Alex Blania: Worldcoin – The Eye Catching Crypto Coin #435

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization in the global blockchain revolution i'm sebastian cuccio and i'm here with frederick ernst today we're speaking with alex blania who is the co-founder and ceo of world coin but before we talk to alex i'd like to first tell you about our sponsors this week are your crypto assets sitting highly and you're idling your wallet well you can start earning rewards and contribute to network security by staking with course one there is taking providers securing five billion dollars in assets on over 25 decentralized networks including solana cosmos and ethereum are you interested in running your own branded nodes well they have a managed white label node as a service offering that leverage course one's highly available and proven infrastructure

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dow go to paraswap.io discord alex thanks so much for joining us today thanks for having me tell us a bit about your background and how you became involved in crypto and what led you to become the ceo of world coin all right so um yeah right before rolkin i was in physics actually so i was um i was i was at caltech in los angeles and i was working on basically how to use neural networks to make kind of quantum computations they're really really hard to do with numerical methods how to make them much much cheaper and faster um and i did this for quite a while i think like one and a half two years so first in germany max planck um and then at caltech and los angeles and before that um well i was

always building things i was always a hacker right so i had my my first semi company when i was relatively young um doing vertical farming and many other things so it was always i was always building it was always clear to me that uh i want to kind of start a company or or a project and yeah then at caltech basically i met sam and max back then and uh he heard about royal client was really excited about it and got involved cool so you met sam altman while you were at caltech that's correct right so the original story actually was something like sam was already working in together with max the the third co-founder and i don't know no not too long like

three four months it was super early it was just like that the concept was there and i remember actually i interviewed as a as an engineer back then at rock and that's actually how everything got started and then i became friends with with both sam and max and uh it was super early and i just became co-founder and i brought my all the great people i met in university uh both in germany at caltech basically with me and that that turned out to be the founding team so we have like a lot of scientists and and and kind of physicists actually like many physicists in the company because of that reason coolant what are your respective roles in the project now well i'm the i'm the ceo i'm i'm running

the day-to-day business all right the company's now around 100 people it's it it's a lot of people because it's just kind of we build hardware like underground operations like many things that just require a lot of human capital um and well samus is the co-founder chairman we talk a lot and he's involved in every big decision but i run the day-to-day basically and uh max max is now actually starting a new project right now uh he's he's like a really great zero to one guy cool so um in a nutshell before we deep dive into the um welcome itself um what's the idea behind workcoin so we started um

two years ago right so right when i uh when i came from caltech we started with this very simple idea of onboarding the rolled into web3 and distribute the value it creates fairly with everyone because that that itself would be a very powerful thing to achieve you can you can try and achieve many new things with that like everything from ubi to uh digital democracy all of those things so that was very very exciting to us um back then web 3 was not a common word use back then was just crypto and uh very few people participating and we just really thought hard about how can we accelerate this whole transition like how can we get many many more people into there uh because getting to a large network

and just kind of getting much more attention towards it should should be net positive for everyone and so with that idea we we thought about just launching a token by by giving ownership and that token to everyone just just simply for the reason of being a human just like when you no matter where you are who you are you should you should have access to that and claim ownership in that in that token um and that then should be hopefully to buy this unfair distributed token there is currently right and that was a very simple basic idea and then we stumbled across a a very big problem that i think you talk about here quite a bit i heard it from uh from bitcoin recently is is civil

resistance right like how can you how can you make sure uh that that every participant in such a in such a network in such a system is only receiving one uh one share of that and it's not just creating multiple pseudonymous identities and basically the whole mechanism breaks down um and that's why we uh that's why we're building a hardware device uh called the orb so the the orb is just basically the the only solution we found to solve their problem in a privacy preserving and scalable way how every user can prove to the protocol not our not just ours but everyone else's uh that they are in fact unique real alive and uh

yeah so fundamentally it's two things it's a it's a platform it's open decentralized proof of personnel that any other project will be able to use for whatever they want to use it for and then an application of that platform which will be the widest and fairly distributed token there is that that is the idea and um yeah right now we we we've answered all the big conceptual and technical questions we had a year ago uh we've onboarded i think 450 000 people so we're ready to scale it's a really exciting time in the company so before you came up with this sort of final idea of the orb and we'll get into how the orb works what had you imagined other systems that would allow you to overcome the civil resistance problem

um you know or had you looked at other civil resistant protocols and other initiatives that people are working on to try to solve this problem um and you know how how did those come up short if you know yeah a lot uh so many many months actually so the first i don't know i probably like the first four or five months we just we just thought about this problem and kind of read in all of those different things that are that are out there right now there's like many things right it starts with classical kyc that you could use and that's obviously not great for a bunch of obvious reasons then what many people are doing is web of trust or network topology things where you just try to analyze the network of

users and you try to understand okay who of those people are fraudulent users and all those kinds of things and basically the the summary of that back then was that the only truly scalable thing that there is currently is um is biometrics it's just a fundamental solution to that it's like you you take a feature that is unique to a person um and you use that to make sure that that person signs up only once right and um that that's the case for example in india and the athar project if you want to be part of the social buffer system in india you do that also with your with your biometrics that's the only solution they found to that problem um and the cool thing in crypto is you can use your knowledge proofs to make it privacy preserving so that was that was back

