Fireside Chat: Worldcoin - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

Alex it's so great to see you here um too yes um so really the the first question I had was what is happening right now with worldcoin you've had so many announcements in the past few weeks uh a big one came out the other day please walk me through it well we we launched last July um we we worked around three and a half years until the launch and So currently it's all about scaling up so we just try to as you know we have a physical Hardware device that we need to deploy in countries and we just try to be as fast as we can with that because we think AI is coming really fast and so fundamentally the thesis was right but we just now need to be fast enough to execute on it so we we hire really fast we deploy really fast and just try to get there yes since you started what are the biggest changes that you've seen in both the crypto and AI worlds and how have you had to respond to them well we Let's see we started right before covid so Sam was already working on it for six months or so but kind of the the real kickoff was right before Co in March and back then I think there was like with in tech there was a huge disbelief for crypto at least within Silicon Valley I remember we talked to investors back then and everyone was just uh crypto's dead this was like right after the Ico bubble and since then of course we had uh a couple other ups and downs um and then the other thing is that back then uh AGI sounded like a like an actual joke I remember the the first slide for worldcoin back then was that AGI will happen in the next decade and crypto will scale to a billion people it was like two two of the main bullet points and people made fun about both um like all the major funds all the major investors and the cool thing is I think both turned out to be true I think AGI will probably happen in in less than 10 years and uh I think the scaling laws will continue the models will get smarter um and crypto will reach probably the first billion user sometime soon there's a lot of cool cool things happening in the space uh so that's yeah and can you give me a little bit of background on tools for Humanity versus world coin you know how what is what are the separations between the two and also do you see yourself in more the crypto space or AI sure so tools for hum is our Labs company uh as as you you probably are familiar with like all the all the big projects they have a foundation and they have a Labs entity and tools for humanties are labs and so uh Sam me all the investors we we said that tools for Humanity and then we spend out a nonprofit Foundation that has all the IP and and and and the tokens and in our case we're actually very very separated um and but but the foundation has a minimal scope of just making kind of building up the governance uh governing the tokens and uh just building out ecosystem versus tools for Humanity is an actual tech company we have 200 people um between San Francisco and Berlin we have uh yeah we we're in office so it's it's somewhat counter to I think how most crypto operates in many ways but um that's that's what we what we chose to do and with Sam Altman obviously he has a lot on his plate what's his involvement with tools for Humanity and worldcoin today so I mean we we talk at least once or couple times a week and it really depends on the the projects so he's he's involved with very key projects like leadership hiring fundraising um all these kinds of things uh does one ones with with with leadership members somewhat fre quently but of course open ey is the focus uh very busy time for him right now but but still it was uh it was very a learned a lot from him I think over the last couple years and in many ways it went very different than we thought and so now the now that the company's is ramping up I think there's many ways for him to be much more involved so it's going to be really exciting couple years you mentioned fundraising crypto Venture funding has picked up enormously in the past few months are you looking to go out and raising again no the the the thing is like with with a public token you suddenly have many new ways to to to finance and fundraise um so and we we're also not in a rush so we're we're not fundraising right now at least might change later in the year but definitely not currently you mentioned ups and downs earlier um you know there have been some regulatory hurdles uh for worldcoin uh we saw actions in Spain and Portugal and allegations that miners were allowed to sign up for World ID how are you responding to those a and what changes have you made to address that so there there's two big sets of regulatory hurdles one is around um just biometric data privacy regulators and there there's many things that are very different about the way how we approach things there's zero knowledge proes involved there's secure multiparty computation there's a lot of new things that many privacy Regulators have Ed of so it's a lot of just explaining things and explaining their approach and then the other one is the the actual crypto regulation right because we have a token we have a we have a non-cost wallet and So currently we we talk with pretty much every privacy regulator that we uh of the markets that we touch or enter and that was expected like we prepared for that for quite a while um because that's their job um on the on the crypto side I'm actually a little bit more worried I think mid mid to long term because there's just like some countries that still have a very aggressive stance against crypto um and so I think that's just something that is not specific to worldcoin but actually something that we Face quite a bit because we have a lot of users in these countries um so but but that that's the two two sets of involvements and then we of course we always work with regulators and and try to address concerns heads on and we see biometric information used in everyday things like airport security security or unlocking your iPhone why do you think there is this controversy around the orb and these irus scans why worldcoin in particular um I think there's a couple things I think for one the idea that we need to verify humanness on the internet and that that will be a core part of the internet I think is um people start seeing it start understanding it but I