0:00

The immediate reaction is like it freaks you out.

0:28

And

0:30

we are exploring the WorldCoin story, one

0:35

of the more ambitious projects in the crypto space.

0:38

And here's what you're going to learn in this episode. First,

0:41

what is the idea behind WorldCoin?

0:43

What does it want to do for the world? Second,

0:46

what is actually inside of an orb? Is

0:49

it safe to put your eye into? Third,

0:52

WorldCoin's answer to how it's providing privacy

0:54

to those who get their iris scanned and why some

0:56

people are still skeptical about it. Fourth,

0:59

what is WorldCoin's identity platform and

1:01

what can it do for Sam Altman's other company,

1:03

OpenAI, and the incoming AI-enabled

1:06

internet that humanity appears to just be waltzing into?

1:09

Fifth, how WorldCoin plans to become a permissionless

1:12

protocol, including the manufacturing and operating

1:15

of the orbs themselves. And sixth,

1:17

lastly, we had to ask him what Sam

1:19

Altman thinks of the AI alignment

1:21

problem. We happen to be recording this podcast

1:24

on Mother's Day, which means Ryan is in his human

1:26

format and why he is not here for this episode. But

1:28

we are still going to record a debrief episode

1:31

for the bankless citizens out there, for all

1:33

the premium subscribers. So I will fill

1:35

him in on all my thoughts about this episode and we'll talk a

1:37

little bit more about the incoming AI revolution

1:40

and the ways that the crypto story is a part

1:42

of that. If you want that extra debrief

1:44

episode, that is exclusively for

1:46

bankless citizens, for people who subscribe

1:48

to the premium RSS feed. If you would like

1:51

that debrief episode, there's a link in the show notes so you can

1:53

subscribe to bankless, get that premium RSS feed

1:55

where we post all of our extra bonus content along

1:57

with all the other perks that you get for being

1:59

a.

1:59

of the bankless nation. Like I said

2:02

at the beginning, Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious

2:04

projects in this space. There's a coin,

2:07

there's a layer 2, there's an identity protocol,

2:09

there's a mobile app, and of course there's

2:11

this physical piece of hardware that's

2:13

become infamously iconic to Worldcoin,

2:16

that silver orb.

2:18

It's Worldcoin's philosophy that the best

2:20

way to produce unique, verifiable humanness

2:23

is human biometrics that map to our

2:25

unique DNA. This is the most robust

2:28

way to achieve civil resistance. That's

2:30

why Worldcoin manifests in

2:32

the physical world with this orb thing. Biometric

2:35

scanners are hardware, and that physical

2:37

nature of the orb that you place your eye into

2:40

to get scanned has these strong, dystopian

2:42

connotations that have triggered so many people.

2:45

We of course talk about this dynamic directly with

2:47

the Worldcoin founders,

2:48

Alex and Sam, how they are dealing

2:50

with this branding that Worldcoin has received, and

2:52

how that's impacted the company along the way.

2:54

But nonetheless, the Worldcoin project does

2:56

seem to be growing in momentum, and it was a pleasure

2:59

having Alex and Sam on the podcast today.

3:02

I hope you enjoy this episode, Bankless Nation, but

3:04

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6:14

Bankless Nation, I would like to introduce you to the co-founders

6:16

of Worldcoin, Alex Blania and Sam

6:18

Altman. Sam, Alex, welcome to

6:20

Bankless. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, David.

6:22

This is going to be cool. Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation

6:25

because the Worldcoin story arc

6:27

is an interesting one as it relates to both the crypto

6:29

world and also especially now with the

6:31

surgeons and relevancy of AI in

6:34

mainstream society. And so the timing

6:36

of this episode, I think, is perfect. And Sam,

6:38

I think this story starts with you. Can you talk about just

6:40

like the inception of the idea of

6:42

Worldcoin, where it came

6:44

from, and what the aha moment

6:46

about why we need something like Worldcoin in the

6:48

future? I started thinking initially

6:51

that it would be quite powerful if you could

6:53

have the biggest network, like the

6:55

biggest financial and identity network imaginable.