then this big click moment for us where we looked in all of those other things and none of that really seemed to scale or we saw many many reasons how at scale so if it goes above like 100 million 200 million 500 million users it would break down and that was not the case for biometrics and then we we realized okay if you use your knowledge proofs in the right way here you can actually make it privacy preserving you can make it scalable and practical on a global application but we really think about it as like we're not it was a really tough insight to be to be clear it was nothing we have been excited back then like okay we have to build our own hardware device so cool it was a really um brutal uh kind of insight for us it's

it's obviously a very hard endeavor and we really see it as we try to innovate on all the other things that there are in parallel right and we try to bootstrap a large enough network with the orb as fast as we can and then maybe at some point uh we can switch to above trust or other applications or the orb continues to stay in in other applications we will see but basically we think about this problem a lot and uh it's the cleanest and straightforward solution we found so i i kind of want to talk about um the problem set and the process of collecting biometric data in a bit but maybe let's talk about the oop first so the oop is this very futuristic

looking ball um ball-like thing it's shiny it's made from metal and it photographs your iris right yeah um and what does it then do with um the the ir scan they're actually they're multiple things to that right so first of all what is the problem you're trying to solve the problem is called proof of of personhood or or proof of unique humanness right so how can anyone no matter where you are where you come from you can prove to a protocol that you are in fact unique you are a real human and you're alive so you're not you're not a bot you're not a display that tries to like attack the

system in a different way like all kinds of security concerns of course that is proof of personal debt is proof of unique uh humanness and so what the orb does is it um first kind of has all kinds of security mechanisms in there to check that you are in fact a real person versus a display and all kinds of things right because basically you want to show up in front of that orb and a few seconds later you get your proof of person that should not work with a display or all kinds of contact lenses all those kinds of things so first the orb does a liveness check to make sure that you're real then it collects a picture of your eye calculates a unique

identifier out of your your eye so the muscle of the eye that's actually uh kind of we will talk more about biometric um data sources in a second but basically it's the only thing that actually works fingerprints face doesn't all of that stuff doesn't work and then basically proves to uh to an l2 so those iris hashes first of all from from the iris embedding there's an iris hash created so you cannot go back from that actual hash to the picture of the eye that that's the first important piece and that iris hash is stored on an l2 in the open so everyone one can see what is going on there and the user can then prove a version knowledge proof in their app that they are included in a certain set of people

so basically basically the thing you achieve here is the orb proves or with the help of the orb you prove that you are unique in a certain set of people without revealing who you are and what your actual public and private key is so you stay full leaps autonomous and neither us or anyone else can change that yeah that that makes sense so basically if um if i scan my iris again um it'll come up with um the same hash and you'll know that i'm already in the system and it will deny a new proof of personnel right correct so where do you store um where's your database of iris hashes so

there there's like a there's a road map we will publish around that soon but um the final state of the system is that it's stored on another l2 right so on another blockchain or those rs hedges are stored and so so it's in the open there is no central database or something like that and everyone basically can prove that that that verification happened okay interesting so so i think there's been a number of criticisms around around this uh around the system um and i think the the one that that most people have that i've read and like most people have cited is this idea that

once you've created a hash of your biometric data there's no going back and that that hash of your biometric data can be used for any number of um any number of applications you know whether it's um you know targeted ads or it could be something even more nefarious um how how like how did you guys come to this comp to the conclusion that this was in fact a good idea given the the amount of and you know it's possible that this uh skepticism exists in a certain circle of the population i think that most

people in the world you know don't think about this sort of thing the same way that most people don't use signal or you know like don't use a ledger device or don't go to great lengths to you know stop tracking or like things like that um but from your position of understanding these things he's like you're a smart guy uh how did you how did you square uh let's say you know the the application which is you know fairly powerful of like being able to prove someone's personhood with this is actually a good idea and no harm will come of this right so so first of all um we are

actually quite like our team is very extreme on the privacy side we have like many many people that have the background in the company so we think about that a lot and we don't take that lightly right so but it is very important to understand that what those zero knowledge proofs here achieve really is that your biometrics do not end up being your your actual identity but rather your kind of password right so those two things are fully separate i as a user i show up in front of an orb um i verify my proof of personal i basically receive two set of keys one one set of public and private keys for my actual wallet my ethereum wallet and i can do whatever i want with that and then the second thing is my basically identity

public and private key and i can use that to then issue with knowledge proofs to different applications that i'm unique to that application right so basically whenever uh i don't know let's go to the worst case i don't know like we we actually would try to to track people or something like that or anyone else really the only thing we could we could we could prove or anyone else can prove is that you're unique to that application you end up in a place where i have no idea who you actually are and that's what you want to achieve right so in fact i think it's much more privacy preserving than anything we use in our daily lives like a google login or facebook login or something so it's just really really important to understand implications of zero knowledge proofs and that implication

and why it's why it's so powerful right that is that is i think that is an important takeaway and we will just explain it over and over we will open source everything so people can actually they do not have to trust us they can just look what's actually going on and then i think it will be it will be clear and it will be fine uh because of course if other people have better ideas how to solve that problem on scale uh we will be the first ones to go down that down that path uh but at this point we don't see anything so the person who kind of or the the organization that kind of decides whether a hash is unique enough enough basically that that's kind of um what in a legacy world would be the attestation server right so basically

the the place where you check um that something is so how does that work if it's just a list of hashes on on a layer two well so the attestation uh happens on the public right so basically uh the the orb so so the orb records an image the orb calculates an embedding hashes that embedding signs a message with uh both that embedding and kind of the the public uh the public identity private key and sends it to at the station l2 and the comparison happens there and basically what happens there is a distance metric right so you have a you have um you basically have a code of numbers a

