Why Proof of Humanity Matters in an AI Future Alex Blania

Transcript

it's very likely going to be the largest onboarding into crypto we have seen so far sitting in the inside I think that's just that's just what's going to happen in the next 12 months this episode of Empire is brought to you by quick node quick node is an end-to-end blockchain development platform that makes building web 3 apps super easy no matter what you want to build you can effortly develop any application by leveraging their elastic apis go to quicknote.com use codeempire you'll get a free month on their feature back build plan that's right go to quicknode.com you'll get a free month to start playing around you'll hear more about quick node later in the show this episode is brought to you by Quinta the premiere derivatives platform on optimism that offers deep liquidity low

fees and up to 50x leverage across 24 different assets you'll hear more about Quinta later in the show all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Empire we have Alex blania the co-founder of worldcoin joining us Alex how you doing man I'm great thanks for having me I'm really excited for this conversation today yeah of course um you guys have hubs all over the place I know you are now global so where in the world are you today right now I'm in Berlin but it's the team is mostly split between Berlin and San Francisco we have uh we have another manufacturing spot in a smaller town in the middle of Germany which is like its other crazy covet story um we can get two but but yeah these are

like the three all right nice great man um all right so I think it'd be helpful so I was uh the backstory of this episode is that I was a very skeptical World coin Observer I didn't know much about it except for some big headlines that Sam Altman started open Ai and then got you know in chat gbt and and and got kind of scared about the implications of AI so then started this other company called World coin and he reached out to you and you co-founded this thing called World coin with him and I was incredibly skeptical and then I went to your office and you showed me the orb and we had a long conversation and you showed me the deck and all that kind of fun stuff and it got a little more I I I I kind of understood the why a little bit more so

I think the big like World coin is building this protocol to prove personhood and like proof of humanity almost while preserving privacy and I would like you to maybe start with like where this idea came from in the first place and like the origin story of world coin as because I think that is necessary to set up this conversation so maybe let's go there first of course so um [Music] yeah you got parts of the story right so actually Sam um Sam started the company I joined I joined six months later so Sam and Max Max number seven was the third co-founder um started the company uh almost three and a half years ago at this point and uh back then I was in I was in terrible

physics so I just I got this i got this message that uh Sam is working on this crazy project and I should I should consider joining as a soft engineer back then and later became CEO and so the original pitch uh the original story was uh really around the fact but basically like two big three streams of thought one is AI is going to change everything uh much more than people realize and this is at this point a very common idea uh three three and a half years ago and people made jokes about that so this was not this was like much more controversial back then kind of all the all the implications of AI and the two the two big things that came up were one uh the necessity for a universal basic income that is

non-government funded and uh kind of really can can go globally and this was like one of the big motivations for worldcoin to lay the technological Foundation to make that happen and then the other big thing as you as you mentioned is proving humanness on the Internet is going to become this major topic uh and it's it's going to be really really tricky because you have intelligent agents on the internet that can behave like humans so this was this was like stream one and the other the other thing is actually that I was very very early in uh in crypto with uh back then with Bitcoin and many other people in the team too so like we we really do believe that the the

premise of this where it all came from this idea that you can create a more effective Financial system for the world that empowers billions of people is is incredible and one of the things to truly accelerate this Vision we we think is to get to a billion people as quickly as possible right that can actually sign transactions have a wallet and can enter in interface with each other so with those two things we we started working on this idea to launch a token by giving ownership in it to every human being just for being a human and one of the big Necessities that you truly have to solve to get there is proving unique humanness on the

internet because nothing right now really works globally and and can get you there so is the problem that you're solving here the proof of humanness and the fact that like in five years we'll live in a world where you have no idea if you're interacting with a human online or is that like a necessary thing that you had to solve in order to be able to give out tokens well it's it's both right because so they kind of they um interact with each other very strongly so we have actually if you zoom out real quick is three things you have a token uh you have World ID which is a an actual identity protocol that builds

on top of the idea of proof of unique humanness and then the last thing is a non-cost audio wallet right these three things and um the protocol is an actual protocol meaning other other applications can connect to it as well but yeah if we start with the token and the proof of humanness so let's say you want to launch a token that way uh or you want to do an airdrop I want to say it like that you need to solve simple resistance first and if you want to solve it in a global way not only for the United States or Europe you actually have to solve identity on a very fundamental level and if you flip the perspective and you're about to launch proof of personnel for the world you need a bootstrapping