6:58

You could have something truly global

7:00

and sort of had no good

7:02

ideas about how to do that. The first version

7:05

we started talking about this was something like, well, what if we scan

7:07

the palm of everybody on Earth? Or what

7:09

if we did all these other, you know, like what if a lot of

7:11

complicated ideas about how to verify identity? But

7:14

the reason I was excited about it is as the

7:17

world sort of heads towards powerful AI systems,

7:20

I thought that if we could do something to eventually

7:23

redistribute wealth through some sort of global UBI

7:25

at scale or maybe even access to these

7:27

systems, which would be the most important component

7:30

of wealth someday

7:31

and also be able to verify unique

7:34

humanness with a different lens on how to preserve

7:36

privacy,

7:37

that would be more important as sort of

7:40

AI advanced. So I started thinking about this

7:42

years ago, mostly driven

7:44

by my work on open AI, but also just believe

7:47

that UBI was a cool thing to study

7:49

anyway. And again, ideas

7:51

were like deeply imperfect, but I knew something in the space

7:53

I wanted to explore. Met

7:56

first Max and then Alex and thought

7:58

Alex was super awesome. and I'll

8:01

let Alex talk about how the ideas evolved since then, because

8:05

that part is really all credit to Alex,

8:08

but that was how it started. Yeah,

8:11

so it sounds

8:12

like the early motivation for Worldcoin came from

8:14

the idea that we could

8:16

tackle two birds with one stone, one

8:19

being UBI and one being identity, correct? And

8:22

that was really like the elegance of the solution before

8:25

there was actually a solution known. It evolved the

8:27

problem of verified humanness.

8:29

And that was really like, that's what you need for

8:32

a lot of other things, like identity, like doing

8:34

the global UBI. If there's a non-fraudulent

8:36

solution to that,

8:37

that also is privacy preserving. That's

8:40

kind of the goal. And maybe we could talk about where

8:42

Alex and Sam met. What year was

8:44

perhaps the idea of Worldcoin incepted and

8:47

then when does Alex come into the story? So

8:49

we really started working on it in January 2020. So

8:52

I was, I think, seven max started working

8:54

on it since before about then. Max

8:58

had a full-time job, Sam, obviously as well. So

9:01

when I joined, we brought the founding team and

9:04

then really started working on it.

9:05

Right before Worldcoin, I was in physics and theoretical

9:08

physics and kind of how I used deep learning to

9:10

predict AI systems. So not

9:12

too close to crypto. And basically, I was

9:14

literally got an email from

9:16

Max explaining with a white paper of Worldcoin

9:20

back then kind of just super early ideas, and

9:22

so important ideas where this

9:24

could go and why it would matter.

9:28

And I drove to San Francisco, had

9:32

a couple interviews with

9:34

Max, then one with Sam, then

9:36

we spent more time together and

9:38

then later became co-founder. That's kind

9:40

of the quick story. Is there anything I'm missing, Sam? That

9:42

sounds right. So Alex, where were you in this

9:44

phase of your life? And what was your skillset that made

9:46

this project relevant for you? Well, Max actually

9:49

reached out to me as a software engineer. I was

9:51

in electrical

9:52

physics. And I had a company before in high school

9:56

that did vertical farming and actually

9:57

did it reasonably well.

9:59

and

10:03

I mean, obviously I read about Bitcoin super early on. I

10:05

was early in that phase

10:07

of the whole space, but

10:11

I could not say that it was deep in crypto at

10:14

all before.

10:20

We took

10:22

these early ideas that Sam mentioned.

10:26

And then later I became

10:29

a CEO and we just took

10:31

it from there. Was it obvious that Worldcoin was

10:33

a crypto project from day one? So,

10:38

had the aspirations, we need verifiable

10:41

human identity. You could also attach some

10:43

UBI to that. Can

10:51

you talk about that choice and then we can start to dive into the tech

10:53

that's actually inside of the orb? When

10:57

I joined, there was this whole paper.

10:59

It

11:03

was not long, it was like three pages, a lot of

11:05

high level ideas. And

11:07

as Sam mentioned, one of the big

11:09

points of it was you basically need to solve civil

11:11

resistance to be able to distribute a token

11:13

to every human being.

11:15

And

11:19

why do you want to do that in the first place? You

11:24

want to launch a token to all of humanity collectively.

11:31

Then the first big thing you have to solve is what people in crypto

11:34

call civil resistance. I'm

11:36

sure you're quite familiar with that. And

11:47

why is that important?

11:52

Because this

11:55

incentive mechanism and this token and everything

11:57

would break down.

11:59

As you know, David, that happens

12:02

pretty frequently in crypto still today. And

12:05

if you really want to scale it to all of humanity, it's

12:07

even a much bigger topic. So

12:10

it was pretty clear very early on that that's one of the biggest

12:12

problems we have to tackle first. And

12:15

then we went quite deep.

12:19

So I mean, the whole founding

12:21

team is pretty much, we all met either at Caltech or Max Planck.

12:25

The whole space, and there's three big things

12:27

you could do if you zoom out.

12:30

There's KYC, of course. So

12:37

you basically just use the civil resistance of governments.

12:40

That immediately falls through because less than 50% of the world actually have

12:42

these documents that you could verify digitally.