set of numbers they get compared to each other if that distance is close enough you say okay that person has already verified has signed up before uh and if that's the case it gets inserted in a in a miracle tree right and that's that's the set of unique people okay but only ops can append to that um list of attestations i mean in the beginning it it would be cool if we as a community figure out ways how other people can can build their own hardware uh when we actually open source all of the designs and and things like that it's just a hard hard thing to solve of course but i'm pretty sure we will get there so by opening sourcing the software will will that provide because i think

one of the things that people have been concerned about through reading like on twitter et cetera is that the the hardware is actually doing things that um it's not supposed to so like that the hardware is acting maliciously that perhaps like that world coin has a potential to be sort of commandeered by like a government actor or something like that to actually scan irises these are sort of like conspiracy theory style scenarios but like scenarios that people are concerned about by open sourcing the hardware i see that like i can see that you know that would allow people to peer into what the code has been instructed to do but without access to actual hardware that that people are using sort of in the

street there's no way to actually verify um what the hardware is doing i guess like i'm curious what i'm curious if you have a nightmare scenario you know like what is your nightmare scenario and what are you doing to mitigate it okay so so first to react to your your comment i i do not worry that people will take the orb apart relatively fast um so like we have we will open source everything we will build in the open with the community so we will have absolutely no incentive to do something like that um i think actually the the real concern i have is

that i don't know like malicious people try to build their own orbs and make them look like orbs right and try to i don't know fool full users into believing okay you're actually signing up for vulcan right now but you're signing up for something else i think that is the that is the absolute worst case that could happen here um well it will just not work with the with the rokkon app or all the other apps that actually support real quick onboarding so uh you will have to build your own app and whatever and that's that's a fraud case of course and what will need to happen here is just being very very transparent and very educational around all of those things right i think that's that's a problem that everyone season expects um yeah that that's by far the the worst case we think about

what do you think about yeah that i think that's what i also had in my like you know it's a fraud case like you said i mean there's no stopping anyone from doing that uh you know just like there's no no one can stop someone from like selling you some cryptocurrency and master it you know pass it off as something else or so i think there's some amount of irrational fear around this and but there's also a good amount of rational fear around unknown unknowns and and i guess i think that's the thing that most people are concerned with when

um when it comes to privacy when it comes to their data when it comes to things like dna sequencing or any sort of any sort of biometric data you know like i got a dna kit for for christmas and um and you know i like i thought long and hard about whether or not i wanted to do it and and i ended up like sending it back because i didn't like because there's too many unknown unknowns like i know a lot of the known risks but there's just some unknown ones that i i can't um square with um and i think that this this um way of of uh mitigating still reciprocal resistance

hints at a little bit of that as well i mean yeah obviously i totally i totally understand that part all right like i have the same emotion towards many things i use in my daily life um and i don't know like it actually starts with with using google and and what's not right there there's i know that somehow it's probably not a great idea but it just makes my life easier um but i i think what will happen here since we're we will open source everything we will build with the community is i don't know we can we can figure out the unknown unknowns like we're not a we're not a closed source company that do things behind doors or something um at least once we put everything out which by the

way is just really really hard to do with hardware it's we heard that criticism of like why didn't you do it so far um well because the the at some point the cost of a tax was higher than the rewards but we will do it relatively soon in next weeks so yeah i totally i totally get that point uh but i think it in my consideration in our thinking and we thought about this problem for quite a while uh it is privacy preserving it truly is like just by design but by the use of the zero-knowledge proofs that we were doing here right and um neither us or anyone else will be able to do by design of the system uh kind of really really scary things and that's the most important thing to get right

and then there's of course many things we have to figure out together with the community many things i probably don't think about it at this point i think you're right about that part of course but i i cannot give you like a great answer here because i think you're right uh and i think we have to figure out those things together i think civil resistance is one of the biggest problems of that space is unsolved everyone knows that and that is a way forward all right then let's try to get it to work yeah so maybe let's um put the biometric um thing behind us i'm also queasy about this but um let's let's talk about the protocol so basically um what technology is it based on and i mean if you plan to onboard the first billion users with this how is it gonna

scale right so the the token itself is um the token is minted as an l2 on top of ethereum an optimistic rollup we are using at this point at least hubble from the ethereum foundation and we put a lot of resources to make it even more gas efficient so we we make our high our own sequence implementation and things like that um and the reason here is just make it very gas efficient uh but we will allow and we are working on this right now um users to mint the token on the ecosystems too like solana for example right um just because we want to be ecosystem chain agnostic the whole protocol should should be like that so the proof of person itself of course

should be able to be used by people no matter which ecosystem if it's near solana ethereum whatever it's just a very powerful primitive that should be open so um basically i have an attestation on each chain i choose to interact on and then how does it how does it connect me to my account so so first of all we are using um photos for this whole zero knowledge proof part we're using what is called semaphore also from from from very whitehead from the ethereum foundation right so that is with that you can you can prove uh uniqueness or kind of inclusiveness

in a set or not without revealing your your actual private key that is what you want to do here uh and yeah so that that's semaphore from the ethereum foundation we're using right now and we will re-implement that uh for example on solana because basically what is happening is there's a merkle tree and you use your knowledge proofs to kind of create that nullifier um on your phone so that will be the hard part re-implementing those things on other ecosystems too but right now it's on ethereum um so there's two sets of uh public private keys right so basically what happens if i use if i lose my i mean i'm not going to lose my iris but uh hopefully but

