Worldcoin's 'Orbs for all' as Altman's releases WorldID 3.0, Credentials, and more

World Network, the billion-dollar pet project of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, held a live event on Thursday to discuss “meaningful updates” on what critics have panned as a controversial crypto project that aims to provide everyone on the planet with a way to digitally prove they are human, both securely and anonymously.

Worldcoin project co-inventor and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with fellow Worldcoin co-inventor Alex Blania, CEO of Tools for Humanity, took to the stage in San Francisco on Thursday to update the public on its next phase of development.

The iris-scanning digital identity and cryptocurrency platform held its “A new world” live event, along with key members of the Worldcoin Foundation, including Chief device officer Rob Heley and a video appearance by its Orb scanning device designer Thomas Meyerhoffer.

The Worldcoin project was created in 2019 to “accelerate humanity in the age of AI” by providing a way to digitally authenticate a human being from artificial intelligence using blockchain technology.

The project has grown and evolved significantly over the past five years, with the company now eschewing its former moniker, to be herein referred to as simply 'World' or 'World Network,' a company spokesperson told Cybernews on Thursday.

The company's official explanation: As the scale of the project grows along with the importance of World ID’s proof of human protocol, the name “Worldcoin” no longer encapsulates the mission of the project – to accelerate every human.

“Every 2 seconds, someone new joins the network, with 15 million sign-ups, of which 7 million are verified with an Orb,” Bania said to the crowd, adding, “Still, it's only just the beginning.”

Altman and Blania say the company’s goal is to “scale up” its technologies and bring more people into the World network – boosting the project's user base from its “current ~7 million verified humans to 700 million and beyond.”

Introducing World App 3.0, the super app for humans. Now featuring Mini Apps. pic.twitter.com/Db8GYXBg4n

undefined World (@worldcoin) October 17, 2024

Even with all the hype, World's large-scale processing of billions of sensitive biometric data files has prompted France, Germany, and other EU privacy advocates to raise concerns about “questionable” data collection practices.

Some countries, such as in Spain and Kenya and have even suspended the devices pending further review over the privacy worries.

Proof of Human

Blania said World has morphed from a 'Step one' idea to create “Proof of human” in a secure and anonymous way, to launching its first cryptocurrency token last July in 'Step two' of its grand plan to provide the tools that will ultimately “help everyone share in the benefits of the AI-driven Intelligence Age.”

The CEO further noted that the World project is now in the process of embarking on its third step of “continuing to scale and decentralize the network.”

"We want to see what happens when we do this at mass scale," said Altman. "It's great to build infrastructure for all people, and we've signed up so many, but there's about 99.9% left to go," Altman explained.

The duo pointed out, as examples, that currently, one out of seven adults in Lisbon, Portugal, and Santiago, Chile, has been verified by the World iris-scanning Orb, as well as one out of every three adults in Buenos Aires, Argentina, also the location of one of the two new flagship "premium verification" stores announced on Thursday (the other is in Mexico City).

To provide access to billions more humans in the next several years, "we need about 1000 times more Orbs and in more places," Blania said.

To accomplish its mission, the company announced plans to triple its production capacity with new assembly partners and locations around the world, aiming to achieve its ultimate goal of decentralizing manufacturing.

Several new retail stores will also be installed throughout various locations worldwide to provide people the ability to physically see the Orb in action, ask questions, and allow more users to verify their WorldID in person.

The company is also introducing a new 'on-demand' WorldID verification process, called “Self-serve verification,” partnering with smaller independent retail locations, such as coffee shops and convenience stores, to make verification even more accessible.

Lastly, starting in Spring 2025, a new Community Operator Program that will use a delivery-order service (think Uber Eats) to bring an Orb “to anyone who wants to verify wherever they are.”

The program, coming first to Latin America, will allow a user to purchase or rent an Orb for delivery by pre-ordering the device through the now-integrated World App 3.0.

Introducing World App 3.0, the super app for humans. Now featuring Mini Apps. pic.twitter.com/Db8GYXBg4n

undefined World (@worldcoin) October 17, 2024

'Everyone here gets an Orb!'

To help accelerate scale and decentralization, Heley, head of device manufacturing and engineering, presented the crowd with a shiny, updated version of the Orb.

Heley said the next-gen Orb was designed from the ground up with its software stack completely rewritten to enable verifications 3x faster and has 30% fewer parts than its predecessors.

Besides 5x the AI performance with 100 trillion operations per second, the Orb also comes with a fully removable SD card, including instructions, so a user can compare it to World’s already published source code.

While describing the technical specs of the upgraded Orb device, Heley told the audience, to a whooping round of applause, that attendees would each receive their very own Orb to take home after the event.

Additionally, the company announced new cryptology measures to beef up data privacy and security – the Anonymized Multi-Party Computation (AMPC) authentication protocol, described as a truly anonymous layer for the internet.

"AMPC provides the ability to take a piece of data and know whether it is unique, but know nothing else about that piece of data on an individual basis," explained Tools for Humanity CISO Alex Ludwig.

"The goal was to build something to benefit all humans – open, permissionless, decentralized across several different parties, accessible to any developer, operator and manufacturer, or business," Ludwig said.

By November, Ludwig said all of the data held by World Network will be independently decentralized across several educational institutions, including Berkley Center for Centralized Intelligence in California and the University of Zurich, "broken into pieces, in such a way, that no one of them is able to tell anything about that data, other than answering the question, is this unique?"

Before AMPC, Worldcoin had introduced a new state-of-the-art cryptology for biometric template protection in May known as secure multi-party computation (SMPC) – a secret sharing scheme in which the secret is encrypted to a set of numbers called shares. At the time, Worldcoin said it had securely deleted its previous iris code system.

WorldID 3.0 and World Credentials

Worldcoin’s project is designed around four key privacy principles; security, anonymity, transparency, choice & control, the company says.

At the event, World further announced the launch of the third iteration of its World App 3.0 and the new World ID Credentials, in which users can easily "sign into mobile and online apps to prove their unique identity while staying anonymous."

“World ID allows you to anonymously and securely (and not a bot) for easy online verification like signing into social apps and ensuring fair online activities like voting or buying concert tickets,” the company said.

The new World ID 3.0 features World ID Credentials, a way for even more people to participate in & benefit from World Network using things like an NFC-enabled passport. pic.twitter.com/sLGRCEzIiD

undefined World (@worldcoin) October 17, 2024

The company said its rolling out a beta version of WorldID Credentials starting today in the US and other select locations.

Along with the WorldID App and Credentials, is the introduction of 'World Chain mainnet' – "the first blockchain designed to prioritize human activity and transactions." As of October 17th, all 15 million World users have been automatically migrated to the new platform.

Originally launched last month under the name FaceAuth, the company re-announced its bio-authentication tool as 'Deep Face' – a facial recognition technology, similar to Apple's FaceID, to provide enhanced security for the Orb scanner.

Deep Face works by comparing a selfie, taken by a person's smartphone, against the images captured by the Orb that were securely stored on that person's same phone (and only on that phone) during verification,” the World website states.

The technology is designed so that it works on a local device only, with the user in sole possession of the encrypted selfie images, it said.

World Network said it foundation now rests on three key pillars; World Chain, World ID, and its cryptocurrency Worldcoin.