ETHKL24 | Fabian Bodensteiner, Worldcoin Europe GmbH| Prepare Humanity for the Age of AI

[Music] [Applause] so guys as you know 5:10 p.m. we actually have a live Q&A session with the OG vitalik butterin so please prepare your uh Q&A questions and keep them to 30 seconds can I see a show of hands how many of you are prepared questions already show of hands nobody has questions really okay this might be a concern later um well come you still have another hour to come up with them so please think of questions to ask uh when he comes on at 5:10 p.m. all right uh up next we have uh actually one of our sponsors so thank you very much will coin uh our gold sponsor for eth KL 2024 ladies and Gentlemen please give a round of applause for managing director of worldcoin Euro Fabian Borden Steiner to talk about prepare Humanity for the age of AI [Music] hello uh thank you for the great introduction and also uh thank you for the opportunity to talk here today about uh wellcoin um who am I so my name is um Fabian um as already mentioned I'm um managing director of work on Europe which is the European subsidiary of the worldcoin foundation um previously to that or I'm still am a founding team member of worldcoin so I had the opportunity to found the whole uh project together with Sam Alman and Alex roughly five years ago and um I'm personally from Germany my background is electrical engineering so was owning over the last couple of years Hardware engineering of this device uh Global and Global manufacturing preparing Humanity for AI is the title of my of today's presentation and I want to talk you through why this is at the core of world coins Mission and how we tackle that but let's maybe start by defining the the problem or the challenge that we addressing I think um when we look at like recent developments that are happening in the in the field of AI um there are for sure a lot of opportunities and there are a lot of challenges and I think there are a lot of parallels to when cars replaced horses like in the early 1900s when a lot of people were concerned that this eliminates too many jobs but I think overall introducing the car to society um also kind of brought a lot of opportunity today with like those developments I think what you see with those new technologies is a major productivity boost I was able to create those four Images within like 20 30 seconds and by typing in a prompt previously it would maybe have taken me like months right at the same time challenges that come with this technology is that it will be harder and harder for us to distinguish what kind of Agents on the web are humans and what agents on the web are artificials what social profiles are real humans and what social profiles are completely made up and this will impact a lot of aspects of existing business models existing platforms and one example that I brought here is the example of the business model of YouTube a lot of you might be familiar with how it works you as a Creator you get like a certain Revenue share YouTube is very generous I think they're still well well in the 40% of the revenue that they're sharing with the creators um but those kind of platforms will have major challenges in the future if they cannot differentiate what what part of the traffic is legit and what part of the traffic is made up even though those Pro profiles and behaviors might look perfectly human and at the moment those platforms can only tackle this issue or similar products by getting by Saving more and more data on their users by KY seeing more and more people just to kind of get like a better understanding what fraction of the users is like real versus madeup traffic and that is something that Sam and Alex like five years ago already kind of saw coming that if we don't do if we don't work on a different technology large companies are will be forced to get your passport information literally for every small small business model just to make sure that the fraud is under control and we don't think that this is like the way it should be so that is what we set course for over the last like five years or what Sam gave us as a task is that we should develop the largest identity and financial Network on the planet where it is while it's not relying on government issued IDs it is not actually an identity system it's a digital proof that you are a unique human being that you can then use to prove to platforms that this is the first time you create an account or this is the first time you claim an offer or is this the first time that you vote and why are we not relying on government initi IDs for this uniqueness signal it's just because he also said we should be as inclusive as possible nearly a billion people on the planet don't even have government issued IDs and they are well in between they're like a lot of like different qualities as well and this is what we call like this whole network we call like World ID that is the underlying identity protocol um that we started roughly 5 years ago so this is the foundation of everything that we are doing so we just hope that in the future with our technology if you are at a platform like LinkedIn Twitter or whatever that the way how you verify to the platform that you are unique human is not by giving up your passport information or by paying 8 us per month but by just providing this digital proof of personhood that is g that you received free of charge um because you're like part of this broader Network so this was like the task that Sam gave us uh when we kind of started the whole thing but of course it's not like super easy to to do this like one of the challenges for sure is that if you target such a broad audience the user Journey for the average person on the street needs to be like super super