Bringing One Billion People On Chain - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

my name is Jake Brookman I'm the founder and CEO of coin fund which is a crypto focused investment firm based in New York City and we've been making investments in the space since 2015 I'm here with my friend Remco from worldcoin I'm excited to ask him a bunch of questions about worldcoin um and I'll just say coin fund is an investor in tools for Humanity the company that created worldcoin uh back in 2021 so welcome Remco can you give a little bit of an intro for yourself yeah thank you very much it's amazing to be here so I'm Remco blumen I'm with the worldcoin foundation now where I'm leading kind of the R&D on um the protocol the cryptography behind the system and excited to talk more about what world coin is and what we do awesome um so as a first order of business I just want to talk about like the traction that worldcoin has achieved well first before maybe we get interraction can you tell us what worldcoin is sure let's let's start a little bit with the with the history of the project so it was founded by Sam Alman um actually quite a few years ago when he already foresaw this future where artificial artificial intelligence would be indistinguishable from human beings um which was really precient back then but now fortunately this is common knowledge and um we we see the problem so the two things that needed to happen is we needed to way to get to recognize human beings in the digital domain and we need to a a to prepare ourselves for the economic impact of having artificial general intelligence in our economy to tackle the latter the idea was created of kickstarting universal basic income in order to do Universal basic income you need to know who are the humans that are supposed to to be the recipients of these schemes so here you are at this hard problem of what is a human in the digital domain um and that that triggered the whole project of of like what's the best way to do this several options were considered in the end what we found is that using Iris based Biometrics is the only scalable fiable solid solution that can get you perfect privacy and inclusivity and Global uh Global reach so that's where we are we have this beautiful AR um device that you've seen and with that you can sign up into the system and be able to prove yourself anonymously to be a unique human being on chain awesome so now let's get into the traction piece um I I think it's sometimes lost on crypto people that we're all here to create Global mainstream adoption of blockchains and the products that are built upon them and actually worldcoin and uh if you don't count crypto exchanges is probably one of the most adopted blockchain products that exist in the world so can you tell us a little about about the metrics of that traction and why do you think worldcoin has been able to achieve that where you know many other projects have not yeah so some quick numbers out there um we have over 13 million users in the app we have almost 7 million of those verified human beings so of those of we're probably the only team that can guarantee you that our users are actually unique real human beings um we have the best civil protection that's the core thing so um what is it like 5 million monthly active users and I I don't know how many transactions at all a lot actually enough for us to start building our own uh our own chain to support all of that um yeah the thing that got me into World coin in the first place is the fact that we start from solving this real world problem and then bringing it back and actually it didn't even start out with blockchains it just naturally rolled out as the solution strategy hands were there uh and this approach really takes well like we have this concrete problem that we're solving and we're solving it live in the field this gets us a lot of traction great one of the features of worldcoin is a device that can measure your Biometrics in order to prove your humanity and prove the uniqueness of your humanity and of course one of the issues that has come up is the issue of privacy and to me like worldcoin is one of the most web 3 values compliant projects that's doing proof of humanity through a Biometrics implementation it feels like you guys have gone above and beyond to use all kinds of Frontier Technologies to ensure the privacy of users on the network and the Biometrics in the device so can you you talk a little bit about what are the strategies that worldcoin has absolutely has done to ensure privacy yeah this is um extremely important to us uh we we are very much aligned with becoming a building the most decentralized maximally privacy protecting system you could have for digital identity because we think it's important and we think it's the only way to succeed at the scale that we're aiming for um some of the things we've done from day one is the moment you sign up you create an anonymous account so every time you use your world ID to prove that you're a unique human being this is anonymous if you vote on a dow proposal as a one human one vote and the next day you vote on a different one uh not only don't you know who was the one voting you don't even know that those two votes came from the same person this is extremely important this is a level of privacy that doesn't exist at the moment in the identity space and this is one layer of our defense in depth strategy where at many points in the equation during the sign up we have similar strategies where we're either using