mechanism to to get you there and kind of to really align incentives of everyone to sign up for that and that is a token right so both perspectives really reinforce each other and we think create this like very powerful flywheel to get to building people as quickly as we can yeah let's talk about proof of humanity and why that's important so I think when you guys launched it was like ai's gonna take over and you'll need to know about Humanity like proof of humanness and it didn't really make any sense to anyone and then chat gbt gbt3 came out and everyone's like oh my God that was the first like big consumer thing of AI I would say that was when like every you know everyone started talking about AI um in like normal worlds I'd call it and then GPS before got even better and I

think maybe like can you tell us what like gbt five or six or seven could look like in order to back into why proof of humanity is actually a really important problem to solve yeah and interestingly I think um organizations like open AI will not be uh will not be kind of the big uh the big problem here right because there's other ways to deal with that the problem is uh that all of this will be open source as well so assuming where we are right now so we have like very powerful and uh you almost have to spark of AGI already there you have like truly intelligent systems in some sense if you iterate that a couple of years in the future and then if you also let

these systems interact with with interfaces which is slowly starting to happen so they can actually take actions online as a human could and get more intelligent on the way then what will happen is you as a you as a user of the internet you will have no idea anymore that you actually interface with a with a human being right and that can be uh it can go everything from Annoying to an actual like big problem annoying in a sense you're on Twitter and you let's say you you battle for like hours with this account and it turns out that's actually it's a neural network Not a Human Being uh that's that's not amazing um and I mean even Elon was tweeting about this recently a lot right um this this problem of bots swarming

the internet but then problem also like it can get much more severe because these systems can like without using like kind words they can rip apart a lot of the infrastructure we currently have right in terms of identity um and many things we do on the internet so it's just gonna drastically accelerate as we go forward and so technically defining one question on that is like do you think that they'll be able to so like will they be able to take action So like um let me use there's a lot of crypto listeners of Empire like will they be able to yield Farm on on the next airdrop will they be able to like wash

trade on blur will liken the gbt7 or something be able to like farm for air farm and airdrop in our arbitrim or something like that is that the yeah yeah totally I am totally that's gonna happen right because um to talk about the kind of the positive implications of that first is like it's gonna go in the direction of work automation right so all the things that you right now do in Excel spreadsheets are uh whatever like you you will just interface with a neural network that does a lot of tasks for you but the other consequence of that is um is what you just said right you can you can yield Farm you can claim air drops you can even build up reputation on the internet right which is one of these

things that I think actually web of trust is becoming a non a non-credible solution anymore because uh you have an agent that can just build out reputation and you're like a bad actor that basically launches whatever let's say 10 000 of these instances and just say hey build up reputation on these 20 crypto networks um over the next six months and then you're there right yeah so that that brings you to the to the point so in a world where neither digital content meaning video or images nor intelligence uh so like captchas or more complicated actions are discriminator anymore what what it means

to be a human being on internet uh the only thing that you're left to kind of left with really is to bridge to the real world and and kind of in some sense I'm a physicist so I always talk like but measure what it means to be a human being right and that is uh that is biometric so that's why we we ended up with the conclusion that the only way to solve this problem fundamentally is to use Biometrics and make it really privacy preserving through cryptography um yeah and that was like a crazy statement three years ago but I think at this point it sounds more reasonable all right so you've got the the uh so you've got the orb right everyone's

scared of the world coin is scanning everyone's eyeballs and you get a token and this is some big psyops thing to like uh a big scary privacy thing going on right now so maybe let's get into the orb um can you tell us the story of the orb why do you need an orb why do you need to scan my eyeball why can't you just scan my face or my fingerprint sure so um so I'm going to walk you through basically where we started right because we we didn't want to build a hardware device uh we this is like it's not that we have been excited to build an orb uh three years ago and we set up to do that actually we build prototypes of pretty much everything else before that we built protects of web of trust implementations the major ones out there

of um actually let's take a step back I think proof of personhood means someone is a unique human being on the internet so you're unique and Alive all right that's that's the statement um and you have three big ways to to do that one is web of trust meaning you you build up reputation over time on the internet and verify about credentials the ID solvent tokens all of that falls to some degree at least it touches this idea uh the second one is Biometrics and the third one is you use the government identity system so kyc right so these were the three big buckets and we thought through all of them

and um so web of trust is we just didn't see it working we talked to many of the most influential researchers at the time and still do and I think actually we will build a version of web of Trust on top of raw coin but you always need uh trusted seats to make web of trust work so it's really hard to bootstrap that so we basically ended up with Biometrics is the only way to get there and which was already a painful Insight right because um we actually have a cryptography background and privacy background it's not something we got like inherently excited about but then within Biometrics

um the really hard thing and and why it's very different to the things you use in your daily life let's say your iPhone is that for proof of personal do you have to solve the problem of deduplication so you are unique under let's say a billion people versus what your iPhone is doing it is proving that you re-identify yourself right there's an embedding stored on your phone you try to log in again a new embedding gets created matched to this previous one and if that works you can use your phone and other than fraud that's fairly easy um because you don't need much information because it's really hard for me to look exactly like you but it's really easy for me to look like an arbitrary human being basically and so what that

