Bankless - 180 - Worldcoin’s Sam Altman & Alex Blania on Crypto's Most Ambitious Project

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Disclaimer: This episode was recorded on May 14th, 2023 David is joined by Worldcoin Co-Founders, Alex Blania and Sam Altman. Alex is Worldcoin’s CEO and Sam is CEO of OpenAI. Both Co-founded Worldcoin in 2020. Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious crypto projects in the space. It’s Worldcoin’s philosophy that the best way to produce unique verifiable humanness is through human biometrics that map to our unique DNA. This is the most robust way to achieve sybil resistance. That is why Worldcoin created its silver Orb that scans user's eyeballs.  Why scan the eye? Is it safe? How is data stored? What’s Worldcoin’s crypto token distribution plan? All of these questions and much more answered in the episode.  ------ ✨DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-worldcoin  ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask   ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku    ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:15 Inception of Worldcoin Idea 8:35 How Sam & Alex Met  10:57 Why Scan Eyes  16:35 The Technology Behind the Orb  21:40 Worldcoin & Privacy  25:05 How Worldcoin Data Flows  28:35 Why Worldcoin is Needed 33:02 Proof of Personhood & Crypto  35:05 Worldcoin’s Distribution Plan  36:49 Worldcoin’s Complexity & Pressure  39:25 Sam’s Involvement with Worldcoin  39:47 Worldcoin & Optimism  42:00 Orb Operations  48:10 Worldcoin Roadmap  49:25 The Ups & Downs of Worldcoin  53:10 Reflecting on Worldcoin’s Critiques  56:10 What Does Worldcoin Need the Most?  56:50 Where Sam Stands on AI Alignment 59:20 Closing & Disclosures ----- RESOURCES Worldcoin Privacy Deep Dive https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive  Worldcoin https://worldcoin.org/  Alex Blania https://twitter.com/alexblania  Sam Altman https://twitter.com/sama   ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here:  https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

The immediate reaction is like it freaks you out, and you really need to understand the engineering behind it to understand that I think none of these concerns are actually grounded. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is David Hoffman, here without my co-host, Ryan Trott Adams, but we are here to help you become more bankless. Today on the show, we have two of the World Coin founders, Alex, Blania, and Sam,

Altman, and we are exploring the WorldCoin story, one of the more ambitious projects in the crypto space. And here's what you're going to learn in this episode. First, what is the idea behind WorldCoyne? What does it want to do for the world? Second, what is it actually inside of an orb? Is it safe to put your eye into? Third, WorldCoin's answer to how it's providing privacy to those who get their iris scanned and why some people are still skeptical about it. Fourth, what is WorldCoin's identity platform and what can it do for Sam Altman's other company, Open AI, and the incoming AI-enabled internet that humanity appears to just be waltzing into? Fifth, how WorldCoin plans to become a permissionless protocol, including the manufacturing and operating of the orbs themselves.

And sixth, lastly, we had to ask him what Sam Altman thinks of the AI alignment problem. We happen to be recording this podcast on Mother's Day, which means Ryan is in his human format and why he is not here for this episode. But we are still going to record a debrief episode for the bankless citizens out there for all the premium subscribers. So I will fill him in on all my thoughts about this episode and we'll talk a little bit more about the incoming AI revolution and the ways that the crypto story is a part of that. If you want that extra debrief episode, that is exclusively for bankless citizens, for people who subscribe to the premium RSS feed. If you would like that debrief episode, there's a link in the show notes so you can subscribe to bankless, get that premium

RSS feed where we post all of our extra bonus content, along with all the other perks that you get for being a part of the bankless nation. Like I said at the beginning, WorldCoin is one of the most ambitious projects in this space. There's a coin. There's a layer two. There's an identity protocol. There's a mobile app. And of course, there's this physical piece of hardware that's become infamously iconic to WorldCoin, that silver orb. It's WorldCoin's philosophy that the best way to produce unique, verifiable humanness is human biometrics. That's map to our unique DNA. This is the most robust way to achieve civil resistance. And that's why WorldCoin manifests in the physical world with this orb thing. Biometric scanners are hardware.

And that physical nature of the orb that you place your eye into to get scanned has these strong dystopian connotations that have triggered so many people. We of course talk about this dynamic directly with the WorldCoin founders, Alex and Sam, how they are dealing with this branding that WorldCoin has received and how that's impacted the company along the way. But nonetheless, the World Coin Project does seem to be growing in momentum. And it was a pleasure having Alex and Sam on the podcast today. I hope you enjoy this episode, Bankless Nation. But before we get there, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible, especially Cracken.