simple and why is that a challenge especially in crypto I think what we see is that a lot of the products are very very complicated to use um so we really started with the user Journey the user Journey as of today and it's actually exciting because we recently launched Malaysia as well so as of today like or a couple of weeks ago um you can download World app from the local app store uh this is our application you then find um you then um you then need to show up one time at a verification Point um there is one um like 10 like 8 kilometers from here for example in a in a mall uh where you show up and look for one time into like one of those devices by that you very ify that you're actually doing this for the very first time and the initial incentive for you for churning the network is that you then receive wellcoin tokens as a fair share of you also bringing value to the network under the hood obviously it's more complicated um so I already mentioned World ID is the identity protocol um then we needed to come up with a verification technology more to that later all of those two technologies like the custom flows and the technology the protocol needs a home in the beginning a flagship client which is what we call World app it's it's a crypto wallet but this is very much build like a consumer facing like product and we try to really cut out all the technical complexities that you usually see wellcoin as the as the token um of our project the initial incentive for people joining and then very recently we announced that we launch our own L2 the reason for that is like previously we run or at the moment we still running on op main net but the the challenge is that the scale that we are operating on there are like a lot of days where like 50 to 60% of the whole traffic of of op main net um and that is just not sustainable for us so that is why we're now launching also based on the op stack our own L2 where we can control scalability a little bit better I already mentioned it World ID is like the your passport to the Internet so it is we show this to the user as like a literally as a passport where you then can collect like stamps like a stamp that you're verified human being and we will expand what you can what kind of proofs you can collect there over time but even if you have like this great idea of like this Global identity uh protocol you still need to develop a technology that that enables you on a billion people scale to this to to actually tell at the one billionth user is this still the first time you try to join the project and what was very important for Sam was it also needs to be like as privacy preserving as possible so if you're not relying on government issued IDs you need to rely on um on Biometrics and within Biometrics there are certain things that that are also not very privacy preserving so I guess maybe some of you stay in a hotel tonight so you have in your your hotel room runs under your full name including your address the whole room will be full of your fingerprints and I'm pretty sure in the bathroom will be a few DNA samples so technically the hotel has like a perfect profile of you and those are the kind of biometric properties we don't want to rely on because that's like the perfect data set for reidentifying like each and every one of you so we needed to rely on a biometric set that you usually you're not leaving behind when you're like going through your day-to-day life and that's still has enough entropy to uh scale to billions and that is not changing over time by the way not the case for fingerprints if you're in very rural parts of the world where there's a lot of farming people just lose their fingerprints over time so we then landed at the iris the the the iris structure of a human being has enough entropy to scale to a billion people scale and then we looked into what kind of Technologies already exist existing Iris scanners out there in the market they try to answer a different question they they try to tell are you like the one of the 10 people that has access to this room and if the scan is not going quite right you just do it again and maybe the door keeps closed and if the scan matches like one of the time you can enter the room our technology needs to answer a different question we need to tell do we see you for the first time and that's even hard for a human and for that you need like crazy high resolution across the iris to get like sharp enough data to actually be able to do this and if your privacy preserving all of that computation needs to happen locally and as of today how this works is we capture like two images of the iris it will be locally encrypted with a user given key then it will be split in multiple pieces those multiple pieces will be sent to multiple independent parties uh nonprofit test test um to multip M nonprofit organizations and then those Snippets will be compared within those buckets so even if like one party kind of gets exposed there's never the full Iris code exposed um and uh yeah so there is not a single bucket of Iris codes but this this this this whole technical architecture needs to be there otherwise you you it's impossible for you to comply with um uh gdpr and it needs to be easy to operate so most Iris skers that you see out there look very surgical they look like super complicated to operate we want to scale to billions of people that means we have like hundreds of thousands of operators uh we cannot train everyone in a way that like an like complicated device would require so it needs to feel and be used like a consumer device and it needs to it look like it needs to have like a certain distinguish like form factor um maybe one thing like why is this like a chrome sphere like me as a German engineer when I joined the