means um kind of an information theory is that you need much more entropy about each user you need much more information about each user and face doesn't get you there so just the amount of information you can get out of face is not enough to get to a billion plus people the same is true for fingerprint and the same is true for many other things it's not not true for DNA but that's obviously even more what why what do you mean by it doesn't get you there like it doesn't because there's it there's not there's um like it's one in one in every 10 million or something fingerprints are are alike or like what do you mean it doesn't get get you there oh that means that um the error rates get too high so you basically will just reject you would

start rejecting a lot of people and what is important to understand is you actually you you hit a wall right because you have an error rate that that explodes almost exponentially so you don't have like a constant error rate of five percent but rather uh with every user you add you have an exponentially increasing error rate so let's say after 20 million or 50 million or 100 million people you will just start rejecting everyone right so it's a really really hard problem and um yeah both both fingerprint and phase just don't have that property you you just cannot distinguish one billion or even saying like three billion or four billion people it will just not work if you had a hard limitation

okay so face doesn't work fingerprint doesn't work so then you have to scan the eyeball so then you guys set out to go build an eyeball scanner and then and that was not an easy task yes yeah I mean we started with um we started with testing uh we started with testing all the all the ones out there so uh we invest a lot of time in building the orbs so this was nothing we wanted to do yet again so we started testing all the ones that aren't there um but they're usually used in a different context they're used either yet again for re-authentication and they're used by government agencies let's say where you're in an airport and control the environment where the lighting is perfect and there's no fraud right so

you we realize we have to build our own Hardware um by two big constraints one is security so making sure that the device is not easily frauded so you you show it a deep fake of a of a of a face or an eye um and you you could easily fool the device that's or you attack the hardware so everything around security and the second big thing is everything around uh accuracy so and accuracy you you fundamentally have to um have to have like a very high Imaging quality so we we build our own lens we build our own Imaging sensor uh not Imaging sensor but uh Imaging board so I I can actually show you one if you want

for a second show me yeah let's see it uh that's an orb from the inside so you have you have basically a custom Imaging board here in the front uh many many fraud sensors that just make sure whatever you see is an actual human being are those all cameras what are we looking at here Alex are those cameras um so these are okay so it's like a little bit hard to maneuver but you have uh infrared LEDs in three different wavelengths so the first big thing is you image uh not not the same way you do a photograph by the image in infrared because fundamentally because very dark eyes are hard damage right so you use a different wavelength

and so that's basically your infrared Flash but you have them in three different wavelengths so you can get more information out of it and then here you have like fraud sensors so you have a thermal camera time of flight and here you have a mirror that is basically tracking and a custom lens right behind that mirror so the cool thing is all of the computation happens locally on a device so we basically trained uh seven neural networks that do all the job on on the Fly and calculate basic unique embedding of you on the device sign it and that's the only thing that actually leaves the device so it's

uh and then there's your knowledge proofs that separate that from your wallet and all the actions here able to do so the only thing we or anyone else could ever prove is that you actually are unique or you have signed up before everything else is self-custodially with the user so it's it's fundamentally built on top of ethereum it's uh the token is in erc20 but then also uh the way we do this your knowledge proofs there's a Merkle Tree on ethereum mainnet so it's this was like a lot but quick overview how much how much does it cost to just build that one camera or to build the one this the Skype the scanner what are we calling it these days the orb so orb oh man probably a total of 50

million dollars it was like it was like it's it's by far the the most um Cutting Edge device to do that thing and it's fully open source um so it it was quite some effort okay walk me through where I think the big concern here okay so we built this eyeball scanner you've got you've got you've got your orb they're pretty nicely designed by the way they look good um but where does the data where does the data live that's the I think that's the overarching big scary question that everyone is asking is where does the data live and are you actually doing with the data what you say that you're doing with the data so maybe maybe you can just address that directly

of course so um you'll sign up so first you download an app let's talk from the user perspective how does it actually look like to sign up a Bitcoin you you download an app and you actually did this Jason so you know it works you download an app a non-considered wallet you click on a map um hopefully there's a device somewhere near you you go there and you click verify now you show a QR code and the device reads that QR code and then 30 seconds later you receive your world ID which is actually a separate key pair so it's a separate uh semaphore keypad semaphores like this from the ethereum foundation a project that we used um to verify yourself against everyone