what happens if i lose my phone well that's uh i mean so so your normal ethereum public private key is just that the app will have an icloud backup right that for that part uh maybe we will implement other things like social recovery i think you're aware that's just the problem the whole yeah ecosystem has that's the hard part for the if you lose your your kind of semi it's actually the semaphore key it's not look not like a normal public private key but if you lose that part theoretically you could show up in front of an orb you need another information too for that like the phone number or something like that but we do not have that implemented so right now the simplest answer is you you

lose your your identity at this point and there's things we have to implement in the future for that i had a question here just it would it be possible because i mean like the i think what's important to realize here is that the onboarding and the um the issuance of this semaphore uh kind of coupon um is separate from the actual wallet and uh then like holding and movement of funds um would it be possible for any ethereum wallet to like if i want to use i don't know like my ledger or if i want to use xengo or

anything that's like wallet connect compatible could i not just use any uh other wallet sure yeah like it will even be like even the onboarding to roll coin will be will be possible through the wallets right so um we have an app of course like we're building our app ourselves because it's just like in the first realization is onboarding people in i don't know all over the world at the same time it's really really hard like trying to people onboard in in kenya with metamask doesn't go that well um let me tell you that so that's why we're just building also an app that makes all of that much much easier but everything is open and other other apps can integrate even at onboarding um so

let's talk about um onboarding and incentives so basically you actually give people tokens for signing up correct that is correct um so what how how many tokens do people get how much is that worth and um is that a one-time thing so um there's actually something something new coming up here um but basically what happens is you as a user when you sign up for for world coin you receive relevant tokens you get ownership and the network in the protocol um that that also will have governance rights all of those things right and we are experimenting with different incentive mechanisms right now like how much how much welcome do you actually

will you give out the different times of the system all of those different things but in short there will be 10 billion tokens in total it will be a cap supply system 8 billion of those will go to users and you will have to implement something like early users get more because the kind of if it actually gets adopted the protocol gets adopted more people are using it the price will increase right to some degree so early users will receive more tokens to still make it worthwhile for them uh but i think what actually will be really exciting to see and what i guess we will see relatively soon is that other projects will also do airdrops uh through the roll call network right it's basically like this this billion user table that biology is always talking about um

or at least mention it often and send this blog post around right it's like it will be an open database of unique humans uh that you can just i don't know distribute ownership in different things towards too so my guess is relatively soon users will not only receive real quick but other tokens too so the public narrative um around webcoin kind of is centered around this ubi notion um and basically to me something that is um given out once is uh is kind of it's an airdrop it's not a ubi right so basically a ubi would be something an income that you actually get on a regular basis sorry i i probably thought a little bit

too complicated here um so yes use a user you will receive your blockcoin as a gradual unlock right that that has many that has many different reasons so i don't know let's say you receive android rollcoin you'll receive those hundreds real quick over two years uh and like a small piece of it every week yeah i mean like why we are so excited i mean we like both sam and i we are just personally really excited about ubi or or at least something like that will be the question how it actually is built in detail in the future but when ai and any kind of agi comes closer we will need something like that um but i don't know there's just how much how much money do you need to give away so worlkan will do a part for that but we

cannot solve the problem our own like other people will need to jump in and use that the proof of personal layer to do their part as well like not not one single entity can provide ui to the whole world of course so with a fixed supply um like how long how long until this uh initial supply of world coin is exhausted so like we we shouldn't expect that like in two generations from now people are still on boarding with the orb with in the hopes of getting world coin they might on board with an orb device or something similar in order to prove their identity and have access to you know all all the sort of additional services and things that uh people get by proving their identity but

they're not going to be issued the the world coin right right it depends really on how the um how the price develops over time and things like that but it it really is designed with the thought that everyone should be able to claim a share of it all right so the later you come you will get less but it should bring us to three three to five billion people at least and everything goes right more more than that yeah but i mean like let's let's imagine like a you know uh best case scenario uh uh you know seven people on board seven million seven billion people on board in the next uh five years and then like

there's just like there's always new people like there's there's always people being born every day uh so if we have like all the world's population then plus uh you know like mothers are putting the orb in front of their newborn babies in order to get you know their world coin tokens um at which point does the supply get exhausted well we will see what the community comes up with uh right like there's a total total reasonable case to like i don't know like drop drop a new a new coin whatever maybe the community wants to expand the supply all of those things like right now that's the problem we solve if we get to that um to that limit that's already a big big big deal of course and

then it should be commonly on okay so governance could at some point uh increase the supply i think so yeah okay all of that all of that stuff is not figured out we also will figure out together with the community but um that would be that would be cool to do so in addition to people getting white coins for signing up and people who sign them up so the operators also get tokens right that's correct but they have to buy their op up front so so basically they kind of renting it from the protocol and that that will be the final state right so you

you will probably have to stake some amount of raw coin you will receive an orb and you you can use it and then you will earn a signup reward in real quick very for every person you onboard or yeah or re-identify there's a lot of things going on here actually um we will also publish a quite long blog post later on because there's fundamentally in kind of this whole incentive mechanism is kind of the crux of the problem that's that's the core of the problem like if you if you really come to a place where the incentives of everyone is aligned like of course like the big ones like the the the team the community investors uh operators users like if all incentives are well aligned so for

example operators have an incentive to um onboard only users that are actually kind of really understanding what is going on and really are using whatever they're getting they should earn more rewards for example things like that so you want to have all of those mechanisms built in that's why it's quite a quite a complicated thing in short they receive an orb they run it from the protocol and they earn some rewards depending on how good they're doing and again the community governance will change the parameters depending on different countries and what's or not but that's the short answer so you guys have been have been publicly accused of running um a multi-level marketing scheme with um the oops what what's your