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check out Mantle at mantle.xy-Z and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Bankless Nation, I would like to introduce you to the co-founders of WorldCoin, Alex Blania and Sam Altman. Sam, Alex, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having us, David. This is going to be cool. Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation because the World Coin story arc

is an interesting one as it relates to both the crypto world and also especially now with the surgence and relevancy of AI in mainstream society. And so the timing of this episode, I think, is perfect. Sam, I think this story starts with you. Can you talk about just like the inception of the idea of WorldCoyn, where it came from, and what the aha moment about why we need

something like WorldCoin in the future? I started thinking initially that it would be quite powerful if you could have the biggest network, like the biggest financial and identity network imaginable. If you could have something truly global and sort of had no good ideas about how to do that, the first version we started talking about this was something like, well, what if we scan the palm of everybody on Earth? Or what if we did all these other? You know, like what if a lot of complicated ideas about how to verify identity?

But the reason I was excited about it is as the world. sort of heads towards powerful AI systems, I thought that if we could do something to eventually redistribute wealth through some sort of global UBI at scale or maybe even access to these systems, which would be the most important component of wealth someday, and also be able to verify unique humanness with a different lens on how to preserve privacy, that would be more important as sort of AI advanced. So I started thinking about this years ago, mostly driven by my work on Open AI, but also just belief that UBI was a cool thing to study anyway. And again, ideas were like deeply imperfect, but I knew something in the space I wanted to

explore. Met first Max and then Alex and thought Alex was super awesome. And I'll let Alex talk about how the ideas evolved since then because that part is really all credit to Alex. But that was how it started. Yeah. So it sounds like the early motivation for WorldCoin came from the idea that we could tackle two birds with one stone, one being UBI.

and one being identity, correct? And that was really like the elegance of the solution before there was actually a solution known. You kind of saw that you could do the same thing solving these two problems at the same time, correct? Yeah, I mean, to zoom out even more, it was like solve the problem of verified humanness. And that was really like,

that's what you need for a lot of other things like identity, like doing the global UBI. You know, if there's a non-fraudulent solution to that, that also is privacy preserving. That's kind of the goal. And maybe we could talk about where Alex and Sam met, What year was perhaps the idea of WorldCoin Incepted? And then when does Alex come into the story?

So we really started working in it in January 2020. So I was, I think Sam and Max started working on it already six months before. But then Max had a full-time job, Sam, obviously, as well. So when I joined, we brought the founding team and I really started working on it. Right before WorldCoin, I was in physics and theoretical physics and kind of how you used deep learning to predict AI systems. So not too close to crypto. And basically I was literally got an email from Max explaining with a white paper of

World Coin back then kind of the super early ideas as Sam just said like a lot of high level important ideas where this could go and and why it would matter. And I drove to San Francisco had a couple interviews with Max, then one with Sam that we spent more time together and then later became co-founder. That's kind of the quick story. Is there anything I'm missing Sam? That sounds right. So Alex, where were you in this phase of your life and what was your skill set that made this project relevant for you? Well, Max actually reached out to me as a software engineer. So right before Rollcoin, I was quite deep in theoretical physics. And I had a company before in high school that did vertical farming and actually did reasonably well, but the five years

before Rockwind was pretty much just physics. And I mean, obviously I read about Bitcoin super early on. I was early in that phase of the whole space, but I could not say that it was deep in crypto at all So it was really just, Max reached out. I think he reached out to many people at this point to start building this. And then we just, we explored the whole space. We took these early ideas that Sam mentioned. We went much deeper into them. And then later I became CEO and we just took it from there.

Was it obvious that WorldCoin was a crypto project from day one? I'll see. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Okay. And so had the aspirations, we need verifiable human identity. entity. You could also attach some UBI to that. But Sam, you talked about the prospects of you can

scan a palm, but that's not where World Coin has landed and landed on the iris. Can you talk about that choice? And then we can start to dive into the tech that's actually inside of the orb. So basically when I joined, there was this whole paper. It was not long. It was like three pages, a lot of high-level ideas. And as Sam mentioned, one of the big points of it was you basically need to solve civil resistance to be able to distribute a token to every human being. And why do you want to do that in the first place? Because it would incentive align a really, really large network to grow to all of humanity and kind of really bootstrap this huge financial network.

And then, of course, at some point, you could also distribute UBI through something like this. So you want to do that. You want to launch a token to all of humanity collectively. Then the first big thing you have to solve is what people in crypto call civil resistance. I'm sure you're quite familiar with that. And simply speaking, what that means is you, when human is, able to verify to a network that human is actually unique to the network. And why is that important? Because if that's not in place, what would happen is that bad actors would just

destroy the whole distribution of this incentive mechanism and this token and everything would break down. And that's something, as you know, David, that happens pretty frequently in crypto still today. And if you really want to scale it to all of humanity, it's even a much bigger topic. So it was pretty clear very early on that that's one of the biggest problems we have to tackle first. And then we went quite deep. So like, I mean, the whole founding team is pretty much we all met either at Caltech or Max Planz. We have all physics background. So we went through the whole space. And there's three big things you could do if you zoom out. There's K.YC, of course. So you basically just use the civil resistance of governments. That immediately