else on internet and then you receive an ethereum body where you receive the Rock and token itself so you receive two different things once you sign up and what actually happens during the signup process is first the orb does a lot of um license checks so it makes sure that whatever we see is an actual human being versus a printed something or displays once that happens all of that is happens locally there is no data actually used twice once that happens we Image the Eye and the eye because it has a lot of information in it the kind of the muscle of the Isle of information and then a neural network calculates a unique embedding out of out of the image

on the device signs it and that's the only thing that actually leads to the leaves the leaves the device so we don't have like a database of of biometric data or anything and then what happens on the back end is a uniqueness check happens and once that uniqueness check happens it gets inserted into a Merkle tree and then the user can prove after sign up if it's your knowledge proof that he is included in the Merkle tree so user user you stay fully synonymous and there's just no way to get around that hmm so I want to um first of all I think people's privacy preferences are really funny like and you've got me thinking a lot about this since uh since we met in

San Francisco like you you look at a lot of people and everyone instantly hates on the orb but meanwhile they're opening their iPhone 150 times a day and they're scanning their face and giving it to Apple and even people who don't do the face scan on on your iPhone have you ever heard of a license where you are giving the government your face ID every couple of years I think people's privacy preferences are pretty funny but I but I will say I did go to um so I went to Apple's face ID and privacy data privacy website and it says the face there so their thing is face ID data does not leave your device and it is never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else like one simple sentence that's that's never leaves never goes to iCloud or anything else yep on your guys's site

you said um biometric data is encrypted and stored securely your biometric data is first processed locally on the orb and then sent via encrypted communication channels to our distributed secure data stores where it is encrypted at rest once it arrives your biometric data is permanently deleted from the orb so my understanding there is it it is going the data is going to a data store and once it's in a data store even if it's encrypted there are it still can be hacked or lost or something of that sort yeah at some I mean you guys have probably have amazing cryptographers and stuff but but there still is the opportunity for millions and eventually billions of people's private like data to be lost no so the default is actually and you did

this the default is that this does not happen so you have like you have a screen where because right now we're in beta it's going to happen it's going to stop soon as well as you know because we're right about to launch that's why we talk and that's why it's an exciting time but so the default is uh that that does not happen so meaning everything gets computed locally in a device and the only thing that leaves the devices to um is the iris code however you have the option to kind of help us with change the neural network so kind of help improve rockline as is on one of the screens less than 50 of the users actually do that um and then what you just said is true right because it is there's a lot of neural networks happening and we need to train them we

don't need to have that data after training is done so we're going to delete everything but right now that's an option so what you just quoted is involves that the training piece I see I see so you're basically you you give the user the ability to lead to delete the IRS image when signing up the only thing that actually leaves in in that scenario would be an iris code which is really just like a random string represent that represents the person's uniqueness and then after that you guys which we can talk about in a sec is you guys make these zero knowledge proofs uh you make zero knowledge proofs that you are a unique person using a private key that's associated with the string which effect which affects uh effectually is just telling you guys that I am a unique real a real unique human being out of a set

of like and registered users where you don't know any of them is that directionally correct yeah that's correct and actually um okay so we are still working through the decentralization roadmap we're going to publish it more detail we already published the first one a couple months ago but right now where the backend is that whole service has to be decentralized right because um eventually the royalcon foundation just sets the standard for how to build such a device and kind of which neural networks to use but then other people should be able to connect their devices and that comparison the uniqueness check has to be fully decentralized right so but that means that it actually will be um in the public so because the only thing

it is is like it's a from the perspective of let's say you would hack us and you would hack that service the only thing you would have is a set of of codes that are not attached to anyone so you actually could not do anything with that yeah Alex why um so I get why you can't use like a fingerprint and why you can't use a face scan which then ended up leading to this Iris scan but my understanding is that in the in the US the government's like wildly inefficient obviously and we all know that but like there are some other countries where they have actually experimented with things like this yep in Estonia everyone has a digital a digital card in India um I forget the specific example but I think I think they've done something very similar to this so like why can't

maybe you could talk through like your thoughts on I think India is probably the best example they've done something like this Estonia maybe hasn't done the like give you money for scanning something but they've done something of this sort like why what are your thoughts on those experiments and why can't you rely on government the short answer is you can rely on some governments or you probably could the question is then silly you should which is like I think one of the fundamental questions of of why this whole Space exists right is um maybe you shouldn't um so the what broken is really doing is like it's I think it's taking to flip it actually something like World ID will exist right

it will exist you will have to verify on the internet that you are a human being right and and elon's version of if you just pay eight dollars each month I think is a travel solution for a number of reasons using government kyc um will work for some countries it will not work for the majority of the world right because uh most countries just don't have a great identity system so raw coin is doing that in a decentralized open source and privacy preserving way so I do think or I hope it is the best way to address a really really big problem um in a provable way that is not dependent on governments adhar is what