12:45

So if you think about inclusivity, that

12:47

just does not scale. While

12:50

it would work super well in Europe and US, it just does not work globally. So that fell

12:52

through immediately. The second big

12:55

kind of topic is what

12:57

people call web of trust. So you basically

13:00

try to build up a reputation graph. And

13:04

that's a super elegant idea. It just never really worked or scaled.

13:09

But I actually think that's something that will come into work on later.

13:11

So we can talk about that. And

13:14

the last part is biometrics. So

13:19

we looked into web of trust and then looked into biometrics

13:21

itself. And

13:24

before we get into this specific modality,

13:26

which as you mentioned, we use average recognition. The

13:29

first big thing you need to understand is all the things you use

13:31

in your daily life. So

13:34

your iPhone, for example, what that does is it

13:36

re-authenticates you. So

13:39

it basically realizes that David again

13:41

tries to log in into the same phone. You

13:44

put on your phone of how you look like and then you

13:46

try to sign in. you

14:00

need to compare one user against everyone else. And

14:05

the big problem with that is you just need much more entropy,

14:10

so information about each user to make that work, because otherwise the fraud

14:12

rate explodes exponentially and

14:15

you actually hit a wall. So

14:20

that's something that's very important

14:23

to keep in mind. Fingerprints

14:26

doesn't have enough entropy.

14:27

Palm

14:30

theoretically actually could have, but there was just no life implementation

14:32

of this. Sorry,

14:35

Alex, when you say not enough entropy, you mean not enough uniqueness.

14:40

There's just not enough uniqueness in someone's face

14:42

to be able to prove verifiable humanness, correct? That's

14:45

correct. And

14:50

it wouldn't be very native, the crypto

14:52

ethos, to just use government ID as our identity

14:54

system. And then you also

14:56

talked about the web of trust, which there are other web

14:59

of trust models of civil resistance out

15:01

there in the crypto world. They're all decently experimental.

15:07

But I think what you're saying is the biometric solution towards establishing unique human identity

15:09

is the most robust and the most

15:11

tried and true model. And

15:14

so that's how you've come to the conclusion of the IRIS. And

15:19

the IRIS is sufficiently entropic, correct?

15:24

And that also, I think, presents why Worldcoin

15:26

is the way that it is, why there is an orb.

15:29

If it was just like United States ID or nation

15:31

state ID or if it was just a

15:33

web of trust model, the Worldcoin project would

15:36

be in a digital sphere only. But

15:38

since we have to look and map that at the

15:40

DNA of someone, we actually have to establish ourselves

15:42

in the real world. So

15:45

can you talk about the technology in the orb and

15:48

how it does what its job is?

15:50

Sure.

15:57

that

16:00

neither digital content, so images

16:03

or video, as well

16:05

as intelligence, are a discriminator anymore of

16:15

what it means to be a human. We

16:20

started building the orb quite in the beginning.

16:23

It

16:25

has a lot of sensors in the front to

16:30

just make sure whatever we see is an actual

16:32

human being, so

16:35

not a display and not an AI that tries to fool us.

16:39

All of that compute

16:41

happens locally. First

16:45

check, we look at a human being. What's

16:50

pretty cool and very important is

16:55

that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's

16:58

wallet through

17:00

zero-knowledge proofs. What

17:05

that means is that the only thing we or anyone

17:07

else could prove is

17:10

that a user has verified before a yes or no.

17:15

It's not a user that is preserving open

17:17

source

17:18

and decentralized. I know it sounds counterintuitive

17:20

in the beginning because

17:25

it uses biometrics, et cetera, but you have to look into engineering

17:30

and understand that this aligns really well with

17:32

the values of the space. Scanning

17:36

an iris is, from what I understand, a known quantity.

17:40

He just told me about the technology in

17:42

the orb. Most

17:45

of the technology is actually making sure that humans

17:47

aren't trying to game the orb.

17:48

It can scan your iris,

17:51

and that's what it does,

17:52

but

17:55

most of the technology is making sure that humans

17:57

aren't trying to game the orb

17:59

to make this happen. Why

18:06

did we have to build custom hardware? Back

18:11

then we were four people in a small

18:13

apartment in San Francisco. Coming

18:16

up with the idea we need to build hundred

18:18

devices and

18:23

ship them around the world

18:25

was really not fun. So

18:27

the device that actually is not a human being. So

18:32

you can just go to the processor and try

18:34

to insert data streams that

18:38

are actually not from imaging.

18:43

So that's one. And

18:46

then two is imaging resolution. So

18:49

all the biometric imaging devices we tested back then, they

18:54

actually also do not have enough to scale to all of

18:56

humanity. But to talk

18:58

more about your question specifically, is

19:03

the orb has in front, it images multi-spectral. So

19:08

what that means is you imagine multiple wavelengths in

19:10

the electromagnetic spectrum.