think it's going to become a much bigger topic and even the US elections might be a major inflection point for that because you will have superhuman AI systems that can uh convince people of of of uh certain political beliefs that U might influence democracies and and and things like that so I think it's going to be a a major move that will happen in the next two to 5 years so that is one I think that that just that learning has to build up two is I think um just Iris itself is is like somewhat feels uh feels very sensitive more more than other things um and and then the fact that we use the knowledge proofs and things like that it's just hard to understand it's counterintuitive like one why you need this how does it work why does it preserve my privacy there's there's a lot of things that I think we'll just need to take time to um to build up but then on the other hand um I remember one of our first worldcoin meetings Sam said the biggest risk for worldcoin is that people don't care because that's the thing that actually happens to most companies people just don't end up caring and I think at least we solve that problem so yeah and looking ahead I mean what kinds of Partnerships are you thinking about for worldcoin uh I know you guys have already teamed up with OCTA uh what areas are you eyeing for the future um all kinds of social social networks uh the big ones that you know um the big AI companies that you know there's going to come some exciting things will come there um and probably media I think media companies will become more and more interested in in in the topic and then of course within markets so there's like two sets of Partnerships one is around World ID so verifying human as on the internet and the other one is around the actual Financial part of the system so the wallet and and so there we partner with uh fintex and all the major regions we are in so latam in in Europe um so the these cor Ong goinging too yeah going off of that What markets are you eyeing um are you interested in expanding here in Dubai we are we I mean I think Dubai itself is super exciting um both because I think for example Vara the digital asset regulator here is very Progressive uh very understanding of the space um we we're very interested in Asia broadly so I'm actually flying to basically all major countries in Asia over the next two weeks um and and try to meet the regulators and and the major um political interested parties um so South Korea Japan Malaysia um all all of these I think are basically the frontier of crypto and digital assets so we we try to be there and and try to build up a presence but in in in our case we really it's like you basically have like a hard tech company and then you have an Airbnb or Uber like uh operation in parallel so it's it's very intensive so we we need to hire a lot of people and and scale up the team really fast I noticed the US didn't make your list how are you eyeing the the changing regulatory situation in the United States um I mean I think coinbase and others are fighting that fight I think for all of us and so what we decided to do given Sam is so high-profile is just to take a super cautious approach and we really stayed out of the US completely um with everything that touches the token everything that touches crypto until there's more Clarity around space so we will just really observe and see what happens and then react but you can still sign up for a world ID in the US right you can but it's a it's it's a fairly small operation compared to other countries so for example in in Argentina I think we have now five or 6% of the whole country we sign up 1% of Benz Iris a week um so it's going to be double digit percentage of the of the whole country towards the end of the year so you basically like at the end of the year you will have verification devices pretty much at every street corner um so the US is very very far from that yeah as you're thinking about that sort of expansion will you be making any changes to the orb itself yeah we um so it's actually really funny we launched with what we consider to be a prototype um so it's it's like not even the production device that is going to launch in summer um and then we will make them much smaller we will collaborate with many of the big tech companies that you know to build their own devices so we we really just Tred to set the standard and then hope that other tech companies adopt that standard um and so yeah a lot of changes we actually build up a new hardware lab right now in in San Francisco too oh very cool to build many more new things when can we expect to start sking I guess new and improved orbs out there well the ambitious plan is July um J yeah I think July July August the the first couple of them and then later in the year it's going to be at full scale nice and how are you thinking about data privacy and control over user dat user data uh I know you made a recent change where people can opt into uh deletion of their IRS numeric code y so we actually made two big changes um that we wanted to do since a while it was just really hard to actually engineer them but one is that now actually all data is self custodi by the user and then second is that even the uniqueness check so the uniqueness check is actually the really hard thing to do that's like something that phase ID cannot do or other systems cannot do that's just what actually a government is currently doing and that is now also running in a secure multiparty computation so there's not a single party that actually has all the information um which is something V also cared about quite a bit and so all of those changes are in life there's not a single party that has the data um and we use the knowledge proofs to fully decouple the account uh from from the actual Iris code so it's basically as private as it gets I think at this point like we as a team we could not link users and no one no one else like even even in the worst case if all systems get breached it would be impossible to to Really compromise privacy of users which is the which is the goal and that's that's cool right because like self- custody and all of those things that the space worked for so long are now finally the place where you can actually deploy them to millions of users yeah and are you doing anything else to I guess beef up security around the world ID signup