project I said let's make it like a black box it's cheap to manufacture um and uh much easier to engineer as well um then but but but what especially Sams and Alex's opinion was and it's it's very true is if you if you're at the beginning you don't have a strong brand you need to take the opportunity where you can own a color and the shape and there was no other company on the planet that was crazy enough to build a technical product in a spherical shape with chrome is outside color and that gave us like this very unique this gave us this very unique opportunity that as soon as you see a chrome orb now in most cities you think worldcoin um and that is very rare in Tech um and believe me like look at this picture it was a pain to engineer it um now after 5 years I would say it's okay um but it was definitely a way to go from something that looks like a cute little Robo head to this well integrated device how you see it as of today um then we thought about world ID as the foundational technology the identity protocol we developed the verification um technology the hardware but of course all of this also needs a home so we also realized that most of the most of our flows that we then have are so custom that we cannot rely on existing crypto wallets also because existing crypto wallets are just four years ago were too complicated to use for the average person in the street so we also had to come up build up our own team that builds like a consumer facing product check out World app I think we did a decent job on abstracting away most of the complexities you usually see in this industry but obviously like even if you like know have those three pieces in place World ID the verification technology and the consumer facing product why should someone join the network right similar to like when WhatsApp came out why should I download WhatsApp if none of my friends has it and that's why that's where we came in like with worldcoin as like the first use case that we that we um that we used like world the world ID Network for we are airdropping to each verified human being a token as a fair share of the network it's actually the majority of our tokens will be dropped to users um to create this initial Financial incentive for someone to ch um down the road we might use it for governance and further down the road we will use it as fuel for for World chain as well um this kind of just G gave us the opportunity within local um within local um markets to reach like a critical scale of like 60% for example between 80 and 65 in certain cities where we have like so much coverage across a certain age group that we can actually talk to businesses to integrate World ID to use proof of personhood within their business models and then create non- token-based incentives for someone to join because with tokens you can only grow in a certain type of customer like at a certain point in time you need to have like Integrations and different incentives maybe that a world IDE holder has access to a specific merge drop or to certain deals on an Ecom platform to kind of capture more and more of the local market with all those in place we launched globally like uh I think one and a half years ago at this point we have 6.

8 million verified World ID holders with 14 million World app downloads we're active in 5 continents in 39 countries and I can tell you as like a founding team member of this project this is just crazy um because we kind of started like Five Guys in San in the San Francisco apartment and then we were forced to Germany because of covid and now seeing those numbers is pretty amazing um also our growth trajectory is is very healthy um we're launching more and more markets um again Malaysia is just for me like personal like a little bit of a Focus right now it's already a third time this year that I'm here in KL uh we also signed like anou with the government here where we explore different topics um so just Malay I'm particularly excited about the Malaysian launch and see where this one goes and especially here in this market we are partnering with a company that most of the Malaysian um people here in this room might be well aware of which is my EG um so we have a very good local partner as well to make sure that we reach here or that we have like coverage we need and as we then this is just our ongoing kind of like operations especially in Asia and latam opening more and more of those countries exploring local business models seeing how we can take Partnerships to the next level um and just to wrap it up um prepare Humanity for AI for us is to come up with a technology that businesses can use as an alternative to KY seeing everyone to kind of save more and more data on their users but to rely on something that does not have the name doesn't have the age doesn't have like the nationality but they can maybe still um decrease the fraud on their platform and um one more thing like what I've talked today about is like the worldcoin until until now um so next week there is actually like a very very big um online and inperson event um check out live.co.uk Alex our CEO and Sam uh will give like a um and like the whole founding team will give give updates to to very different topics but we will announce a lot of changes a lot of changes and exciting announcements related to the hardware but also how we how we see identity moving forward um and it will not be just worldcoin and orbs and whatnot but there will be a lot of things added to our scope so so tune in it will be all live streamed or if you're in San Francisco apply that you can be in person will be very exciting so thank you for your attention a round of applause for Fabian bodensteiner managing director of worldcoin Europe thank you so much for that Insight um