19:11

So we have infrared, we

19:13

have 3D time of flight, and

19:19

we have multiple wavelengths with an infrared spectrum. Just

19:23

to make sure that whatever we see is an actual human being.

19:26

Quite some engineering to get there.

19:27

And

19:31

then the cool thing is everything happens locally

19:33

on a device. So

19:36

there are seven neural networks that in real time just

19:38

do all of these checks. And

19:41

that's important because privacy yet again. Is

19:46

it accurate to say that the retina scan inside the orb

19:50

is perhaps the most advanced retina scan technology that exists? Humanists.

19:55

One human is one human in the world of

19:57

world coin. This is especially important as a

19:59

human. the world of AI comes and those lines start

20:01

to blur. We need to understand who is a true

20:04

human. Crypto has other identity projects,

20:07

other civil resistance projects, but I

20:09

think the point here that stands is that there's

20:11

no identity project, proof

20:13

of identity, proof of human project that is

20:16

as civil resistant as biology,

20:18

as DNA. And so the World Coin Orb

20:21

is meant to map onto an iris,

20:24

and that is the strongest form of civil resistance

20:26

that we have. And so the question

20:29

I want to ask is, and I think

20:29

this kind of gets to where there

20:32

are always concerns about the World Coin Project,

20:35

is that serializing humans is

20:37

a double-edged sword. We in the crypto industry

20:39

don't have a source, a source of truth of

20:41

who is a unique human, but the history

20:44

of serializing humans has not been a

20:46

good one, and this has been the cause

20:48

of concern around the World Coin Project, is the concern

20:50

of privacy. So since you can scan

20:53

someone's iris and prove that they are human,

20:55

what's the story behind the privacy

20:57

side of things? How does World Coin address

20:59

the privacy issue? Well, first of all, we

21:01

agree, right? So that's

21:03

why we built it the way we have built it.

21:06

So the first, like, there's this counterintuitive

21:08

thing going on that, of course, you have biometrics, and

21:10

that first, the immediate reaction is like, it freaks

21:12

you out, and you really need to understand the

21:14

engineering behind it

21:16

to

21:17

understand that I think none of these concerns

21:19

are actually grounded. And

21:22

so within World Coin, it actually comes down to three

21:24

big things. The first one is that

21:27

the biometric data is not stored. So basically,

21:29

the imaging happens locally

21:31

on a device, the computation happens

21:34

on the device, and the only thing

21:36

that actually leaves the device is an iris code that gets

21:38

signed by the orb,

21:39

and then that's the thing that gets compared

21:41

against all users. Then point number

21:43

two,

21:45

which is by far the most important

21:47

one, is that the uniqueness

21:49

check is separated from the

21:51

user's wallet with the knowledge proofs, which

21:54

brings me to the third point is it's actually self-custodial

21:57

setup. So when

21:58

the user signs up...

22:00

The user has a non-custodial

22:02

wallet that generates, then

22:05

later, DC or knowledge proofs and

22:11

that gives it quite extreme privacy. I

22:16

don't think there's anything else I'm aware of that

22:21

could

22:21

solve the same problem on that scale without

22:26

literally any privacy implications.

22:29

And

22:31

then the other thing is everything will be open source. It's

22:36

going to be fully decentralized. It's

22:41

of

22:43

course a challenge because you

22:45

have hardware but it's going to happen. I

22:51

think it's actual rocket science. We

22:56

spend a lot of time, a lot of money to build it the

22:58

way we've built it. I

23:01

think that's an example of someone goes and gets their

23:03

iris scanned. That

23:06

turns into data and then that goes through a line of steps that

23:11

turns into somebody being able to be verifiably

23:13

logged into their Worldcoin app. Can

23:16

you talk about just how that data is carried, the

23:21

processing of the data in the iris scanner, the zero knowledge proofs.

23:26

So a

23:27

user or

23:29

a person is excited about Worldcoin, learns

23:31

about it, downloads an app. Right

23:36

now it's the only client for Worldcoin but

23:41

many other wallets will support it too as well. All

23:46

of this is a protocol so many other

23:48

wallets should connect to it. What

23:53

happens when you verify is you

23:56

click on verify now, you generate

23:58

a key pair, actually twice a pair.

23:59

two separate key pairs because you have one these

24:05

are two separate key pairs that basically live on your phone.

24:10

And then once you verify you show that public identity key

24:12

to the device and

24:15

that gets air gapped just via a camera to the device.

24:20

Then the orb does first the humanness check, then the

24:22

uniqueness check, which

24:25

means it images the eye, calculates a unique

24:27

embedding out of this with

24:30

a neural network, then signs that and that's the only thing

24:33

that actually leaves the device. And that later will be decentralized

24:35

as well, but right now goes to backend. The

24:39

uniqueness

24:39

check happens and then when the user uses

24:42

world ID the

24:44

user does a proof of inclusion with zero knowledge

24:47

that the user is actually,

24:49

that public key is included into that set. And

24:54

so what that enables you then to do is you can use that proof

24:59

across many different ecosystems so not only in Ethereum but also virtual all other chains.