falls through because less than 50% of the world actually have these documents that you could verify digitally. So if you think about inclusivity, that just does not scale. While it would work super well in Europe and US, it just does not work globally. So that fell through immediately. And the second big kind of topic is what people call Web of Trust. So you basically try to build up a reputation graph. And that's a super elegant idea. It just never really worked or scaled. But actually think that's something that will come into RollCon later, so we can talk about that. And the last part is biometrics. So we actually built implementations of all three. We looked quite deep into K-YC, we look quite deep into Web of Trust, and then looked into biometrics itself. And before we

get into this specific modality, which, as you mentioned, we use Irish recognition, the first big thing you need to understand is all the things you use in your daily life. So your iPhone, for example. What that does is it reauthenticates you. So it basically realizes that David again tries to log in into the same phone. So there's an embedding stored on your phone of how you look like and then you try to sign in again. A neural network calculates this pretty much the same embedding again matches it and you can use your phone. So it's a one-to-one comparison and that's fairly easy to do other than fraud resistance. To solve proof of personhood however, you need to compare one user against everyone else. So you have a one-to-end comparison. And the big problem with that is you

just need much more entropy, so information about each user to make that work, because otherwise the fraud rate explodes exponentially and you actually hit a wall. So that's something that's very important to keep in mind. You actually don't have a constant fraud rate, but you literally hit a wall. And so things like face, just taking a face image doesn't have enough entropy, fingerprints doesn't have enough entropy, palm theoretically actually could have, but there was just no life implementation of this. Sorry, Alex, when you say not enough entropy, you mean not enough uniqueness.

Like there's just not enough uniqueness in someone's face to be able to prove verifiable humanness, correct? That's correct. At least if you image it with a normal phone camera. Okay. And so I'm assuming that you come to the conclusion that government IDs don't work. And it wouldn't be very native, the crypto ethos, to just use government ID as our identity system.

And then you also talked about the web of trust, which there are other web of trust models of civil resistance out there in the crypto world. They're all decently experimental. But I think what you're saying is the biometric solution towards establishing unique human identity is the most robust and the most tried and true model. And so that's how you've come to the conclusion of the iris. And I'm assuming talking about the entropy of the iris, you're going to give me a number that's like, and the iris is sufficiently entropic, correct?

Correct. That's correct. Okay. And that also, I think, presents why WorldPoint is the way that it is, why there is an orb. If it was just like United States ID or Nation State ID or if it was just a web of trust model, the World Coin project would be in a digital sphere only. But since we have to look and map that at the DNA of someone, we actually have to establish ourselves in the real world. That's why the orb exists. So can you talk about the technology in the orb and how it does

what his job is? Sure. So to just like quickly summarize what you just said, because I think it's another important piece is the world is about to do. change in a meaningful way, right? In that case, that neither digital content, so images or video, as well as intelligence are discriminator anymore of what it means to be a human. So you actually need to bridge to the real world, and I think that's the only way to actually solve the problem. So we started building the orb quite in the beginning. We went quite deep into that engineering. We literally had to build our own lens. Like, it's completely from the ground up custom. So what it does, it has a lot of sensors in the front

to just make sure whatever we see is an actually human being. So not a display and not an AI that tries to full us. And all of that compute happens locally. So first check, we look at a human being. Then second, the eye is imaged. And a unique iris code is calculated on the device, get signed by the device, and that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device.

And what's pretty cool and very important is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet through serial knowledge proofs. So what that means is that the only thing we or anyone else could prove is that a user has verified before yes or no. And so if you believe what we believe, you believe that something like this will have to happen, like something like Rollcoin will exist. And I think Rollcoin is the option to make it privacy preserving, open source, and decentralized. And so I know it sounds counterintuitive in the beginning because it uses by metrics, et cetera, et cetera. but you really have to look into engineering, understand

that I think this aligns really well with the values of the space. Certainly. And scanning an iris is, from what I understand, a known quantity. That's technology that we've had. And I was talking with a team member at the World Corrine Project, a DC builder, and he just told me about the technology in the orb. Most of the technology is actually making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb. And so it can scan your iris, and that's what it does.

But most of the technology is making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb in the process of getting their iris scanned. Can you talk about the layers of technology that are comprised in the orb to make this happen? Sure. So actually, I would not say it's most of it because you have, if you think about why the orb in the first place, like why did we have to build custom hardware, which is like it was not fun. Back then we were like four people in a small apartment in San Francisco. And coming up with the idea we need to build hardware devices and ship them around the world was really not fun. You actually solve two major problems, like one you just mentioned, which is,

fraud resistance. And that comes down to, one, showing something to the device that actually is not a human being. And two, just physically attacking the device itself. So you can just go to the processor and try to insert data streams that are actually not from imaging. So that's one. And then two is imaging resolution. So all the biometric imaging devices we tested back then, they actually also do not have enough to scale to all of humanity. They don't have enough resolution. So that's why we had to build our own lens and on imaging system and things like that. So this was also like a lot of work. So I think it's pretty equally split.

But to talk more about your question specifically is the orb has in front, it images multispectral. So what that means is you basically like you imagine multiple wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. So we have infrared. We have 3D time of flight and we have multiple wavelengths with an infrared spectrum. Just to make sure that whatever we see is an actually human being. So you could just show a display or even more complicated optical setups.

