OpenAIs Sam Altman Launches Worldcoin Crypto Project

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The company behind Worldcoin is Tools for Humanity, based in San Francisco and Berlin. | photo credit: Reuters

Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is launching on Monday.

The project’s main offering is its World ID, an account that only real humans can get. To obtain a World ID, a customer signs up to perform an iris scan in person using the Worldcoin “orb,” a silver ball about the size of a bowling ball. Once the orb’s iris scan verifies that the person is a real human, it creates a world ID.

The company behind Worldcoin is Tools for Humanity, based in San Francisco and Berlin.

The project has 2 million users since its beta period, and with Monday’s launch, Worldcoin is expanding its orbing operations to 35 cities in 20 countries. As an incentive, those who register in certain countries will receive the Worldcoins WLD cryptocurrency token.

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The cryptocurrency aspect of global IDs is important because cryptocurrency blockchains can store global IDs in a way that maintains privacy and cannot be controlled or closed by any single entity, co-founder Alex Blania told Reuters.

The project says global identifiers will be needed in the age of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which produce remarkably human-like language. Global identifiers could be used to tell the difference between real people and AI robots online.

Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it would list Worldcoin with the tentative opening of trading scheduled for Monday at 09:00 GMT.

Altman told Reuters that Worldcoin can also help determine how the economy will be reshaped by generative AI.

“People will be supercharged by AI, which will have massive economic implications,” he said.

One example Altman likes is Universal Basic Income, or UBI, a social benefits program usually run by governments where every individual is entitled to payments. Because AI will increasingly do the work that people do now,” Altman believes UBI can help tackle income inequality. Since only real people can have global IDs, this could be used to reduce fraud when deploying UBI.

Altman said he thinks a world with UBI will be far in the future and he doesn’t have a clear idea of ​​which entity might distribute money, but Worldcoin is laying the groundwork for it to become a reality.

We think we have to start experimenting with things in order to know what to do, he said.

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