or batteries or whatever the case might be.

[00:46:54] Savannah Fortis: That's really cool to know because, yeah, you know, sometimes I have wondered, like, whent is someone just going to pick up one of these Orbs and exactly walk around the city with it somehow under their arm? That's a really funny vision. I can, right?

And, you know, we've talked a little bit about AI in the context of how Worldcoin and the World ID can help combat AI bots, for example, pretending to be people or distinguish people from AI bots. And I'm curious if you guys are working with AI as well as, you know, trying to verify humans against AI. If you guys are working with any AI integrations in your product.

[00:47:29] Steven Smith: Yeah, actually we are. And, you know, depending on, I mean, AI is kind of a broad term, and it can include things like machine learning, for example. But actually, the Orb itself has several models that run on it. And there, for purposes of, we were discussing fraud a bit earlier, it's hilarious, honestly, to watch the team run here, try to spoof an Orb. Basically, you know, I've seen people standing with their faces basically glued together, and it's one eye of one person, one eye off another to see if you know there's any way to get by an Orb. But the models that run… So the Orb is not only a sophisticated hardware device; there's a sophisticated Orb operating system that runs on it and an incredible team that keeps that operating system. I mean, it's just incredible how efficient it is. But at any rate, you know, when you go to sign, you know, we want to make sure when you sign up or when a person goes to an Orb that they're not holding picture, an incredible high fidelity picture of a human, you know, face with the iris, right? So you can't take a picture and go, you know, hey, scan this. And you couldn't, you know, like, if you had a poodle, you couldn't hold a poodle up. So there's models that run on the Orb that determine, well, this, okay, something's in front of me. I'm scanning it. It is a human. It is a living, breathing human. So it's not a picture. It's not like a really good picture. So there's the determination made using, you know, machine learning models that, okay, that is actually a human in front of me.

So we're already using AI in that sense. And to kind of combat fraud at the most basic level, like what's in, you know, in front of the Orb is not a computer-generated image of an iris. And, you know, so if someone's got a picture after picture after picture, it can sign up multiple times. So we already use it there at that level. There's a number of areas we’re researching to basically determine, okay, is there is there an alternative to the iris code that would allow us to more easily compare a billion-person scale in terms of like more, even more unique information we could extract from an iris image? It'd be kind of, you know, the iris code plus plus, if you will. So that's an active research area for us. It's been ongoing. The great thing about, you know, we have kind of… I was chatting with some of my friends at, they're in a research area at Bain Capital Crypto and a really sharp team. And we just kind of refer to it as, oh, that's a Worldcoin-size problem, you know, like because the problems are enormous. Not in a bad way. But the challenge is like the research frontiers that we operate in and the problems we're trying to solve. And we're looking, we're 5.7 million today, but we're looking at what does it look like if that's a million? And what if we get there next year? Then what do we do? Yeah. So we're researching a number of things around AI and other advancements to kind of, you know, again, go back to those challenges that we have around scale and performance primarily.

[00:50:20] Savannah Fortis: Right. And as we've said multiple times, this is a year in. So already at millions of users. I am sure we can anticipate within another year, there will be millions more joining you. If not, like you said, in probably extreme case or good case, billions of users joining in on the network. And I'm curious, as we start to wrap things up, what's next for Worldcoin? What do we see in the short term, like in the near future, within the next year, let's say, as we look forward within the rest of this year? What can we anticipate to see from you guys? It seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes, a lot of research, a lot of development. So, I'd be curious if there's anything you can share.