So this was quite some engineering to get there. And then the cool thing is everything happens locally on a device. So there are seven neural networks that in real time just do all of these checks. And that's important because privacy yet again. Is it accurate to say that the retina scan inside the orb is perhaps the most advanced retina scan technology that exists? Probably. We don't know whatever military has, but yeah, probably. Sure. Okay. And so just to really just drive this point,

home because I think this is really important. The goal of WorldCoin is to produce humanness, right? One human is one human in the world of WorldCoin. And this is especially important as the world of AI comes and those lines start to blur. We need to understand who is a true and human. And crypto has other identity projects, other civil resistance projects. But I think the point here that stands is that there's no identity proof of identity, proof of human project that is as civil resistant as biology, as DNA. And so the WorldCoin orb is meant to map onto an iris, and that is the strongest form of civil resistance that we have. And so the question I want to ask, and I think this kind of gets to where there are always concerns about the WorldCoin

project is that serializing humans is a double-edged sword. We in the crypto industry don't have a source, a source of truth of who is a unique human. But the history of serializing humans has not been a good one. And this has been like the cause of concern around the WorldCoin project is like the concern of privacy. So since you can scan someone's iris and prove that they are human, what's the story behind the privacy side of things? Like how does WorldCoin address the privacy issue? Well, first of all, we agree. Right. So that's why we build it the way we have built it. So the first, like, just this counterintuitive thing going on that of course you have biometrics and that first, the immediate reaction is like it freaks you out. And you really need to understand the

engineering behind it to understand that I think none of these concerns are actually grounded. And so within Rollcoigne, it actually comes down to three big things. The first one is that the biometric data is not stored. So basically the imaging happens locally on a device, the computation happens on the device. And the only thing that actually leaves the device is an iris code that gets signed by the orb. And then that's the thing that gets compared against all users. Then point number two, which is by far the most important one is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet with CIO knowledge proofs.

Which brings me to the third point is it's actually self-custodial setup. So when the user signs up, the user has a non-custodial wallet that generates then later these Cerell Knowledge Proofs to prove inclusion into a set of users. And that gives it quite extreme privacy. I don't think there's anything

else I'm aware of that could solve the same problem on that scale without any, like literally any privacy implications. And then the other thing is everything will be open source. The majority of the hardware is already open source. The firmware is getting released slowly because there's still some security concerns, but we're getting there. The whole setup will be fully decentralized. It's of course a challenge because you have hardware, but it's going to happen. So, yeah, it's, I it's actual rocket science. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money to build it the way we've built it. And so, yeah. Understanding the system at a high level, it does seem like there's so many moving parts. There's the hardware inside of the orb. There's the zero knowledge cryptography.

There's the mobile app. Can you just walk us through an example of someone goes and gets their iris scanned that turns into data and then that goes through a line of steps that turns into somebody being able to be verifiably logged into their WorldCoin app? Can you talk about just like how that data is carried, the processing of the data and the IRA scanner, the zero knowledge proves. Can you just do an N10 story for how this goes from an IRA scan to somebody's phone? I will keep it relatively high level, but we can go as technical as you want. So a user or a person is excited about Rolecoin, learns about it, downloads an app. It's called the World App right now. Right now it's the only client for WorldCoin, but many other

wallets will support it too as well. So, I mean, all of this is a protocol, so many other wallet should connect to it. But right now you download the WorldConn app and you click on a map, you see where the next orb is, you show up in front of this device. And then what happens when you verify is you click and verify now. You generate a key pair, actually two separate key pairs because you have one an Ethereum wallet and the second one is basically your identity wallet. So these are two separate key pairs that basically live on your phone. And then once you verify, you show that public identity key to the device, and that gets air-gapped just via camera to the device.

Then the orb does first the humanist check, then the uniqueness check, which means it images the eye, calculates a unique embedding out of this with a neural network, then signs that, and that's the only thing that actually leaves the device. Goes to a back end that later will be decentralized as well, but right now it goes to the backend,

uniqueness check happens, And then when the user uses World ID, the user does a proof of inclusion with zero knowledge that the user is actually, that public key is included into that set. And so what that enables you then to do is you can use that proof across many different ecosystems. So not only in Ethereum, it will also bridge all other chains, but then also in the Web 2. You can just use it to log in wherever you want without revealing any of your personal information. information. And then another thing that is important to mention is actually World ID is an identity protocol on top of that, on top of this idea of proof of personhood, that then lets developers

and other people attach verifiable credentials and things like that. So it's even more than justice. But yeah, that's the flow. And importantly, nowhere in the flow does WorldCoin ask for your name or data birth or address. Is that correct? No. The only time where this comes up is when you actually use a ramping solution because in the app, also in World App, there is a non-custody wallet and you can on-ramp through ramping providers and they ask for your name, but it's not us.