zero knowledge proofs multiparty computation trusted Hardware the or itself is a Marvel of engineering it's all open source you can check it on GitHub it is an extremely sophisticated device just to make sure that a real human being is trying to sign up uh and all of this comes together in what in what in the end becomes a very elegant package that is focused on the user and here we're going back to this core core concept of user centrality it is the user that goes to the orb and has a selfie taken it is the user that goes to the NPC service and has their uniqueness proven it is the user that goes to the blockchain and has themselves added to the anonymous set and it is the user that initiates any transaction using keys that they hold in their wallets it is all self- custody so when when someone signs up to worldcoin they go through the process of getting scanned uh and then they also uh go into the world app what can users do on the world app today in World app today um at the moment we actually kept it deliberately simple because our target audience the the initial audience that we uh we're reaching are generally people that are new to defi new to crypto so we don't want to overwhelm them with all of the complexity and Chaos that can happen there so the wallet is deliberately simple World ID at the moment has a couple of Integrations where you can prove um you can verify your accounts you can verify that you're not a bot on um U social platforms we're building this out as we go along um we'll have a couple of very cool announcement in an event we'll be uh hosting mid October um so definitely check that out awesome um so let's talk about the worldcoin road map you mentioned uh that your guys are rolling out your own chain why does worldcoin need another yet another blockchain and what is so special about this blockchain I mean why do we need our own chain well one reason is simply because we're forced to right now we are on optimism and there we are consuming I think more than 60% of the block space and whenever we have an airdrop period going on the transaction cues are measured in days so we just need it to solve the scaling problem but it's also an incredible opportunity because we have this native concept of a human uh being in our infrastructure we can also build a an L2 um on the op stack part of the O part of the super chain ecosystem but an L2 that is human first and a unique thing we'll be launching with is that every human being will get a certain amount of block space allocated to them um and and they don't have to compete against Traders they don't have to compete against me they will just have an amount of transactions that they will be able to get through in this chain because of this human Centric nature that we're able to endow it with one of the really unique um I think approaches that worldcoin has taken compared to other identity projects is they have kind of a global rollout um can you tell us about like the scope of countries that World coin has covered and what are sort of your plans for the future oh man we we are everywhere um we're let's see I think we're at every continent except Antarctica at the moment and I'm sure that is being worked on uh we'll be launching in in three to five more markets in in Asia soon and we yeah we'll be we'll be growing rapidly from there is Singapore going to be one of those markets we're already active in Singapore you're already in Singapore we already in Singapore and like one of the really impressive things I think historically is that you were able to convert um I think a few million users but you only had a couple of hundred devices out in the world like how how many devices are out there today where are they where can people find them so there are 4,000 orbs that have been manufactured but most of them are are actually the orbs not the bottleneck this is what I thought in the beginning as well um turns out the bottleneck is just the logistics of getting orbs to the right locations finding the right locations um all right well as we wrap up the conversation where do you see worldcoin maybe like 5 years from now 10 years from now oh this 20 years from now man 10 years is a long time Horizon with ADI um coming this close but let's do five years what I think um we'll do as worldcoin is we will push hard for maximally privacy preserving online identity we're getting to this states where we need to get serious about verifiable credentials online and we're also getting at the states where Technologies like zero knowledge proes are maturing to an extent that you can take very complex um queries and be able to have them self- custody client side be proved we're basically in the next 5 years we'll get to a point where you as a human being can prove anything about yourself to a third party without revealing anything you don't want to reveal without having to rely um trust wise on any uh anyone besides the data that you just have in your own wallet thanks rco and for the people sitting in the audience like what is the best thing that they can do to engage the worldcoin project today what you can do if you're here now today is uh we have an AR Cafe um just outside and that is a great place to to meet and greet us um you can check our website world.org for all of the events that we are participating in and talking at um and yeah there you will find a good overview of what would be the best way to get in touch with us awesome thank you so much for telling us about worldcoin thank you so much for hosting us here all right