reply to that i don't know like people people will say many things at some point it's it is just not the case right and um it was really funny like on twitter there was this and this early uh team video from like the growth team or something where they explained real quick whatsoever and people made jokes about that but back then we literally have been like five people a team of five people or like eight people um sitting in a small apartment in san francisco and figured things out right so like we were startup we're testing many things and many things will not work others will and we will we will move ahead right so um but but of course like to be very very clear

we will produce 50 000 of those devices a year all right so and that starts relatively soon so that means uh every month we will onboard thousands of new people with those orbs um and already now we have onboarded 450 000 users to roll coin and that's only the case with 30 devices so one device is onboarding an average of 800 people a week the best ones are doing more than 2000 so the numbers are much much crazier than we thought in the beginning but on the other hand the implication of that is that just operational load of handling that is insane right like figuring out the governance making sure the operators are doing the right things are not explaining like shady things all of those all of those problems that you

get on scale um right that even things like uber and whatever had in early days we have to figure that out but we have to figure that out in a decentralized way in the open which is even harder i guess for that case so yeah it's it will be a big challenge and i think um people will make fun of many things and that's fine as long as we move forward and we actually get it get it going so i'm curious who are these 450 000 people where are they mostly concentrated and like yeah what's what's the kind of demographics of the people that you're onboarding right now i know you had uh i know you had some onboarding some people in france like i live in france i know you had some some people with an orb here yeah oh that's cool okay so like first of all what was the

objective right like the over the last few few months um the objective really was just talking to users in as many locations as as we possibly can and kind of figure out what do they understand what do they not understand um what works in terms of operators incentive mechanisms all of those things so we really like we're like full on in testing mode and so that means we we we took a small number of devices only 30 of them uh because the media attention is just really high it's like a shiny thing that shows up in front of i don't know like in a big big city um that that attracts a lot of attention so small number of devices and then we try to spread them as as much as we can all over the world so everything from norway

people have operated them in trump's or norway like in like i don't know minus 10 degrees celsius and then the door broke down to um everything like to cape town um chile so really all over the world um i i could show you i guess we do not have video sharing here but i could show you a map it's really all over the place everything from europe to africa indonesia india chile and quite quite evenly spread but the the thing you you learn relatively fast which was surprising to me is that the biggest the biggest thing to figure out will be to find the right operators and you really want to find kind of young entrepreneurial people that otherwise would run companies so kind of this this

yc application process that's really how we think about it because you have a strong pareto distribution going on here and the most productive ones on board like many many more people because for example in kenya one operator led the the local crypto club and then started people onboarding in universities where like the the the crypto user density is really really high so in in short smart operators will figure out uh things that no centralized entity could ever do and that that is that is why we're doing that right like find smart smart young talented people all over the world they will find how to explain people between onboard them into it

is that a tangible upside um for the people receiving work coin today i mean is it tradable no it's not it's um so right now in the testing phase users receive uh ious and rotcoin that will go online when the maintenance goes live um so so that that is what i imagine that's difficult to explain to people i mean so basically um for web3 users i mean this is this is something that we're used to but if you go um to nairobi and say please look please look into this oop no you don't need to smile sort of thing that's um i mean what what do you tell these people

why they should do this yeah of course you you're you're you're saying exactly right it's it is different and that's why it's or it's difficult and that's why it's actually so cool that it already works like all of that the whole last year uh and again we will publish much more about this but the whole last year was super surprising to us um just like the scale how it works and what those stories those operators tell is very very different right so for example i don't know when you when you interview users in kenya and ngos universities it's about um web3 uh kind of real coin will hopefully soon be the the widest dispute and ferris network and you get ownership in it before it actually goes live and just i don't know like young people find that cool and exciting

and then you also receive your proof of personal that later on if people actually start building things with it you can use for that so it you're right it's like those operators they uh do a long pitch uh and in in many places because it's hard to explain but what will happen relatively soon is that rolkin will become a platform um for other projects and protocols to also distribute their ownership because that's that was actually quite recent change we're really really excited about is kind of we want to bring the community with us and not not only our tokens other people should be able to do it too and i think we will see that relatively soon how do you police operators so basically i mean if the operators have a much

clearer picture of what the possible upsides of the token are how do you prevent them from saying um look i don't really want to explain this but i'll give you two dollars if you look into this oop first of all right now operators receive they not re they're not receiving workload are used they're receiving um stable coins uh paid by us right that is the case right now when when the money goes live they will be paid by the protocol how much do they get per person i do not have the exact numbers in in mind because it's different for different locations later on there will be again like a community governed auction mechanism basically going on to find the right price given on how the market goes

uh and right now we just try to estimate okay what is the opportunity cost for someone to i don't know work in our norway and work in our in uh in in cape town and you you try to cover that and you you understand okay how many sign ups do those people make uh and that is everything from one dollar to like up to five dollars per sign up depending on where you are i think that that's roughly the range but i can check it up and let you know later and to your question actually you you asked one of the most important questions um which is like how do you align operators incentives with the ones of the of the protocol right so um in the extreme case you could imagine an operator going or showing up in i don't know