[00:50:57] Steven Smith: Uh, yeah. Actually, I mentioned World Chain. We announced it in April. We're going to have, most likely next week, we're going to announce a major partnership around World Chain, which I think is a very, in my opinion, a very fundamental relationship for the Worldcoin Project and World Chain, specifically. We're looking forward to launching World Chain sometime in the summer. Prior to the kind of the general launch of World Chain, it'll be open for, let's call it, you know, development testing. So as we add partners and other applications that want to run on World Chain, we'll have a period of time, kind of like a, let's call it a test period prior to just like the general launch of World Chain. But those will, you know, definitely be coming in the summer. And on the protocol team, in particular, in project, you know, the company TFH, Worldcoin Foundation, that's like something we've been working on for quite a while. We actually knew we were going to launch our own rollup over a year ago. I'm not sure everybody at the project knew it, but definitely, the people working in the protocol. When we looked at the numbers we needed, well, we're going to launch our own rollup eventually. So that's super exciting. That's going to be, that is kind of the embodiment of the Worldcoin network essentially is World Chain. And we're super excited for that. We're, you know, we announced SMPC, and that work, and we we’re already working on subsequent versions of SMPC. So we're doing some interesting things around SMPC, around more efficiency, how we're doing things, more parties, participating in the protocol. That'll be something we talk about in the next few months. And then just yeah, a number of just research projects we've been working on that are, you know, kind of, in my opinion, incredible breakthroughs. We'll see how they manifest themselves in the different products and the protocol over time. But there will be some pretty interesting things announced over the course of the next year.

[00:52:51] Savannah Fortis: So I'm looking forward to it. There seems like a lot to look forward to and a lot to keep our eye on.

[00:52:56] Steven Smith: Yeah, I'm pretty excited. Look, I love working on hard problems, and just the tie back into, like, we talked about a few times, like just the tie into the let's call it the non-Web3 world because you know, like the person we were talking about, on Twitter with his goats, that's I don't even think that's like a Web2 use case. That's like a real-world use case, you know, and… but just the tie into real-world use cases, it's just something that's fascinating.

[00:53:20] Savannah Fortis: Oh, definitely. Me too. That's what I'm always having my nose sniffing around for are those real-world use cases that actually bring people into this awesome technology that has and will change the world? And it's for me, that's where it gets really exciting because I get to see people interact with it in ways that they understand. They may not understand it on a completely technical level, but once they can grasp it because it becomes like directly relevant to their life, that they wake up and live every day, that's where it gets really exciting. And that's what we're going to get people into our space, I think.

[00:53:53] Steven Smith: I think so too.

[00:53:54] Savannah Fortis: Definitely. And I want to thank you so much for joining us and having this awesome conversation, and explaining more about what Worldcoin is doing and its vision, and its mission. If there are any final thoughts or messages you want to share, I open the floor up to you, Steven.

[00:54:09] Steven Smith: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity. You know, I chatted before to kind of talk about what we wanted to cover and then chatted today. But it's just been a pleasure to be talking with you today and to be on your podcast. And, uh, we appreciate the opportunity to talk about about blockchain in the project, kind of where it started, where it's going and where we're at, at the moment. And yeah, I would, you know, as we have some of these additional announcements we're going to have throughout the year, I would love to come back anytime you'd like and chat with you again.

[00:54:41] Savannah Fortis: Awesome. Thank you so much. And where can people find more information about Worldcoin or follow the work?

[00:54:47] Steven Smith: Yeah, I mean, the primary source would be like the Worldcoin.org website. And you know, that would have, you know, like all our blogs that we put out. And we put out blogs on everything. Some of them are totally educational. Like, here's what an iris code is, and here's how we calculate an iris code. And some of them are talking about, you know, we're going to launch World Chain or here's SMPC in kind of the details on how it works. And then, of course, you know, @Worldcoin on Twitter. We amplify everything on there. If it is in a blog post, it's going to be on Twitter as well. So I would say those are the two best sources probably. Worldcoin.org, the website, and @Worldcoin on Twitter would be the two easiest ways to kind of keep up generally with what's going on.

[00:55:27] Savannah Fortis: This has been another episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph. Thank you so much for joining us on yet another insightful conversation uncovering the decentralized and Web3 space. Also, check out one of our many articles we've published here on Cointelegraph on the topic of decentralized IDs and Worldcoin. Once again, thank you so much for tuning in to Decentralize with Cointelegraph. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode, and we'll see you in the next one.

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