25:03

Also in web two you

25:05

can just use it to log in wherever you want without

25:08

revealing any of your personal information.

25:11

And

25:13

then another thing that's important to mention is

25:16

actually world ID is

25:18

an identity protocol on top of that, on

25:20

top of this idea of proof of personhood that

25:23

then lets developers and other people attach verifiable

25:26

credentials and things like that. But yeah, that's

25:28

the flow.

25:43

Cool.

25:58

And so this provides us a place for

25:59

for unique humans to have a public

26:02

address, right? And so that is the

26:04

net output of this, is like there is a new

26:06

public address from the Worldcoin protocol,

26:09

and that is because of the way that that address

26:11

is derived, verifiably human. And

26:14

I think, Sam, one of the reasons why you're

26:16

a co-founder of Worldcoin and the vision behind

26:18

this is that

26:19

you would find it from the open AI

26:21

side of things, and I think you hypothesize

26:23

that the world will find it in the age of

26:26

AI, that having a list

26:28

of addresses of verifiable humans

26:30

to be supremely useful. So

26:33

why would that be useful in the next

26:35

decade or century? Why do we need this in this coming

26:37

era? Yeah, I think

26:39

there will turn out to be other reasons besides the

26:41

ones that I'll mention now. But when we think

26:43

about these very powerful

26:45

systems, these very powerful AIs that will

26:48

exist in the world, I think the

26:50

benefits from them, access to them,

26:52

governance of them,

26:54

that belongs to real people.

26:56

And I think it's very important that AI is

26:58

being built as tools for people.

27:01

Now, there are a lot of ways that we could think about doing

27:03

this, but there's a lot of advantages we like

27:05

about the Worldcoin solution. And

27:08

as Alex just explained, I think although the privacy

27:11

vision is different than what people have maybe

27:14

traditionally thought about, I think it's one

27:16

that's very compelling. And I think it's also

27:18

one that is very fair. Like this is

27:20

sort of the maximally inclusive system we can

27:22

imagine. I also think that

27:25

the ability to say, I'm a human, I created

27:27

this content, or I'm at least endorsing this content,

27:30

that's gonna turn out to be important too. And another

27:32

advantage to sort of this sort of a structure.

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in the description below. Alex, are there any

30:13

other like use cases that you see in the crypto

30:15

space? Like airdrop farming is another one, but

30:18

it's just like the distribution of tokens is

30:21

muted by the fact that we don't have this proof

30:23

of personhood. Is there any other crypto native applications

30:25

that you see? Oh man, so many. We'll start

30:27

with like crypto first and then we can go a little bit broader.

30:29

But I think within crypto,

30:32

one of the things that is an outcome of Rolecoin for me

30:34

personally is that I travel

30:36

the world, which I didn't do when

30:38

I was in grad school. I saw

30:40

many different countries, I talked to so many users in

30:42

Latin America, in Europe, and in Africa, literally

30:44

everywhere. And I think there's a

30:47

lot of financial primitives that technically

30:49

the

30:50

space can deliver,

30:52

but right now it does not for a couple

30:55

different reasons. One is just UX, but a

30:57

really big one is you need

30:59

reputation for many of these things. This

31:01

whole idea of a credit score, basically,

31:04

like an on-chain credit score, so you can do under-collateralized

31:06

lending, I think is a really big idea that hopefully

31:08

is coming. And proof of personhood,

31:11

generally when you just, like you try to build your mental

31:13

model what proof of personhood actually means, it's

31:16

the foundation

31:18

for identity. It's not identity, these

31:20

are two different things, because identity means I'm

31:22

a unique person and this is my name, that's my date

31:24

of birth, or that's my GitHub account. So proof of

31:26

personhood is like the foundational building block to make

31:29

all of these things happen, which are the couple things here. Sam,

31:32

most people know you from your work at OpenAI and

31:34

chat to UBT. Are there any specific

31:36

or concrete paths that you see between integrating

31:39

OpenAI and WorldCoin? I think it's too early

31:41

to talk about specifics there, but

31:43

as we sort of watch this play out in the coming

31:45

decade,

31:47

hopefully it will reveal itself. Okay, so how does

31:49

the actual distribution of the WorldCoin

31:52

token, and that's the name of the token, correct, WorldCoin?

31:54

Yes. How does that actually get into people's hands

31:57

and what is the distribution plan? How

31:59

do I get?