Right. So if you want to get money into the app, you will give the on-ramp provider your information, but WorldCoyn, the system does not require your name, date of birth, address or anything like this. Correct. Okay, cool. And so this provides us a place for unique humans to have a public address, right? And so that is the net output of this.

is like there is a new public address from the WorldCoin protocol, and that is because of the way that that address is derived, verifiably human. And I think, Sam, one of the reasons why you're a co-founder of WorldCoin and the vision behind this is that you would find it from the open AI side of things. And I think you hypothesize that the world will find it in the age of AI, that having a list of addresses of verifiable humans to be supremely useful. So why would that be useful in the next decade or century. Why do we need this in this coming era? Yeah, I think there will turn out to be other reasons besides the ones that I'll mention now. But when we think about these very powerful systems, these very powerful AIs that will exist in the world, I think the benefits from them,

access to them, governance of them, that belongs to real people. And I think it's very important that AI is being built as tools for people. Now, there are a lot of ways that we could think about doing this, but there's a lot of advantages we like about the World Coin solution. And as Alex just explained, I think although the privacy vision is different than what people have maybe traditionally thought about, I think it's one that's very compelling. And I think it's also one that is very fair. Like this is sort of the maximally inclusive system we can imagine. I also think that the ability to say I'm a human, I created this content, or I'm at least

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governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space, Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help in navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to Toku.com plus bankless or click the link in the description below. Alex, are there any other use cases that you see in the crypto space? Like, AirDrop farming is another one, but just like the distribution of tokens is muted by the fact that we don't have this proof of personhood. Is there any other crypto-native applications that you see? Oh, man. So many. We'll start with like crypto first, and then we can go a little bit broader. But I think

within crypto, one of the things that is an outcome of rock coin for me personally is that I travel the world, which I didn't do when I was in kind of grad school. I saw many different countries. I talked to so many different countries. I talked to so many users in Latin America, in Europe, and Africa, literally everywhere. And I think there's a lot of financial primitives that

technically the space can deliver. But right now it does not, for a couple different reasons. One is just U.X. But a really big one is you need reputation for many of these things. This whole idea of a credit score, basically, like an on-chain credit score, so you can do under-colleterized lending,

I think is a really big idea that hopefully is coming. And proof of personhood, generally when you just, like, you try to build your mental model what proof of person actually means, it's the foundation for identity. It's not identity. These are two different things, because identity means I'm a unique person

and this is my name, that's my date of birth, or that's my GitHub account. So proof of personhood is like the foundational building block to make all of these things happen. There's a couple of things here. Sam, most people know you from your work at Open AI and chat, CBT. Are there any specific or concrete paths that you see between integrating Open AI and WorldCorn? I think it's too early to talk about specifics there, but as we sort of watch this play out in the coming decade, hopefully it will reveal itself. Okay, so how does the actual distribution of the WorldCoyne token? And that's the name of the token,

correct, WorldCoyne? Yes. How does that actually get into people's hands in what is like the distribution plans. Like, how do I get WorldCoin and how much do I get? And what are the details behind that? Look, many of the details we can just not talk about here for the regulatory uncertainty in the United States. You're certainly aware of. So we'll not go too much in the details here, but

the broad mechanism is super easy. You download an app, you verify with an orb at some point, you get your proof of person out, and then you receive a weekly ownership in Rollcoigne. And the whole system is built in a way, so this can actually scale to billions of people, and it will remain like this over the coming decade or so.

So there's an incentive to getting your WorldCoin ID earlier, because then you start to get your distribution of the coins sooner? Well, I mean, you have like this whole reinforcing flywheel, right? It's not just about ROLD. I mean, at launch, Rolcoin is these three things that we talked about is Rolcoin, it's Rural ID, and then it's the World App. Of course, the RolDap is way less important for the grand scheme of things than the other two. But, I think one mental model you can have is World Coin is a protocol that is designed to scale itself to all of humanity,

which is something we've never seen because civil resistance was never there. So you have, it's unclear to me. If you go 10 years in the future, what will be more important? Will it actually be the token or a really deep world ID? Because we have never seen a token being held by 3 billion people, let's say.

Zooming out a little bit on the same thread, Alex. The World Coin project is a bunch of very ambitious moving parts. Really? So there's the orb, which is the hardware component, which is on its own frontier of hardware. There's the coin with its own frontier of distribution mechanism. There's the mobile app. Then there's like the actual boots on the ground scanning effort. Then there's the layer two, which we haven't even talked about, built on the OP stack. There's a ton of moving parts here. I probably missed a few. So maybe you could also like finish the list. But also once we're done finishing the list, what's it like managing a startup that requires like, and probably

an extreme level of excellency across so many of these domains. I mean, I think Sam can give a little bit of the high level answer after, but it certainly has been a crazy journey because I think what people always say in the beginning, we literally have been like four people. All of us came right of university, so we never worked anywhere. And now it's this big machine of 180 people across these different fields making this happen. And as you said, we have a quite sophisticated Harvard team. We have quite sophisticated protocol team, economics team, AI teams.

There's like so many things here, so many moving parts. So it definitely was quite a right. And then over time, it went from the early focus was hardware. That was the big thing to focus on and after that product. And right now it's pretty much operations. So it's going to become this big operational machine. I don't know, Sam, how was it for you? Yeah.