let's take as an example like an elderly home like people that have absolutely no idea what crypto is and the operator goes in there and signs up all of the people because that's just the easiest way to earn a reward right um so what what do you have to do and that's a hard thing to do is you basically have to measure kind of a quality metric in in some way right so and these are many things right like users afterwards answering kind of governance questions like how much do they actually understand what is going on that's the easiest thing you can do then afterwards okay do they actually transact with the protocol and things like that because all of that also has to work decentralized which makes it even harder and then what you want to do is you want to have a feedback mechanism

to the operator so operator earns more if uh the user actually is an active user and i don't know answers the governance questions in the right way and that should be much more because then those operators they go to to crypto conferences and not to uh i don't know like whatever an elderly home in the extreme case so so that is a really hard thing to figure out and uh to be clear like one of the hardest things and really did not work in the beginning so we saw all of those all of those cases happening we saw it happening for example in one occasion that like an operator onboarded people without phones um because we did not have like this feedback mechanism implemented and that that's of course not great but that's

because we're doing testing i'd like to talk about the world going like the company and sort of the organizational structure so i think world coin is a u.s based company in san francisco but can you talk a little bit about the corporate structure will there be a foundation what does that look like yeah so i will tell you where we are right now um but but there are still many things to figure out um like and i actually would love to brainstorm review if you have great ideas but so right now uh there is there's a a us entity like a normal company um we have we have people based in the united states okay actually so there's a us entity there's a german entity and

then there's a swiss foundation so these are the things that currently exist and why why that is the case is we have um we have a team in in the united states but that's that's actually very small at this point most of the people are uh in europe and there's this very funny backstory it's like we actually ended up in a small town in the middle of germany um because in uh during covet we were building harder devices like we had to go to an office and we really started uh rollcoin and january before code started so like in march coveted in january we started working on it and it was really hard in san francisco to go to an office or to a lab even to build things the regulations were just

super strict and some of us including me had german passports so just we flew everyone from san francisco to to the small town called uh tenently next to also a small town airline and rented a big place there rented like houses around it um and and just like flew everyone in there and we just had crunch time for like many weeks uh so anyways that's why we're still here we have like a lot of hardware equipment um and it kind of became a meme in the company right so many people in germany some of them in san francisco and there's there's a swiss foundation now yeah so the swiss foundation should do the token issuance later on um the thing i'm trying to understand right now and maybe you have like good

input here like good ideas is um how to actually kind of set up the dao structure in the right way right like so right now there's a company it's called tools for humanity but obviously like this me my i saw many times on twitter directed towards me like if your currency has a co it's not a like it's not a cryptocurrency and all of those things right like we understand that that's not not the goal so we want to figure out a way like how we can give as much governance as we can to the community and kind of put the legal legal structure behind that but that's that still never works cool and um alex you're vc backed so um last year you actually um raised 25 million at a valuation of uh 1 billion from

[Music] the uh from the crypto all-star so a a16z coinbase ventures coin fund spf and so on let's talk about the business model of ykk coin so in in a way um you've reserved 20 of the coin tokens um for um investors and developers so basically insiders right yeah i mean no no um so so how it's actually structured as 10 to the foundation and 10 to two investors broadly specified so right now these are just internal investors like as you said like vcs

um but again we're trying to find a way how to broaden that investor base soon but um more about it later so yeah that's the case okay and um so how does this um square with um [Music] the mission of a fair launch so basically if you say basically everyone um basically this this um cryptocurrency um the value proposition is basically that it's as widely um distributed as possible and then basically 20 is retained by very small i mean you know but compared to you know the entire world population by a very small set of individuals and how how does this square

up [Music] well i mean it's um so first of all i i think as you probably know compared to other projects it's actually a very very small fraction right so it's um it's basically as far as we we thought we can go in terms of just giving it to users in the community but while still funding the project right they just have a simple economic question we see like in in a regulatory world we live today um the best way to get capital to build something like that rvc's and uh i know it's like an anti meme in the crypto space actually like chris dixon and people like that they're working with are some of the smartest people i know so i'm actually really really happy to have them so um yeah and then you just make a

calculation i'm really flattered that at this point in time like everyone says like it's crazy like whatever 20 but when we have been 10 people in in in the middle of the bear market in san francisco uh it sounded like an insane endeavor and everyone gave us the feedback back then like you will not make that work you will have to kind of give kind of do more pre-mine otherwise you will not be able to fund it and we really sticked with it and trust me it was a really really tough thing to do and it will be an even tougher thing to do in the future because uh building hardware and being on a global scale that just requires capital and um it's a hard discussion we have it over and over so like of course twitter and the community things like

it's it's it's a lot investors things like it should be more uh so that's that's the trade of your navigating and um yeah if people have better ideas what we can do uh i would love to hear them uh but just giving the situation you launch a company today you cannot do icos as you could in the early days you have to get funding for that it's like what other options do you have that's that's a question and because fundamentally what you where you want to end up um right like all incentives should be and will be aligned around the token not around the company that's the other important boundary condition all right like we do not want to sell ip or off an orb or like i don't know see people building i don't know using those orbs or like selling that

the iris gang technology or like whatever that all of that stuff is off the table right all of that ip goes in the foundation so all the incentives are landed around the token and that's why you have to have that that allocation reserved doesn't make sense yeah and that makes sense i i think um there's examples and i think the heart the fact that you're doing hardware makes it particularly unique because there's there's an added cost there that you know you don't have if you're just a software project um but like if you look in the cosmos community for instance i'm citing this example because i'm like close to that community you know projects are