process or you know data protection um a lot of operational things um so I think we discussed this I think two weeks ago but in many ways the operation looks very different than we thought it would uh meaning basically wherever we go and we put an orb we have a line of people people basically every country no matter how saturated and so it really is much more of just an operational problem of like getting getting this operation set up in the country and doing all kinds of ID checks security finding a nice location so it's it's very different than we expected back then we expected it would be very mobile and you we would have many many more devices and they would essentially travel around the city in the country um so it's we we just learn as we go yeah I mean what are the biggest challenges facing you right now is it you know building to scale you know issues over image what are you thinking about at night when you're trying to fall asleep it really is all only about scaleup and that's um but basically wherever we go we have a lot of users waiting for us so it is really just entering markets fast enough and then expanding fast enough within the market which is a lot of you need to we need a higher local teams get warehouses we need to build manufacturing lines so it's a it's a very hard tech effort uh which is not usual for the space I think um so that's that's number one number two is certainly just actually explaining over and over the project why it exists to both Regulators governments the media um I think that that's O2 probably any positive developments on the regulatory front as of late yeah totally um I think like one interesting I mean it literally went from theoretical physics into two years later talking to these um regulators and political parties it's a very new learning I think the the most interesting thing to me is how wide the spread is between how different governments behave so you have like extremely Progressive and Technology forward governments and you have extremely conservative and so but what I'm trying to say is that we interact with so many countries and so many governments that there's also a lot lot of very positive surprises we're like people are actually excited welcome us to the market work with us on regulation um and and understand everything immediately and others were the opposite is the case so it's just it's a it's a process and we we learn as we go I think there's actually many if I would go back in time one of the major things I would have done is I would have hired I think someone from Airbnb from the policy team much much earlier because I think many many of the things like how do certain European government governments react how do certain asent governments react that's something that only I think a handful of people have ever seen and I think if you try to run such an operation you need to get these people in really fast and that's what we I think underestimated what parts of the world do you find to have I guess the the friendlier Regulators um Asia Asia for sure um is both very Tech forward and what is an interesting just a very interesting fact is like we have all these PR firms it's ET and I think Japan and South Korea are the only two countries from everywhere we operate in which blockchain is actually a good thing um just both in the public and in in in the case of regulators and then you have markets like Singapore where the government is just super high power High Velocity um and so I think Asia is a very positive surpris more broadly um Germany actually so I'm I I grew up in Germany I think both the uh the Bavarian data protection authority the buff and all those Regulators work really well with us and are collaborative um Africa has a very interesting experience um so and with the market picking up how much are you paying attention to token price for worldcoin um I mean not not that much I think it it goes up it goes down it go sideways um I think it's much more driven by what the world does what the market does than what we do at this point in time so it's really just all operations scaling up building product that we think serves users and and other companies and what's hiring looking like for you right now are you actively going out there and recruiting and if so for what types of roles we we recruit extremely aggressive right now actually so we are now 200 people um between San Francisco and and Berlin mostly and then we have 30 40% remote um and we recruit all kinds of technical Talent like Hardware Engineers firmware Engineers we want to build a factory so all kinds of things around that a lot of operational roles so people from Airbnb Uber lift lime that actually have seen operations in these markets playing out so we try to get a lot of um expertise especially local markets in House of course gr regulatory product team so it's really the whole company is probably trying to double headcount or something over the next year or two that's great yeah and you mentioned this earlier you guys are very in person when it comes to your work culture and that is different for the crypto space uh why do you why do you have that attitude why are you wanting people to be together in office I think the so one it's something that Sam believed and so we just B on that and took that very serious early on even in Co I told you the story but we had this um we rented this office in a city called erlong and all the apartments and houses around which is in Germany so it's a small town in Germany and we flew everyone from San Francisco in Boston we flew all of them in this random German Town and we essentially worked through Co in in that office which was in probably made roll kind like five or six times faster that's actually what we when we when we we look at decision times um remote employees versus in personal employees there's like a one to five speed difference roughly so I think it's okay to work remote but you in our case we just allow it for extreme Specialists that are ic's so so managers we will not hire remote anymore for example and how are you thinking about decentral ization um with how you're structuring you know tools for Humanity the world coin project uh how does that play into your strategy 60 60% of all engineering efforts are around decentralization probably um and it's I mean you have different parts right you have