you just mentioned actually at heart in India um is actually did incredible things to the country right like it really accelerated development of whole country so they they did something as you said very similar obviously with very different privacy implications because they don't have their knowledge proofs or any of that um but still it was very empowering to many people yeah can you so what happened in India so they they my understanding is they issued a 12-digit like random number which was kind of like this like gave you this unique identity in India yeah so um I think it happened in the early 2000s but as you probably know biology talks

about that a lot I think India is one of the countries with the made like the the biggest leaps in terms of infrastructure uh in the last few decades and one of the big leaps they did is how they build adhar which is uh um an identity system that basically scaled to the whole country 1.3 billion people even the poorest people that have been cut out of everything so before they did adhar uh I think 30 to 40 percent of the country were not banked fundamentally because they were poor like living very kind of very rural areas and I rolled out adhar to reach everyone um and so they used hours by metrics because they came to the same conclusion

that that's the only thing that works at that scale and enrolled 1.3 billion people at this point almost the whole country um and then a couple years later on top of that they built uh UPI which is uh basically a payment Network and I think the most successful payment Network we have right now in on the world and in terms of just transaction volume and things like that so the big Insight of adhar and the India stack that's how they call this whole thing is if you solve identity uh in a fundamental and inclusive way it empowers a lot of payment and financial use cases on top of that and those two things together really accelerate the

whole economy so it's it's a crazy success story um in many ways I want to get back to one thing that I am thinking about from the beginning of this conversation that I don't fully understand which is you talked about the benefits of like let's say I'm gonna I'm making up that gbt6 or gbt7 is the thing but like why is proof of humanity a problem I I don't I don't or like proof of yeah proof yeah why is this such an issue because I understand like the benefits of having like a gbt 6 or 7 but like I just want to make sure I fully understand like why that's such an issue to solve yeah not not just for by the way Alex not just for World coin I know why you guys

have to solve it but like why should we be thinking about like this proof of humanity issue so I do think um pretty much so right now when you're on internet I think a default assumption is what you what you interact with as a human being all right that's that's that's a good default interaction on Twitter there's a lot of bots but it's not it's not crazy yet the thing is if um if you have these like intelligent systems and very capable systems and you can use them uh to civil attack all kinds of services that we use like you can start with social media and maybe you want to flood social media with messages or political

messaging that is just you want to emphasize or you you want to change even you want to help change elections let's say right all of this is like really bad stuff um it will be impossible to track any of that because these systems behave like humans they tweet like humans it's not like you cannot just have filters that detect these these kinds of people right so that's the social media context which I think is very easy to understand there's a lot within the crypto space that I think is very easy to understand where uh yield farming airdrop claiming all of those things um building up reputation so it's it's just very foundational to your online

identity that you are a human being and that should not get compromised we uh I'm I met with the chief data officer at like a top I don't know they're probably like a top 15 bank or maybe top 20 Bank just by like size uh like Global top 20 bank and he said that their number one issue that they're worried about not in a one to two year span but in like a five-year span is proof of humanity uh and that was a very interesting yeah interesting to hear him uh hear him say that all right quick break from the show there is this kind of overused cliche saying in crypto but it's true bear markets for building and everyone tells you that and everyone knows it what people don't know is that if you're building apps in crypto and building

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codeempire Santi and I gotta get credit for this one so they know that we sent you and you will get a first month free hope you guys enjoy it this episode is brought to you by Quinta trade Smarter with Quinta Quinta is the Premier derivatives trading platform on optimism that features deep liquidity low fees and up to 50x leverage across 24 different assets all powered by synthetics if you want to trade crypto Forex or Commodities on chain puenta is the platform for you it's built for both the casual dgen and advanced Traders it offers stop losses limit orders cross margining and a whole bunch of other Advanced order types and unlike most of today's web3 products puenta has a super

easy to use interface including a position dashboard charts and a leaderboard for a seamless experience go to quinta.io that's Quinta dot IO right now tell them we sent you Tom Santi sent you tamiano sent you Tom Empire sent you puenta dot IO hope you guys enjoy uh okay so what what is the uh what is the crypto stack here Alex and and why why does there need to be why I think maybe we could start with like why do you need to build this on crypto like on crypto rails um and then we can get into like would love to learn about the actual crypto stack sure so why do you need to build it on crypto rails is just um the whole thesis of the space right like

you want to make it decentralized do you want to make it resilient against all kinds of attacks you want to make it provable you want to make it uh open source all right I get this whole why we why we are here in the first place on the spaces are all the things that such a important infrastructure piece should be right identity on the internet that billions of dollars or billions of people will rely on at some point should be fundamentally decentralized and provable and open source and all of these things so that's fundamentally why we build on crypto um and then the other thing is like identity and finance are very closely connected uh and so we have an unconsiderable wallet that lets you send

