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If anyone, anyone approaches you with a device that looks like this, my best advice is to turn around and walk away.
The “Orb” | Source: World
The Orb – built by the innocuous-sounding company Tools for Humanity – is a biometric capture device. It is designed to capture a picture of our face and scan our iris to create a biometric signature that can verify our identity and that we are, indeed, human.
The company’s pitch is that the process is “simple, safe, and easily done in just a few seconds.” It promises that our biometric data is safely encrypted and secured on its centralized systems and that “you can choose to delete your data at any point.”
Sure.
Longtime readers of The Bleeding Edge will probably recognize the Orb. It’s the biometric device linked to what was known as Worldcoin – a Sam Altman-led blockchain project with a “mission of creating a globally inclusive identity and financial network, owned by the majority of humanity.”
The company has built its technology with a concept of “Proof of Human” (PoH), a digital identity verification to confirm that an individual is actually a unique human and not an artificial intelligence (AI).
Its even grander vision is to “enable global democratic processes” and “show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.” In other words, universal basic income using a digital asset.
I haven’t written about Worldcoin for quite some time because there just didn’t seem to be much going on at all. That was a good thing from my perspective.
But in the last month or so, it appears there has been some movement. Some new capital has been raised, and Worldcoin has been rebranded to just World with a new website URL – world.org.
Part of the rebrand has also included the launch of the World app wallet – a chat function that allows users in the World Network community to both message one another and send or receive digital currencies. The screenshot below demonstrates two humans chatting and transmitting a stablecoin – USDC.
Source: World
But this rebranding from Worldcoin to World doesn’t mean the “coin” has gone away. After all, the digital coin is the honeypot.
As with almost all blockchain projects, there is a digital token. In the case of World, it’s WLD, which currently trades on a variety of digital asset exchanges with a market capitalization just shy of $1 billion right now.
Price Chart of Worldcoin (WLD) | Source: Messari
WLD is used as a lure to get unsuspecting humans to sign up and allow their biometrics to be scanned. In exchange, they receive a small amount of WLD which is transferred to their World app wallet.
Back in 2023, when the program was rolled out, the offering was 25 WLD for signing up plus some recurring smaller payments after signing up. It appears that has been scaled back, but there is still a monetary incentive to sign up, however small in value that might be.
Again, the pitch is that the World Network will scale to more than a billion users. The model suggests that higher utilization may result in higher prices for WLD, so however small the signup payments are today, the value of WLD may grow significantly.
I can imagine the kinds of things that Orb operators might be saying to humans on the street to get people to give up their biometrics scans and join the World Network…
For anyone who isn’t deeply uncomfortable yet, you should be…
It’s important to remember that Tools for Humanity, the parent company behind World is a for-profit company. And the person behind this whole project is Sam Altman, one of the most prominent figures in the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Altman is a founder of OpenAI, which I believe all my readers know, is one of the leaders in building frontier AI models. OpenAI is well known for programming heavy bias into its AI models with strong political leanings.
There are red flags everywhere.
The technology, however, is legitimate. World’s blockchain technology leans heavily on two technologies:
The first enables secure and anonymous communication between multiple parties. The second enables identity verification without the transmission of sensitive data.
Multi-party communication (MPC) technology is used by some other blockchains. Zero-knowledge proofs are widely used in the industry and have been a major breakthrough in blockchain technology.
World uses its own tokenomics (i.e. the monetary policy programmed into a blockchain) to create a business model that it hopes will result in a profitable business.
The supply of Worldcoin is capped at 10 billion with 75% allocated to the community, and 25% split between investors and the team at Tools for Humanity. WLD coins are used to compensate Orb operators to collect biometric information from individuals.
To date, more than 11 million humans have been verified by Orbs and are now on the World Network. World’s strategy has typically been to launch its Orbs into developing countries with loose regulatory environments and unsuspecting humans that are more likely to be lured by the WLD tokens.
Source: World
How can World make money? For a blockchain project like this, there are a few obvious ways:
With all that said, I seriously doubt that World would be permitted to launch something like this in the U.S. market right now. There are simply too many privacy concerns. But Orbs are for sale now on pre-order and expected to ship in the second quarter of this year.
Orb | Source: World
I certainly won’t be buying one. And I’ll definitely never become an Orb operator.
So, it’s a digital wallet, a digital currency convertible to stablecoins, and the mass collection of sensitive biometric data, all led by an individual who has systematically programmed bias and false information into artificial intelligence models… it feels like a dangerous combination.
Not to mention that entities and individuals like Google, Reid Hoffman, and fraudster and “effective altruist” Sam Bankman-Fried are all investors.
Is that the kind of company you want holding your biometric data?
When we see these kinds of grandiose agendas marketed with soft color tones and smiling people on the website with magnanimous sounding language like “tools for humanity,” “financially inclusive,” “safe and secure,” “community for every human,” “globally inclusive identity,” and other virtue-signaling verbosity, it usually means trouble.
Aside from the obvious and serious privacy concerns and the potential abuse of the personal data of everyday people… if World were able to achieve the scale of a billion people by luring people in with a cryptocurrency, it would be in a powerful position.
Almost like a non-governmental organization with the kind of control that totalitarian factions within governments have been trying to achieve with implementations of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and a centrally controlled digital wallet.
My advice: run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.
Jeff
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