raising funds from foundations um from um you know sort of like grants programs and things like that and they're they're able to launch their projects um and launch the token without uh you know like massive like sort of vc backing like in your case it's it's obviously difficult different because of the because of the hardware um but yeah maybe there's like uh maybe there's an opportunity here for someone to figure out a better model uh especially for something that is so seems like it should be a sort of public good like not only the civil resistant identity

but also like the open source hardware it really feels like like it it exists in public good territory and so theref and then in that case you know like what are the types of organizations that have money that are less incentivized by just purely returns but more incentivized by like the vision and like supporting division and the mission whether that's you know um like foundations in the crypto space or uh foundations or like non-profits that uh you know help people be financially sovereign or i don't know like this this sort of thing so maybe maybe there's a an interesting model here i i totally agree with all of what

you're saying and it it will become a public good like that's that's the whole goal of what we're doing right um and i don't know like oh it would be amazing if people figure out other other methods but to to be honest um i don't know it's kind of like an empty meme in the crypto space i think we seize at this point but again um all of our investors are like i don't know we selected them a lot like we many many people who didn't let it around and things like that and the investors we have are very aligned with everything we're doing and the only way they make money is that the protocol actually works and the token increases in value there is no there is no backdoor or something so there are actually value land

and if you ever talk to chris dixon you will understand why it's great to have someone like that with you um and the same is true for many other investors we have right so i think um i i think it's actually wonderful that that exists like that you have like super super brilliant and smart people that thought about this space for many years and um they will go on board and help you and you you get funding from them so i i i get it's an anti-meme and i get where it's coming from but um i love our investors um yeah so basically i totally understand the need for funding if you if you look at coins that are meme coins so basically coins that have no obvious utility so say bitcoin i would also i mean white coin is also

mean coin so basically what's what's the meme uh for for world coin this so just a comment to that right like um i mean one way and certainly not a perfect way to measure it is the genie coefficient as you probably know and there's like all kinds of literature why it's maybe not the perfect matrix but it's at least it's some and uh like bitcoin and and and other projects are at 0.9 rook and will be at 0.4 um something like that so it's much much better i don't know like everyone gets ownership in in this new thing everyone just simply for being a human no matter where you are you get ownership in something new that we all can create together and it's like a new

playing field and that's really really exciting i think to many people but you're creating value first and foremost so i mean yes i mean you're positioning it as a as a public good um but you're creating value first and foremost for the people who've invested right i mean so basically the vcs they're in this um for the money they're not in it to make the world a better place right so um if you if you give like um the equivalent of what you'd give a billion and a half people to um uh to uh 500 people who funded you in in in the beginning doesn't that um

do you think that doesn't make it extremely unlikely that the remaining people will kind of um uh coordinate around that system rather than a system that doesn't have that right so basically if if you have the entire distribution of world coin and 20 and 20 um goes to the people who kind of um started it um or financed it in the beginning um don't you think this will be forked and i mean see i'd see where i where i'm coming from is that i don't see how this is how this is not going to act people the wrong way

i think that's fair but again um if people have ideas other ideas what we can do here i will be the first one to talk about that like maybe there's even a way how we can issue like um i don't know like another another token with like different different rights or whatever like there's all kinds of things you can think about we had this discussion with biology actually recently so i i totally get it i think given the boundary constraints we had and we thought about this for like a lot of time and we just you actually need money to make that work i think it's the yeah it's the best end state um that was achievable yeah i'd like to talk about the the the regulatory side a little bit um so

yeah i mean you're aware of of what happened in the fallout of libra and that that project uh i think stirred uh a lot of to put things lightly uh in terms of like regulatory awareness uh around crypto and around these you know like kind of global currencies that might compete with national currencies um what's the um what do you feel is the state of things uh in the jurisdictions that you have started sort of like launching the project and are you um are you concerned about say regulators in europe for instance you know like uh

prohibiting these sorts of currencies from even existing as the mika regulation hints at and is accelerating perhaps because of the ukraine conflict yeah i mean of course we are concerned um so level level one concern was certainly um and is the united states right there's just a lot of it's not even it's you're basically just flying blind uh as i think you probably heard from many people there's just a lot of regulatory uncertainty and that's why we will not launch in the united states um at least a token you will you will be able to receive your your proof of purse note uh kind of your identity piece but you will not receive the token and also the team is is located um also the

united states to large degree we just we just don't know what will happen there and like many people also don't know that i guess that's that's no surprise so that is level one concern um the european union as you just mentioned like there's recent developments that are also concerning i think uh particularly uh the craziest thing that happened recently is kind of thinking about banning the proof of proof of rock chains which was just scary to see i was in the room with the people writing the paper refuting that thesis so uh or from that regulation so yeah uh yeah i'm very much uh close to the to the people that are doing the the hard work trying to not make make you know this

regulation not go through yeah okay so you know much more more than me about this but um yeah i mean we think a lot about regulation we have um we have extremely talented people in our legal team thinking about that problem a lot um but yeah so so number one is we will launch not in the united states for exactly that reason we will monitor the european union but but otherwise we will just comply wherever we go we are also obviously like in a simpler situation in libra yeah yeah it's unclear i think at this point and i think like the the the conflict in ukraine will certainly uh accelerate things on the regulatory

front i mean i think just just uh today like christine like art makes made some comments about how we like really now need to regulate and like mika needs to be fast-tracked and um that will likely not be great for the industry i presume um so like what's your what's your goal here like you know if if world's corn succeeds and you know you fast forward 20 years from now how will it have made the world a better place it it will be a major public good that the whole ecosystem is using to to solve civil resistance it will have it will have been the biggest onboarding into web 3 that the world has seen so