31:59

and how much do I get and what are the details

32:02

behind that? Many

32:05

of the details we can't just not talk about here for

32:10

the regulatory uncertainty in the United

32:13

States, you're certainly aware of. We

32:15

will not go too much into the details here, but

32:17

the broad mechanism is super easy. You

32:20

download an app, you verify with an orb at

32:22

some point, and

32:25

all this can actually scale to billions of people and

32:30

it will remain like this over the coming decade or

32:32

so. So

32:35

there's an incentive to getting your Worldcoin

32:37

ID earlier, because

32:40

then you start to get your distribution of the coins sooner?

32:45

Well, I mean, you have this whole reinforcing

32:47

flywheel, right? It's

32:50

way less important for the grand scheme of things

32:52

than the other two.

32:54

But

32:55

I think one mental model you can have is Worldcoin

32:58

is a protocol that is

33:00

designed to scale itself to all of humanity, which

33:05

is something we've never

33:06

seen because civil

33:08

resistance was never there. It's unclear

33:10

to me, if you go 10 years in the future, a

33:15

token being held by 3 billion

33:17

people, let's say.

33:24

There's

33:45

a ton of moving parts here.

33:59

of the high level answer after, but

34:02

it certainly has been a crazy journey.

34:05

I think what people always say is in the beginning, we literally have

34:07

been four people. All

34:10

of us came right out of university, so we never worked anywhere.

34:16

Now it's this big machine of 180 people across

34:18

these different fields making this happen. As

34:21

you said, we have a quite sophisticated

34:23

Harvard team, economics

34:26

team, AI teams. It

34:32

definitely was quite a ride. Over

34:36

time it went from the early focus was

34:38

hardware, that was the big thing

34:40

to focus on, and after the product, and

34:43

right now it's pretty much operations.

34:46

It's going to become this big operational

34:49

machine.

34:52

The world coin team has gotten it, getting good

34:54

at new challenges. One

34:56

of the things I love most about startups is watching people learn

34:58

just how much they can get done, and

35:01

just how much they will have small teams in particular.

35:04

That's been very fun

35:06

to see the world coin team do all these things. I

35:11

don't remember who I first heard this from, but there's a somewhat famous saying in

35:13

startups, but

35:17

you can accomplish, smart, driven, aligned, small groups

35:19

of talented people can

35:22

accomplish so much more than they realize because

35:25

their comparison is working in a big company, or being in school, or something

35:27

like that. The

35:31

world coin team has certainly outperformed expectations, even

35:33

adjusted for that. Sam,

35:36

what's your day-to-day involvement with the world coin project? Maybe

35:41

it's not day-to-day, but where does your rubber-beat the

35:43

pavement with world coin? What that

35:45

looks like varies a lot, and I try to

35:48

help anywhere I can, but there's no specific, like,

35:51

oh, this is my area or my project.

35:53

Alex, one component that I want to delve into

35:55

is the layer 2. This was actually announced not too

35:57

long ago that world coin is building on the OP stack.

35:59

with optimism. What

36:06

does the actual protocol do for world coin?

36:11

What we announced last week, what we're talking

36:13

about is

36:23

actually that the token itself will launch on OP mainnet.

36:28

We just spent so much

36:30

time with the team, like

36:33

Liam, Carl, the whole crew,

36:36

and actually

36:38

over the last couple months,

36:42

so many

36:44

things, they gave us so much feedback on

36:47

the whole technology stack.

36:51

We just decided two months ago that we have to intensify this

36:56

then of course with base as well. The

37:01

simple implementation is just putting the world coin on

37:03

optimism. I'm

37:06

assuming there's additional infrastructure that world

37:08

coin will also use the optimism chain for. Just

37:11

like zooming out, what does it actually mean, infrastructure

37:13

for world coin? So

37:16

world ID is completely separate because world

37:18

ID is kind of abstracted away.

37:20

That sits on Ethereum mainnet and

37:23

users then make an inclusion proof to that. That

37:26

then is bridging to different ecosystems so

37:31

that will not only be the case for Ethereum.

37:34

Then again, as

37:36

you just said, yes, the token will be an OP mainnet and

37:41

then later in the year we will have our own layer two,

37:46

so key to the world coin

37:48

project is that everyone actually gets

37:50

their iris scanned, which

37:53

is funny if you think about it. It's like if world coin is successful,

37:55

everyone's putting their eye into the orb. I want

37:57

to talk about the boots on the ground effort as

37:59

it.

37:59

it's been so far. Sure.

38:08

In

38:11

total right now it's 1.6 million, actually 1.7

38:21

million as of yesterday, and

38:27

scale really only matters

38:29

once everything is launched. We are weeks away from launch, that's

38:31

what we talk right now.

