Worldcoin, the crypto startup co-founded by Open AI CEO Sam Altman, announced Wednesday a major expansion of its eye-scanning identity platform, including integrations with major tech companies and a new multi-level verification system for the World ID “digital passport.” .”
Tiago Sada, head of product at Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin, said in an interview that World ID 2.0 marks a “monumental upgrade” for the protocol that combines “ideas originally laid out on the white paper” with “feedback.” that we heard from developers.”
Sada said Worldcoin will begin offering on-site onboarding proof-of-personhood service in Singapore and Mexico. He also mentioned several companies – including Shopify, Mercado Libre, Minecraft, Reddit and Telegram – that allow users to log in with a World ID.
The 2.0 upgrade will help these new partners by making it “easier to distinguish between bots and verified humans online,” Tools for Humanity said in an emailed statement.
An eyeball scanning sphere
It’s impossible to talk about Worldcoin without mentioning the orb – the retina scanning orb that you have to look into in exchange for a World ID passport. The device is a chrome globe the size of a basketball and scans eyeballs to authenticate new users. It does this to ensure that all World ID holders are provably unique, which could be useful for online services looking to detect real-human bots in the increasingly creepy age of AI.
The uncanny intimacy of Worldcoin’s chosen authentication method has raised user privacy concerns: For a vocal corner of the privacy-obsessed, anti-corporate blockchain industry, the idea of handing your biometric data to a shiny metal sphere built by a Silicon Valley startup inevitably sounded dystopian.
But Tools for Humanity says Worldcoin does not store its eye scans and only uses them for initial user authentication. Tools for Humanity also presents the World ID service as a more privacy-protecting alternative to traditional authentication systems. World ID holders can “verify that they are a human through an app or service without revealing their identity,” Tools for Humanity said in a statement.
On Reddit, for example, a subreddit’s moderators can use World ID to “give people who are verified as human specific roles or special permissions,” according to Sada. Or on Shopify, merchants handing out discount codes can use World ID to “ensure you only get that discount once,” he added.
With World ID 2.0, “new levels of verification” have been added to accommodate users who choose to provide varying amounts of verification information. In addition to the standard orb-based World ID, a new basic-level World ID forgoes retinal scans and allows users to authenticate themselves on their own devices. This lower layer of authentication can help extend IDs to people without access to an orb authentication site, and can be used to log in to apps with less stringent proof-of-personality requirements.
At the other end of the verification spectrum is another new – and more stringent – level, called Orb Plus. App makers can identify users with this option if they want orb-authenticated users to re-authenticate themselves to the device every time they log in with a World ID.
Altman’s OpenAI ouster
Tools for Humanity says “nearly five million people” have since had their eyes scanned in exchange for World IDs Sam Altman unveiled the orb in 2021. The number “includes more than 1% of the population of Chile, 1% of the population of Argentina and more than 2% of the population of Portugal,” Sada said. Worldcoin’s main product today is a crypto wallet app that anyone can use and provides special access to verified ID holders.
Sada says Altman remains actively involved in key product and strategy decisions at Worldcoin, and he claims he heard about the AI standout’s surprise firing and rehiring at Open AI on the news like everyone else.
That debacle led to public speculation about Altman’s commitment to AI safety – one of the founding principles on which Open AI and Worldcoin were both founded. “Sam was clearly in the middle of the spectrum” between techno-optimism, which wants to accelerate the development of technology like AI, and effective altruism, which is more concerned with the existential risks of AI, Sada noted. “If anything, he’s more on the safety side.”
“Worldcoin was founded because the world is changing and we need the tools to make the most of this new era,” said Sada.