crypto it uses uni swap it's it's uh fully built on D5 and you can deploy that globally right you can you can deploy Financial Services immediately globally uh that's that's the dream so that's that's why we use crypto nice and then after what's the stack the stack is um so yeah the stack is three things right so World ID World app uh World coin World coin the token itself will be an erc20 um it's gonna be deployed on optimism at launch then you have uh World ID which is fundamentally it's like it's a Merkle

tree and user usually prove that you included in the Merkle tree and that Stapleton ethereum mainnet of course there will be uh there will be Bridges to all other major l1s right so there's no reason why it shouldn't work on soldana and you can do the miracle proof and then the app itself is is an uncustodial ethereum wallet um you have two separate key pairs in there one for your world ID that you can use to verify the different sources of student Lodge proofs that uru and the other thing is just fundamental ethereum wallet to receive a real coin and other tokens in there and then we we let you swap tokens with uni swap in there as well uh it says it's like knows the safe wallet so

that's like a few headlines nice why did you guys choose optimism um just fundamentally aligned with our values I think is is a big one uh I mean arbitrom was also like a big favor but we we've been close to Liam and the crew since since like a while so we decided to go with optimism nice cool um what about uh like so within the wallet space one big issue like taking World coin out of this but like one big issue in the wallet space is uh like wallet recovery I would say yep um and just kind of like the clunkiness and the UI ux problems of wallets like how do you guys think about wallet

recovery especially because when you start thinking about wallet recovery in this case of world coin there's like then there's the second order impact of like is there an ability of people not to just get access to money but to get access to someone's identity which is a really scary idea so how do you think through this yeah so first we split up the problem into different things one is your recovery World ID and then the other thing is recover your wallet right your financial wallet and those two things are actually fully separate for a reason right in in our case so uh the financial wallet we have we will use the same thing as ever like the same Primitives as anyone else you will not be able to recover

that with your Biometrics in any way or shape because we think that would be dangerous um for fundamentally for privacy because what that would mean is that you would need to link your Biometrics to your wallet and then on the wallet transactions of course are transparent so that's that's not great um however your role that you will be able to recover by just showing up in front of an orb simply speaking there's like more steps to that but you can just uh basically recover that if you have lost access or even you have sold it to someone and you want to get it back um so there's like a lot of game theory behind that part but yeah what's been the toughest issue in terms

of building all of this is it the orb is it the is it this identity recovery what's been the hardest thing um well we went through a lot of different phases over the time so definitely for the first two years the hardest part was the was the hardware because we had to build everything from ground up and uh then we like once we have built it we went into production and one of the big things I learned I'm having a really nice prototype and then producing it at scale are two very different problems so uh that certainly was the biggest issue until now then going from there the other thing was actually understanding how to build

the wallet because we fundamentally didn't want to build a wallet again we we actually um like we wanted to use others but if you're actually on the ground you talk to a lot of users you understand first that most users have never heard about crypto and two that the things that you and I understand really well are completely new to those users all right so you cannot use as much as love Rainbow you cannot use rainbow and deploy that to my mother and ask her just like use that in your daily life that will not work so you have to just dump it down make it much simpler so we basically deployed product teams on the ground in the markets we are active right now for beta which is Portugal Kenya Argentina and uh and India

Bangalore daily and just like iterated on the product to make it easy to understand and easy to use and of course we're still not there and it's going to take a long time but uh that it was like the last couple months was just really getting into that and then I think going forward the biggest challenge will be around the operations right because you have to send these orbs globally you have to deploy them in all large cities and you have to operate a fleet of that so this is going to be a logistical uh nightmare uh but we're gonna get it done so that's I think going forward yeah and if I if I uh remember correctly when you explained it to me it's almost like

a franchisee model where you can people can make money by putting orbs around the world or in like in their cities and in their towns did I did I get that right yeah I mean it's the yet again it's the early it's the early stages of a decentralized model right because yeah you don't you don't want to have a centralized entity that um sends these orbs out and operates them but rather you want to have a way for uh people globally to operate these devices and get incentivized by the protocol to verify people right so that's how it should work it should be in in Lisbon and say I want to become I want to operate in a broken orb receive it verify and then receive World kind with every signup you do so

yeah in some case I think how you should see it is that there's going to be a broken token and Bitcoin used five percent of the yearly issuance to secure the network I think well can really use five percent to grow the network in terms of the user base and I think that's gonna be quite quite quite crazy to see because we are already at 1.6 million users almost six hundred thousand you have 1.6 million users right now yeah we have like so people that verified and we have around 600 000 Maus in the app so it's already I think the fourth largest wallet in the world right now 1.6 million users who have scanned scanned with the orb and have set up and have