38:36

Once we learned we had to build

38:38

hardware, which

38:41

was again a really

38:41

painful insight, the

38:46

next big question was, I think this was like

38:48

the super early days with

38:51

an orb on a public place was the first big question.

38:55

Can you generate enough throughput with one of those devices to

39:01

actually scale to the billions? It

39:06

was like our super early definition

39:08

of what product market fit would mean.

39:10

We built a prototype and it was literally me running

39:13

through Berlin with 70

39:16

signups a day, we raised the Series A back then. Because

39:21

if you take 70 signups a day, you multiply it by a

39:23

week, then

39:26

you arrive at 300 to 500 signups a week. That

39:31

means that tens of thousands of devices would be enough to scale to

39:33

the billions. It

39:36

was one of the very surprising

39:38

things. Then

39:41

two, as we took it global, we

39:46

had 15 devices that we just tried to

39:48

deploy globally and

39:51

across many different markets to understand if

39:54

there's any fundamental roadblock that we are

39:56

not aware of.

39:59

to Latin America

40:02

and all of that in COVID. It

40:05

was quite a ride. We

40:10

actually wanted to go to because of COVID. And

40:15

then most recently, now we have a much more professional

40:17

team such

40:20

as Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lisbon,

40:23

Portugal, Nairobi, Kenya,

40:26

and Bangalore and Delhi, both in India. And

40:30

these four because these are kind of the perfect launchpads

40:34

we believe you should

40:36

actually start.

41:03

And

41:05

then also the Rokon Foundation is basically

41:07

just setting

41:27

the standard and then later other people will be able

41:29

to produce of

41:36

this large process that it's going to take probably 10 years

41:38

to get done for

42:01

orb manufacturers to manufacture orbs. And

42:05

then what are the learning lessons from the boots

42:14

on the ground for the orb operators since

42:16

they are not part of the

42:18

actual company. What is it like to manage these people? It

42:24

started with the very obvious ones.

42:29

Quality control and

42:29

fraud detection and things like that, which

42:35

we don't have to go super deep in. But

42:39

then the other thing is just get as much power to the user.

42:42

Put as much

42:44

in the app as possible. Educate

42:49

the user as much as possible before the sign up. I

42:54

don't think we've ever seen a project from humanity

42:56

that has this kind of spec. But

42:59

where are we, would you say Alex, in this roadmap

43:01

for Worldcoin? So

43:04

it started in 2020. Sam said that the progress of Worldcoin,

43:09

the professionalism from Worldcoin has exceeded expectations.

43:12

So maybe we're

43:14

a little bit further ahead in the roadmap. So

43:19

where are we in the grand arc of the Worldcoin project

43:21

and how much left is there to do?

43:23

I mean we're literally ahead of launch, that's why we

43:25

talk right now. But

43:28

there was just so much engineering that went

43:30

into this and

43:33

so much building that had to go into this. So

43:38

we were super early and of course everything we have seen so

43:40

far is extremely

43:42

promising. That's why we're here. We

43:49

have three and a half orders of magnitude of growth in front of us. It's

43:55

hard to say it's anything but extremely early.

44:00

got absolutely hazed by

44:02

the crypto industry. And

44:05

I think it was kind of an expected outcome. Like,

44:08

hey, stick your iris in this orb and then

44:10

you'll get some tokens. It was the spinal

44:12

reflex, I think it's pretty obvious. One

44:15

thing I've noticed, however, is that

44:17

it has attracted talent in ways that I haven't seen

44:19

other projects. There's actually been two instances

44:22

in my life that I've

44:24

been in a social situation, a social setting,

44:27

where the world coin company pulls out an orb. People

44:29

inside of world coin love the orbs. And

44:33

so slowly, the world coin team

44:35

has continued to build, continued to iterate, attracted

44:37

some talent, attracted people that were

44:39

not on the world coin team, that are now on the world

44:41

coin team, that I've respected

44:43

just as builders and thinkers and developers in this space.

44:46

And so not only has the project of world coin

44:48

progressed on its own trajectory, but the

44:50

perception around world coin has changed. Can

44:53

you just talk about that experience? So

44:55

the initial,

44:56

we actually didn't want to announce back then, there was a super

44:58

annoying journalist leak that

45:01

had us to react. So I was just

45:03

imagine this vividly of like, we

45:07

were back then a super small team. And

45:09

because of COVID, I just lost my student visa.

45:12

We were locked in this ridiculous situation.

45:14

We were sitting in a small town called Erlangen

45:16

in Germany. And on

45:19

a Friday night, I think 11 PM, I get

45:21

this email from a Bloomberg reporter. It's

45:23

like, okay, if you don't react, you're going to write about this.