far i think that that's by far the most exciting thing for for all of us that it will give people access to a system that otherwise um would just take much much longer i i don't think it would not happen but we're just in a position to actually accelerate it and we see that working we actually see it have to go to a billion users in less than three years from now um and that was very very surprising to us and and crazy to us um and yeah it will be it will be something where where people can can try new things maybe you'll be able to come i think like in in 20 years the most exciting thing actually would be that that ubi is deployed at least to some subgroup of people or something with that and everyone has access to a privacy

preserving scalable proof of personnel there's like many many answers in there but i think you get the point so alex um if you zoom out a bit um there's actually a couple of projects that um i'm in a similar um position in the web 3 ecosystem right so i'm thinking of things like um the good dollar proof of humanities or circles ubi um how how do you see where coin with respect to these well first of all i'm excited um to see other people solving solving i guess one of the hardest hardest problems that there is in that space right so um i think it will be

like hopefully just like a great co-existence where we will figure out different things at different times and can just adapt and learn really really fast it's a way too big problem to be solved by one one project alone well i think it will be very surprising to um to people to see how fast the scales uh because there's there is actually a like i i think it will be at least double digit millions by end of the year um so it will it will scale much much faster than people expect at this point that that's that's everything we measure internally and we're really surprised by so um so alex um i mean the the true test of time will be how many of these people will actually use their identity for anything right so basically because just

because someone signs you up um doesn't mean you're an active participant in the network and you're actually using this for anything at all right so basically when do you expect the network um to be live or when do you expect the when do you expect people um to be able to interact with them their with their identity well i mean we will we will open up the sdk and all of those things relatively soon um so less less than three months uh that part that parts will be open source and people can start building with it and then i'm excited to see what what the community actually comes up with um there are many interesting things going on here um that will make it

very different than what people are used to so just just to give you one example like one example is that those orbs lead to a very different network uh distribution than normally because you basically have operators you have talent operators that show up in front like in a certain city or geography and then they they get to high penetration really really fast so the density will be much much higher um compared to other crypto networks and that's what we already observe right so you basically versus like a normal crypto network um at least like broadly speaking ends up being widely distributed like equally all over the world with people that are interested in it what the welcome network will look like is you you have clusters of like high penetration um double digit percentage penetration like

different locations and then it starts it starts growing um that will have many interesting implications it will hurt to tell what what that actually will do and what will people build with that um but that was one thing that was very surprising to us so in short we are we are like this this identity part is a platform and uh like we need a community to build things with that of course so we will open source it we will grow it and i think if it gets to a certain scale uh many people will build with it because it's just you will have access to many many users and a lot of attention so will you or your vcs um actively incentivize the adoption um through

other projects so basically i mean will you give out investments or grants to projects to actually use your sdk yeah i think so however uh i want to figure out a way how that it's also community governed right so that there's some some community some some community fund or community grants and uh like it's it's getting relatively fast the community actually decides what to invest and what not but but yeah of course it will happen where does the community currently convene so basically if if um our listeners want to get um an idea of um what the thoughts in the community are are there telegram groups or discord or

where do they go to check this out we are launching so right now there is not much going on here we just we we actually had to step from from from zero to one with all the hardware and things like that so relatively soon we we open source the first parts of the system launch launch a discord to telegram all of those things and and really involve the community and the most important decisions we're doing and how can people um stay up to date on this is there a mailing list that they can subscribe subscribe to or follow you follow you on twitter what's what's the idea um well i think the best thing will be to join our discord and i think we will certainly also do a mailing list all of that stuff right now just doesn't exist um we we have worked like

really really hard over the last two months to just get get that report off the ground and now it's now it's there so the the project will change um very very significantly in in the coming coming weeks and i'm excited to tell you more and show you more cool but it really it really goes to kind of from now of course we didn't talk much about it and that will change so we'll talk much more about it it'll be open source and people can start building with us uh keep my eyes open uh to see where this is going thank you for coming up thank you for coming on alex thanks for having me that was fun yeah if if i could just like if i could just sum up here like

so i i feel like my my squeamishness around look i mean bottom line is like civil resistance if you if you if you figure out identity you unlock a ton of use cases and i mean we've discussed this on the podcast at length with tons of people and and that's an important component to unlocking like the full potential of crypto and like a world internet and like breaking down borders and what you know whatever you want like that's a big problem that needs to be solved we talked about some other projects like proof of humanity and all these other things that are trying to do this different ways this is i i guess this is the um

you know the hardware option is a super efficient option but it does come i think with some with some drawbacks which like we which we discussed earlier and i think i've come away from this still squeamish about um getting my retina scanned to um to onboard the system but confident that you guys will make the right decisions in order to make this as secure a system as possible um yeah i think that's i think that's that's the takeaway from this from this

conversation i don't know felika what do you think yeah so basically my takeaway i think is yeah i think biometrics is somewhere i wouldn't go to me that's too invasive and i think i've just i've come away with this with a renewed sense of that you know web of trust is the way to go because that's also i mean to me that's the oh the only way that i can see that this can um scale um in a truly decentralized manner without being orchestrated and i mean you don't really want to have um a conductor for this um so yeah to me it's web of trust all the way [Laughter]

well that that would be cool we just don't see it working yet but of course if that works it would be awesome and again we're also working on this internally but it's just it doesn't work yet and no one has seen it scale all right thanks for thanks for having me thanks so much