It's been very cool to watch how good the World Coin team has gotten at getting good new challenges. One of the things I love most about startups is, is watching people learn just how much they can get done and just how much they're capable of small teams in particular. And that's been very fun to see the World Coint team do all these things. I don't remember who I first heard this from, but there's like a sort of somewhat famous saying in startups. If you knew how hard it was going to be, you would never start. So it's important that you're like a little naive at the beginning. But you can accomplish it like smart, driven, aligned small groups of talented people can accomplish so much more than they.

realize because they're like their comparison is working in a big company or being in school or something like that. But even then, like the WorldCoin team is certainly outperformed expectations, even adjusted for that. Sam, what's your more like day-to-day involvement with the WorldCoin project? Maybe it's not day-to-day, but like where does your rubber meet the pavement with WorldCorn? Kind of whatever Alex needs. I try to, and the rest of this year. But what that looks like varies a lot and I try to just sort of help anywhere I can. But there's no sort of specific like, oh, this is like my area or my project. Okay. So Alex, component that I want to delve into is the layer two. This was actually announced not too long

ago that WorldCoin is building on the OP stack with optimism. Can you talk a little bit more about that choice, why that choice, why a layer two on Ethereum? And also like what does the actual protocol do for WorldCoyne? What's the actual mechanism inside of the whole project? Well, I mean, what we announced last week, what you're talking about is actually that the token itself will launch on OP Mainnet. OPM Mainnet. Okay. Yeah, so we did not announce the OPStag layer two. We will certainly do our own layer two at some point, but not launch. So this is going to come later in the year. Why optimism is we just spent so much time with the team like Liam, Carl, kind of the whole crew. And actually over the last couple months,

like so many things, they gave us so much feedback on the whole technology stack. And so we just decided, I think, two months ago that we have to intensify this and actually really start working together. So of course it starts with the migration, but it goes much deeper than that. So we will work together on identity primitives, then of course with base as well. So yeah, there's many things coming. So the simple implementation is just putting the WorldCoyne on optimism. That's where it starts. I'm assuming there's an additional infrastructure that WorldCoin will also use the optimism chain for. Yeah. So just like zooming out, what does it actually mean infrastructure for Alcoin? So World ID is completely separate because World ID is kind of if you abstracted

away, it's a miracle tree that sits on Ethereum Mainnet. And users then make an inclusion proof to that. And that then is bridging to different ecosystems. So that will not only be the case for Ethereum. Then again, as you just said, yes, the token will be an OP main net. And then later in the year, we will have our own layer two, which is in our case important for a bunch of reasons. I think also because just of that identity primitive and making it useful for a bunch of native applications. So key to the World Coin project is that everyone actually gets their iris scanned, which is funny if you think about it. It's like, if WorldCoin is successful, everyone's putting their eye into the orb. But I want to talk about the boots on

the ground effort as it's been so far. So like how many irises have been scanned? How many people have gotten their WorldCoin ID? And what's been the strategy behind producing that? Sure. So in total right now, it's 1.6 million, actually 1.7 million as of yesterday, 1.7 million total. All of that still with a very small operation for us, at least. So it's like it's right now, 210 devices. Most of the time it was about in 50, and that's mostly because we actually had to iterate on product. And scale really only matters once everything is launched.

So we are weeks away from launch. That's why we talk right now. And how was the strategy? Well, once we learned we had to build hardware, which was, again, a really painful insight. The next big question was, I think this was like the super early days when I also didn't know Sam super well. But back then it was okay, how many people would sign up?

once you show up with an orb on a public place was the first big question. Does this actually work? Can you generate enough throughput with one of those devices to actually scale to the billions? This was like our super early definition of what product market fit would mean. And so we built a prototype and it was literally me running through Berlin with these devices and kind of signing of users. And I remember back then Sandra, one of my colleagues, they did 70 sitems a day. And with that 70 signups a day, we raised the series A back then.

because if you take 70 synops a day, you multiply it by a week, then you arrive at three to, I mean, back then it was 300 to 500 to signups a week. That means that tens of thousands of devices would be enough to scale to the billions. So that's the, it was like one of the very surprising things. And then from there, this was like phase one, which was like super early proof of concept. Then two is we took it global. We had 15 devices that we just tried to deploy globally in across many different markets to understand if there's any fundamental roadblock that we are not aware of.

So we went from Tromsor, Norway, which was the capacitors blew up because it was so cold, to Nairobi, Kenya, to Latin America. And all of that in COVID. So it was quite a, it was quite a ride. We had these team members that traveled through five different countries to end up in the one we actually wanted to go to because of COVID. And then most recently, now we have opposite a much more professional team in that regard specifically. We focused on four markets, which is Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lisbon, Portugal, Nairobi, Kenya, and Bangalore and Daly, both in India. And these four, because these are kind of the perfect launch pads for the larger region. So if you want to build product, these are the four regions.