verified their identity well um that would make if you take out the big crypto exchanges that would probably make you guys a top five crypto project in terms of um yeah monthly actives and daily actives yeah and that's without even trying so we are right now we are only at 200 active devices still um because it only makes sense after full launch to truly scale and so we are now weeks away from launch um foreign taking it out of the limited availability taking out of beta and and launching the app globally right and launching also I mean well World ID will go uh we'll be fully open so you can as

a service you can just integrate with that um we have like some cool Partnerships there to announce over the coming months then it means the app is globally available and then the last thing is it means the token goes and made it as well so these are like the three things like everything goes out of beta and then of course in the months after we go from 200 to the 2000 devices we've produced which will already make a lot of noise um in terms of just yeah throughput and active users yeah what's the revenue model here Alex well I mean it it has to be um again it has to be a protocol so that means that this will not be the case in the

beginning but at some point once what kind of once everything is truly at scale and people really use it for important services uh what the community can decide or the governance can decide at some point is to engage for example if he's around World Eddie so let's say users log into your service maybe you have to pay fees in real coin um to to do that then of course we can launch or an own L2 at some point because as you alluded to it will likely be a very large or the largest user base which itself is very interesting so these are these are only two things that come to mind and of course the wallet itself will have a lot of activity in it as well so you could go

down almost like the the coinbase rep the coinbase route and launch something like base which is built on the op stack yes we could what's the what's by your smile I gotta ask what's the timeline on that one as soon as possible we will talk we will talk about it soon it's not it's not like it's not right around the corner but it's gonna happen um yeah nice it's gonna happen What uh have you thought about the Mev model of l2s not really I like at this point we are we are like this is this is uh these are the things I worry about into three months right now we remember we'll see on world ID the world app I travel a lot I talk to a lot of users

still um so it's it's been a crazy crazy couple couple months yeah man seems like it um there was this Edward Snowden tweet that I'm curious about what what you think of it which like was was one of the big like viral World coin tweets I'd say say this is when Sam tweeted out in October 2021 he said introducing World coin a new cryptocurrency that will be fairly distributed to as many people as possible um and then and then Edward Snowden kind of quote retweets and says this looks like it produces a global hash database of people's irises scans for fairness and waves away the implications by saying we deleted the scans he says yeah but you saved the hashes produced by the scans hashes that match future scans don't catalog eyeballs

um I think I got this answered before but what is the what what's your what's your like simple response to to snowden's criticism here so there's two things like one is um he actually understood um the the blog post back then wrong and and to be fair like it actually pointed towards us I think we didn't write it clearly enough back then so there's like one part of actual technical misunderstanding back then I would love to talk to him about this at some point but then there's these this other thing which honestly it's just the case is um we use Biometrics and we use we we generate Iris codes and we think that's

the only way to solve a really hard problem and of course if you I I talked to all the critics I can find at this point right and some people just say like hey you should not you should not use Biometrics for anything or you should not normalize Biometrics and this is bad right all of those things like that's that's true and if people if other people find better Solutions uh I would be excited to see that but that's that's just the case yeah um what of government folks thought about this and like how has the government reaction differed from maybe a country like the United States to somewhere like in folks in Africa that you've spoken

with for example yeah so interestingly the majority of the discussion around this has always been around crypto assets more than anything right because that's that's what what governments have opinions on right now is uh they just fundamentally dislike crypto or don't want to have it in their country or something and so interestingly the the wallet part of of worldcoin was like the biggest discussion point at this point is don't bring crypto to this country you don't normalize it or something um but I mean everything has been super friendly at this point uh so we never we never really had kind of serious

discussions um around proof of personhood the discussion was mostly around like wow uh holy you guys have been like three years early to something that we are just about to understand mostly yeah cool um let's talk Ubi Ubi is starting to feel like uh this inevitable thing um what is your take on Ubi and how it plays in with World coin it's one of the um like the original paper I received from Sam so like imagine this this moment it was like sitting at Caltech I was doing theoretical physics all day it was like

far from startups and or crypto back then and I received that email saying Sam Sam is working on this project and I think the original paper was stating um a path to a non-state Ubi for the world or something like that financed by by AI so this was like one of the one of the big initial motivators we didn't actually avoided talking about it for a while because I think it has this political touch that I think actually doesn't apply because if it's a technology if a technology generates Ubi it's very different than the government redistributing uh economic benefits through taxes it's like a very different situation and so