45:26

And everything blows up. It's

45:28

like

45:28

just the internet melts, Sam Altman's

45:30

launching this thing. And so there's 10

45:33

people in a small village in Germany trying

45:35

to figure things out as early as it

45:37

gets basically. And

45:39

of course, it was incredibly hard. It

45:41

was like managing the team through

45:43

this and then also managing

45:46

the,

45:47

just like actually scaling the company, raising

45:49

capital with that early

45:52

pushback was super, super hard. But

45:55

then, I mean,

45:56

we just, as you said, I think we attracted

45:58

incredible people, one of the best. Teams in

46:00

the space for sure.

46:04

But then not even within that industry,

46:06

I think broadly speaking, we

46:10

have incredible people here. Just

46:15

like this flywheel started happening, I've

46:20

done people outside of ROC and got excited about it. It

46:25

was just incredible because now we get so much

46:27

excitement

46:28

and people are hyped about

46:31

it. I've

46:35

been through some of these up and down cycles before, so

46:40

I was

46:41

less phased by it. But

46:43

the level of personal attacks

46:45

and hatred was definitely high. I

46:48

remember logging into Twitter one day. These

46:53

are quite personal attacks. Yeah,

46:58

OpenAI has super

47:00

fans and super haters, so

47:03

you kind of get used to both. And

47:08

they're super welcome never to sign up. I

47:13

think that's really important to keep saying.

47:19

Yes, I talked about on a recent Bankless

47:21

episode, the

47:24

weekly roll-up that this episode was happening

47:28

and that I got breakfast with the World Coin member and

47:32

there was an orb sitting on the table, just

47:35

a little ornament. Some

47:38

people were like, oh, Bankless

47:40

is talking to the World Coin people? Wow,

47:43

I can't believe they're

47:44

doing that. Yeah,

47:47

the less extreme side of the crypto world

47:49

seems to be keeping an open mind. More than

47:51

that, it feels like an enthusiastic mind at this point,

47:54

which is a big turnaround. So

47:56

what would you say? I don't have the technical skills to

47:58

actually be able to explain.

47:59

the separation of the privacy between the

48:02

identity and

48:05

the app and all that stuff, there's great documentation

48:10

that's very, very robust that listeners could go read and

48:13

they get the technical explanation as

48:16

to how the privacy is actually

48:18

maintained. But then I want to present the argument

48:22

that there's also the world of unknowns. Ultimately,

48:25

the goal of Worldcoin is to scan everyone's irises.

48:28

You're still doing it.

48:29

Well,

48:33

as you could imagine, I have a lot of these conversations

48:38

and I think for 99% of

48:39

these conversations,

48:42

the answers usually just actually

48:44

did not read the docs or

48:48

they just did not try to understand what

48:50

was happening. You

48:53

should not have to trust us because

48:58

things already are open source. That's

49:03

a common pushback we get right now and

49:06

I think it's totally fair that not everything yet is open

49:08

source. Obviously,

49:11

we move on that as fast as we can, but

49:15

there's just real world trade-offs we

49:17

have to work around. We get the code.

49:49

If you're super-operational, talented,

50:00

technically talented, just reach out.

50:16

So

50:30

there's a ton of work to do there.

50:53

I

51:00

think the way we need to do that is contact with these systems

51:02

as we develop them, and conduct reality. Number

51:04

two,

51:05

I think

51:06

once we have the technical ability to align

51:08

a superintelligence,

51:10

we then need a

51:11

complex set of international

51:14

regulatory agreements, cooperation between the lead in

51:16

efforts. But we've got to make sure that we

51:18

actually have people implement this

51:21

solution and don't have, for lack

51:23

of a better word,

51:24

rogue efforts that say, okay,

51:26

well, I can make a more powerful thing, and I'm going

51:28

to do it without paying the alignment tax, whatever that is. And

51:31

so there will need to be a very

51:34

complex

51:35

set of negotiations and agreements that happen, and

51:37

we're trying to start

51:39

laying the groundwork for that now. And

51:41

then third

51:42

is, I think we

51:44

talk a lot, and this is, I'm glad

51:46

we do, about the alignment problem. But

51:49

what we talk less about is,

51:51

what about humans misusing this, or even much

51:53

weaker things than AGI to cause great

51:56

havoc or do great damage to society? System is

51:58

like a little bit of a problem.

51:59

aligned with its operator, but doing something we don't want. So how

52:02

are those rules of what the limits are going

52:04

to get written and how are we going to enforce them on

52:07

limiting intentional misuse? Awesome.

52:10

Guys, Sam, Alex, thank you so much for joining me on Bankless

52:12

Today to walk through the World Coin Project and I'm excited

52:14

to see what it produces in the future. Thanks

52:17

a lot for having us. Thanks for having us, David. Guys, Bankless

52:19

Nation, you know the deal, crypto is risky. You

52:22

can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the

52:24

frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are

52:26

with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.