We believe you should actually start. So we basically parachute at product teams in all of these four locations. I try to travel a lot to them, and we're going to scale from there. How does one scale out to... You can't be employing every single individual operator of an orb to get to the world's population, correct? So how do you get the orb spread around the world into the hands of people who are operators? Are you employing every single orb operator? What's the strategy there?

No, and the much bigger part is it actually has to become a decentralized protocol, right? So that's not a strategy. So how it works is when you operate an orb, you get paid by the protocol, if every sign up you do. In short, and there's a lot of... The orb itself is an affiliate program? Well, in some sense, it's like there's a lot of incentive mechanisms behind it to actually kind of make it work, but that's where it's going to go. And then also the Rolkine Foundation is basically just setting the standard and then later other people will be able to produce their own hardware devices that connect to the protocol. So this is just a kind of stage one of this large process that it's going to take probably 10 years to get done to fully decentralize this.

But Rolkine Foundation sets the standard. Everyone can produce orbs. At some point, everyone will be able to operate them as well. and the protocol basically pays people. So that's the high-level abstraction. Interesting. Okay, so the orb actually turns into a commercial product that can be built by anyone who desires to participate,

and there's some sort of financial incentive coming from the protocol for orb manufacturers to manufacture orbs? Yeah, correct. Interesting. And then what are the learning lessons from the boots on the ground for the orb operators? Since they are not part of the actual company,

what does it like to manage these people? Oh, man, so many. it started with the very obvious ones. So now we have a team of people that worked at Airbnb and Uber and all of these companies. They brought a lot of experience of just how to operate these decentralized models. There's a lot around quality control and fraud detection and things like that, which we don't have to go super deep in. But then the other thing is just like get as much power to the user.

So put as much in the app as possible, educate the user as much as possible before to sign up. such as like there's a bunch of things there. But it certainly was a journey. And it still will be because it's 200 devices, not tens of thousands. So this is going to be the major thing for this year. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we've ever seen a project from humanity that has this kind of like spec.

Where are we, would you say, Alex, in this roadmap for WorldCoyne? So started in 2020, Sam said that the progress of WorldCoyne, the professionalism from WorldCoyne has exceeded expectations. So maybe we're a little bit further ahead in the roadmap. So where are we in the grand arc of the WorldCoin project and how much left is there to do. I'm going to give my answer then I'm actually curious about Sam's, but even though we worked on this now for a while, we are still extremely early. I mean, we are literally ahead of launch. That's why we talk right now. But there was just so much engineering that went into this and

so much building that had to go into this. So we were super early. And of course, everything we have seen so far is extremely promising. That's why we're here. So we have like 600,000 MAUs in the app. we at more than 40,000 users in a week with only 200 of those devices. There's like a lot of things that are super exciting. What do you think, Sam? We have three and a half orders of magnitude of growth in front of us. It's hard to say it's anything extremely early. Alex, I remember when the World Coin project debuted and WorldCoyne got absolutely

hazed by the crypto industry. And I think it was kind of an expected outcome. Like, hey, stick your iris in this orb and then you'll get some tokens. It was the spinal reflex, I think is pretty obvious. One thing I've noticed, however, is that it has attracted talent in ways that I haven't seen other projects. There's actually been two instances in my life that I've been in a social situation, a social setting, and somebody from the World Coin company pulls out an orb. People inside of WorldCoyne love the orbs. And so slowly, the WorldCoin team has continued to build, continue to iterate, attracted some talent,

attracted people that were not on the WorldCoin team, that are now on the WorldCoin team, that I've respected just as builders and thinkers and developers in this space. And so not only has the project of WorldCoin progressed on its own trajectory, but the perception around WorldCoin has changed. Can you just talk about that experience? So the initial, we actually didn't want to announce back then. It was a super annoying journalist leak that had us to react. So I was just imagined this, like, imagined this vividly of like, we were back then

a super small team. And because of COVID, I just lost my student visa. We were locked in this ridiculous situation. We were sitting in a small town called Erlangen in Germany. And on a Friday night, I think 11 p.m. I get this email from a Bloomberg reporter. It's like, okay, if you don't react, you're going to write about this. And everything blows up. It's like just, the internet melts. Sam Altman is launching this thing. And so there's 10 people in a small village in Germany trying to figure things out. It's like as early as it gets, basically. And of course it was incredibly hard. It was like managing the team through this

and then also managing the just like actually scaling the company, raising capital with that early pushback was super, super hard. But then, I mean, we just, as you said, I think we attracted incredible people, one of the best teams in the space for sure. But then not even within that industry,