you actually have to tweet it very differently but so yeah what I think about ubis I think it's um it will have to happen uh in in one way or another and in the coming in the coming decades it's really hard to say when and it's really hard uh to say in which context but I think it's incredible when it happens as well right and it's and that's well done because it can lift billions of people out of poverty it can just Elevate the living standard of the World by a centralized technology that generates just like a lot of Revenue in that sense which is AI so just if you fast forward I don't know five years and you imagine you have uh wherever we are GPT 7 at

this point and that generates like a lot of economic value by just solving all of these problems um writing software and deploying all of these different things um then you have like a very centralized thing that generates a lot of Revenue and a lot of value and so having a way to distribute that to the whole world I think is going to be incredible and uh to do that you need two things you need a way to make sure everyone can verify you at any system and then you need a way to economically reach them so you need a you need money so that's raw coin yeah everybody I never required this is either the

scariest thing I've ever seen Alex or this is like makes mainstream internet money wallet like available for everyone makes Ubi possible at global scale enables we haven't even talked about voting but like voting is more bigger and bigger and bigger issue in in elections these days and it enables like trust digital voting and it builds proof of humanity in an age where AI makes dis information easier than ever and and I get that from this guy said Cedric makes on Twitter and uh I I think he nailed it and yeah I don't know uh man I don't even have a question there I just yeah um I would like to hear why you think it

could be the scariest thing actually um if you have if you have anything to point to and we can talk about but this the scariest thing is because um I when you tell me that you the scare when you tell me that you guys what you guys are doing with privacy and with data I have to trust you I don't I am not smart enough and don't understand ZK proofs well enough and don't understand the technology well enough so I have to nod my head and be like that sounds right that like that sounds right and then there's also the element of like I hope that's what you're actually doing and like I've met you before seem like a trustworthy guy but like there's an element of trust there um and I think one of the things that

makes crypto so so great is like there's um it like starting with Bitcoin first is like you you you're able to remove that trust layer um and the trust gets put into code and it and it gets taken out of like people's hands and I feel like this reintroduces a lot of people um and so that that that's why I'm thinking about this in that way well I mean that the same is true here all right everything um it kind of comes in steps but right now the majority is already open source so that means maybe you yourself cannot verify but other people in the community can verify what we're doing and actually I hope they do um and it starts to happen much more people actually start getting into repos

and start reviewing things to Hardware is is um mine is like one small Security Board that's going to come in the coming months everything is open source so you can literally you can check everything um of course like the what then people that kind of operate in the space on a more technical level will say like well but it's much much more complicated because you have Hardware devices and they cannot verify that these Hardware devices actually run the firmware that I've seen right and that's uh also that is solvable but so yes of course it's like fundamentally it's much harder than Bitcoin with like a fairly simple contract that you can verify it's a much more complicated Tech stack but

all of the other things you just stated um will be true here too so it's yeah all of this is intended as a protocol not a company right because then I think it would be yeah I saw you guys launch the pro yeah the protocol yep the Sam had a good poster I'm sure you got you guys wrote it but um he shared it on Twitter like humanness in the age of AI the the path to the open and permissionless identity protocol that was a good post yeah so yeah thank you um anything else that we're missing anything that you think is like people have uninformed opinions on or things that you're really excited about that you guys can on things that can be unlocked by World coin that we haven't talked about so like I think just fundamentally it is it's very likely going to be the largest

onboarding into crypto we have seen so far like that's sitting in the inside I think that's just that's just what's gonna happen in the next 12 months and that is incredibly important um and in like a thousand different ways so we are here uh and we we're like we we talk um so just like if you have concerns or if you have like improvements on on our code or something please just engage and and help um and well I'm just I'm just super excited about everything that has happened it's been it's been like this crazy Journey from

reading a super abstract and crazy paper three and a half years ago that sounded like a like a um like it really sounded like like a joke almost like I was like dropping out of Caltech for that felt like a mad decision back then um to now something that I think has a lot of technological foundation and is about to launch soon so I think it's gonna be a crazy and incredible journey and I I hope people give us a chance and engage with it amazing man well how many and how many people work there right now or work at the foundation and on the protocol and on everything um so it's a total of 170 people at this

point um between yeah it's like it's Global at this point but the majority I think it was 150 when I saw you last so uh yeah we we grow we grow yeah good stuff man cool well I appreciate you coming on and uh answering some of the tough questions um for folks to learn more about worldcoin just go to the website download I the app is still in test flight is my understanding but you guys are launching it soon um yeah like action to take care yeah so when when this I think when this podcast streams you you will be able to download it because it's uh we're launching it next week that's one two photos on Twitter Johnny Discord um and check out the website

amazing man Alex I have a feeling this will not be the last time you're on Empire so I appreciate you coming on man thank you so much all right be well [Applause] [Music]