you have the chain you have World ID you have the hardware devices um and so it's uniquely complicated in our case because we need to find other manufacturers and and then kind of find a way to actually onboard them onto the network Etc and make everything fully permissionless in the coming years so it's there's a lot of very new challenges that I think are very unique to us but it's exciting and it's really most of what we do so most of the research is actually on decentralizing the whole stack and because that's what will make it probably scale at 10 xra speed and in your early days uh Universal BAS B income came up a lot when it was connected to worldcoin and this seemed like part of your mission earlier on is that still the case so we we avoided talking about Ubi because it's very politically loaded but um there was like two big motivations for the project early on and one was AGI will happen and it will drastically impact the whole economy and we will need new infrastructure to handle that and deal with with that and we will need to try complet kind of radically new things um U Ubi might be one thing but it might also just be universal access to compute so it might be that every World coin user will have a certain token limit for free because that's how you actually create economic value um so and that's what we still believe is like basically how can we make this technological Evolution that will happen in the coming years how do we make it accessible to a much much much larer larger sphere of people that I think that's a deep part of the mission and that might be Universal compute might be Ubi at points um so yeah and what's your goal at the end of the day for worldcoin I mean is it to sign up as many people as possible is it to you know have strong Partnerships with the governments that are currently trying to I guess inhibit your development you know what does the future look like for you create the largest financial idty Network on the planet it's the it's the very simple it's the very simple goal and so it's all about scale um because we part of the initial feces was that crypto is now around so long and maybe the one big thing that is missing are actually Network effects that's like what we've seen in other Industries it's like maybe you just need to get in a country to 20 30 40 50% penetration for Innovation to drastically accelerate so it's like what we really talk about in leadership meetings is like how can we accelerate the whole adoption of the Space by 20 30 years and we think that is fundamentally around scale and now we have a lot of capital A lot of smart people to get there and so we hope that we can help with that and with Regulators you know you've had issues in different places what lessons have you learned I guess from butting heads in countries all over the world and how has that changed your approach to working with Regulators today I think the very simple takeaway is that usually when you have a startup you enter market and you have actually quite a room to grow until you get attention of the top of the government of countries but in our case because of Sam and open Ai and the whole Cloud around it we don't have the luxury so like I think the big learning is that before we enter a market actually approach the really the top the top Ministers of the country the Prime Minister explain them what the project is about um educate much more than usually startups what so like in many ways I think over and over again we had to learn that just given the whole thing is set up we cannot behave like startups usually would so many many of the classical startup advice I think doesn't apply to us when you're in a room with a regulator what's usually the biggest concern on their mind is it the crypto element is it the fact that you're getting your eyes scanned what are they concern concerned about most of the time there is really not most of the time because it is widely different for different markets right so there is um just trying to pick examples there there's there's uh there's African countries there's European country there there's even like India in which crypto itself is by far the biggest concern so everything if you just are attached to crypto um you you basically have fundamentally a problem um and for others it's just explain the project and around the Biometrics and how it is work so it's really it's a it's and then of course the other big learning that I had personally at least is that the governments are much more divided themselves right so um yeah there's there's no Universal answer it's it's very different and in the world of AI how do you envision World coin's role is it I guess part of a sort of system with checks and balance on the power of AI you know where does proof of personhood play into this I mean for one the the very simple um to explain piece of it is that there will be probably many parts of the internet in which we will need to verify humanus simply speaking because like Twitter is a very simple example like currently we have a lot of stupid bots on Twitter but eventually these will be superhuman systems that will be impossible to distinguish from anyone else and um the concern of them influencing elections and democracies is actually very real and so there's going to be like a at least we believe so there's going to be a societal call out for something like this to happen and and currently the only option we have are government IDs which is good for some parts of the world and probably not that good for other parts of the world both because the infrastructure doesn't exist or because it actually might limit the freedom of citizens and so we hope that we can help and be kind of an open source decentralized standard that that solves the problem so that's very easy to understand but then a lot of other things fall out of this right it's like um you have a problem of rhf so um how do you train these models how do you make sure that they actually uh follow not the political beliefs of San Francisco but of the whole world so um that that's something we talk about a lot second one is just Democratic input into uh how how big decisions are being made that's something Sam is very uh very obsessed with really and um and then universal access to compute and eventually Ubi so awesome thank you so much Alex it's great to catch up with you