I think broadly speaking, we have like incredible people here. Just like this flywheel start. happening. I've then people also outside of Rockin got excited about it. And I think, of course, AI helped a lot with this because people just understand why this matters so much and why it's important and that actually might be the solution to one of the biggest problems we face. And the recent weeks was just incredible because now we get so much excitement and people are hyped about it. What do you think, Sam? How was it for you? I've been through some of these

up and down cycles before, so I was less faced by it. But the level of like personal attacks and hatred was definitely high. I remember, like, logging into Twitter one day. I tried not to read a ton of Twitter, but I think it's a little bit unhealthy, but I logged in one day right after and just spent like a long time scrolling through whatever was saying. I was like, wow, this is like, these are quite personal attacks. Oh, no. Sam, do you also get that from the Open AI side of things? Yeah, Open AI has like, you know, super fans and super haters. So you kind of get used to both. Yeah. I think that there are certain people that, regardless of what you tell them about the tech inside of the orb and the zero knowledge cryptography that just

simply won't accept the privacy side of things. And they're super welcome never to sign up. Sure. Like I, you know, I think that's like really important to keep saying. Right. Yes. I talked about on a recent Bankless episode, the weekly roll-up that this episode was happening and that I got breakfast with the WorldCoin member and there was like an orb sitting on the table, just like a little ornament. It's kind of fun. And some people were like, oh, yeah, Bankless is talking to the WorldCoin people. Like, wow, like can't believe they're doing that, right? So some people are going to be this extreme case. That's for sure, but it's been amazing to me, and I don't even fully understand why, like, how much it feels like the kind of like overall meme has changed.

Yeah, the less extreme side of the crypto world seems to be keeping an open mind. More than that, it's like me, like an enthusiastic mind at this point, which is a big turnaround. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what would you say? It's like, I don't have the technical skills to actually be able to explain the separation of the privacy between, like, the identity and the app and all that stuff. there's great documentation that's very, very robust that listeners could go read and they get the technical explanation as to how the privacy is actually maintained.

But then I want to present the argument that there's also the world of unknown unknowns. Ultimately, the goal of WorldCoin is to scan everyone's irises. And while there is the technical explanation for why this is still secure, there's also just like, yeah, but you're still doing it. And so maybe we could reflect on that. Like, Alex, what would you say to that,

feedback or criticism? Well, as you could imagine, I have a lot of these conversations. And I think for 99% of these conversations, the answers usually just, they actually did not read the docs or they just did not try to understand what is happening. And so you can usually calm down people quite a bit, but just actually going through the details. And there's a much bigger headline, which is you should not have to trust us and you will not have to trust us, right? Because things already are open source. And like, that's a common pushback we get right now. I think it's totally fair that not everything yet is open source.

So this is obviously we move on that as fast as we can, but there's just like real-world trade-offs we have to work around. So, yeah, just don't trust us. Like look at the documentation, look at the code. If you find something you don't like, like literally our head of engineering was the head of engineering of C-Cash before. All right, just talk to us and we will figure things out, but I think we're in a pretty good place.

So if people are peaked by WorldCoyne as a result of this episode, what is WorldCoyne looking for? What does it need the most to help move the needle the most? What do you guys need? We literally hire across the spectrum, everything from product to AI. I mean, in our case, it's not like, it's not AGI. It's neural networks on edge to detect all kinds of fraud attacks. So it's a different kind of skill set, of course. But yeah, like literally across the spectrum, what you could imagine?

If you're super operationally talented, if you're technically talented, just reach out. And Sam, since I have you here really quickly, where do you stand on the AI alignment debate? Let me try to talk about it in three different ways. Number one, we need to make a lot more technical progress. We've laid out part of our roadmap for how we think we're going to solve it. But one unarguable thing is we need new techniques beyond our LHF. I think opening eye has been characterized. I don't characterize.

I don't understand how for saying that, oh, alignment is solved because we have RLHF, absolutely not. Like, we want to be super, super clear. So there's a ton of work to do there. I think the shape of it all is going to look fairly different than what people think in a vacuum. I think like with all really hard complex problems at the intersection of technology and society, like it's kind of hard to sit in an ivory tower and think it through all the way. We had really smart people doing that for a long time. Say they've made limited progress and a lot of the progress or assumed progress they thought they've made has turned out to be wrong because the technology went in a little bit different direction.

So we need to do more. more work. And I think the way we need to do that is contact with these systems as we develop them in contact with reality. Number two, I think once we have the technical ability to align a superintelligence, we then need a complex set of international regulatory agreements, cooperation between the lead and efforts. But we've got to make sure that we actually like have people implement this solution and don't have sort of, for lack of a better word, rogue efforts that say, okay, well, I can make a more powerful thing and I'm going to do it without paying the alignment tax or whatever that is.

And so there will need to be a very complex set of negotiations and agreements that happen. And we're trying to start laying the groundwork for that now. And then third is, I think we talk a lot, and this is, I'm glad we do, about the alignment problem. But what we talk less about is what about humans misusing this or even much weaker things than AGI to cause like wreck, great havoc or do great damage to society, um, systems. is like aligned with its operator, but doing something we don't want. So how are those rules of what the limits are going to get written and how are we going to enforce them on limiting intentional misuse? Awesome. Guys, Sam, Alex, thank you so much for joining me on Bankless today to walk through the

World Coin Project. And I'm excited to see what it produces in the future. Thanks a lot for having us. Thanks for having us, David. Guys, Bankless Nation, you know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.