Remco Bloemen I Worldcoin Announcement | Pragma Paris 2023

foreign [Music] thank you well it was great to see a brand new launch and up next is a whole new set of amazing announcements by Remco from worldcoin please welcome Remco on stage [Applause] hello everyone um let me put this on autoplay so quick recap of what is worldcoin we are here to create the largest financial and identity Network by giving its ownership to everyone now what do we need why do we need it um AGI is around the corner it is going to make it very hard to distinguish humans from machine generated content online it's going to disrupt wealth distribution and we need a solution to this such that the world becomes fair and inclusive again also we wanted to deliver on the original promise of D5 like where is the Global decentralized pension fund where is the insurance where are all these things why are we still stuck with these non-functional Primitives we have now what do we need to build this thing um in order to solve this problem we need a better concept of what a human being is on chain this is a big missing primitive and to solve this we created World app this is um this is an app that allows everyone to participate in the D5 ecosystem as a unique human being we've been running this for a while now and a big announcement we've recently passed more than 2 million users in our data sign up where are these users well they've been growing at a steady Pace we'll be ramping this up soon they are in more than 16 countries globally and we have more than half a million um what is this monthly active users so that's where we are currently with our project what is World ID World ID is a privacy preserving proof of personnel it it allows you in a self-sovereign fully Anonymous way to prove to all sorts of decentralized applications that you are a unique human being um this is an SDK that everyone can build on more on that later now how do we know that you are a unique human being for that we have these wonderful devices called orbs you can find some of them downstairs um what we found after exploring lots of options we looked into kyc we looked into fingerprints we looked into all sorts of ways you can verify that someone is a unique human being and in the end we concluded that none of them can feasibly scale to 10 billion people except for irises they can actually solve the birthday Paradox at that scale and if we do it right we can do this in a very privacy preserving way so for that we need the orb this is a hardware device that can um take your iris Biometrics make sure you're a real live human being and also someone trying to fraud the system and when all that checks out we can add your public key to the set of verified human beings now very important in all this is that it's private by Design so during the sign up only a minimal set of information is collected assume basically your Biometrics and your um your public key all the computation to turn the your iris images into um a uniqueness code is done on the orb itself they're all images don't leave the orb unless you opt into that you generate a public private key pair on your mobile phone that is yours and yours alone and when you use the system it generates a semaphore serial knowledge proof that you know the private key to a public key that is in the miracle tree that lives on chain without ever revealing which one it is so whatever public key you share during the sign up you will never reveal it when you actually use it this gives a very strong separation and makes you Anonymous each time you use it on chain and practice what this means is that let's say you want to do an airdrop and you want to hand out a token to every human being exactly once you can do this using our protocol by simply requesting a proof and making sure that um disproof reduces a thing called a nullifier kind of a random number and you just need to check that this nullifier hasn't appeared before now if you have a voting system for example you could also do one person one vote and the anonymity in the system is so strong that even if you do multiple rounds of voting you would not even be able to tell that two votes were made by the same user the anonymity is on each instance of use so with this primitive we've been touring around a bit and thanks to mostly eat Global we now have more than 350 projects building on it and more than a thousand developers building all sorts of interesting use cases that were not possible before because there was simply no reliable concept of a unique human being on chain so big shout out to eat globals because 95 of the projects came from each event at the last pragma in Lisbon we announced that we were migrating to the super chain I want to do a quick update on that so during the last couple of weeks we've been migrating our users over we think account abstraction is supported so all our users get a safe deployed on their behalf so in the past couple weeks we've deployed a couple hundred thousand I think six hundred thousand hypnosis saves in total on optimism which is um kind of nearly all of them and we learned a couple of important lessons along the way so if you looked at the gas fees on the optimism L2 recently you may have seen that they showed up at some point that first bike I apologize that's us we were just using the gas Oracle it was provided and basically blew up the blocks by all these deployments and spiked the gas price to almost as expensive as ethereum L1 now why did it happen the funny thing is that ethereum L1 has since pretty much 2017 been Supply limited all the blocks are full all the time and whenever the price whenever whenever demand Rises the gas fees just go up to basically back people off that can no longer afford it like there's dirt it's it's Supply limited so like no amount of fee you can offer will create more blog space on ethereum mainnet optimism is not yet there optimism right now doesn't have their blocks full um which means that under eip1559 the price will basically converge to near zero where it is most of the time until you start actively using it and then the price just shoots up immediately because of the exponential growth and there's no Natural Balance there's no equilibrium there that the supply side constraint instead it's demand limited like the price needs to go to zero and the blocks still aren't full yet so when you actually start filling them up you get effects like this the fix to this is simply to to establish a reasonable maximum fee and basically rate limit yourself when you're doing these things uh we did that on the 26th and then somewhere around the 30th I think someone else made the same mistake again so that's one lesson learned another interesting lesson is that everything costs the same on optimism except it is in much much cheaper L2 gas except one thing call data because it's a roll up so everything that goes in your transaction on a roll up in call data needs to be one to one sent to ethereum L1 optimism in Bedrock introduced some compression scheme and it helps a bit but in the end all url2 call data still becomes L1 core data so you're still paying L1 prices for all your call data so on ethereum the exchange rate between compute and call data was 16 gas per byte on optimism this ratio is wildly different you can be paying up to 10 000. L2 gas for each byte of call data and this depends on how the price is between optimism base fees and ethereum based fees relate to each other so it's also very unpredictable but generally it is at least between like let's say 300 and 10 000. that's a lot more budget to do fun things with so one of the tricks we came up with is that we use a lot of Serial knowledge proof Rod 16 of course and they have elliptic curve points there is this cute mathematical trick where an elliptic curve point which has an x and y coordinate you only store one coordinate and you use the mark to recover the other one this is very expensive does not make sense on L1 to do with ink solidity turns out in optimism it makes a lot of sense and it will save you a lot of gas if you do this so that's been our learning so far from our adventure of on optimism now another big thing that we've been working on is the whole world ID SDK the app and everything and after three years of building we've now officially launched the world ID SDK they're open source they're public everyone can now integrate or World ID app into their um the app to get all sorts of things that might need civil protection you can find it on id.worldcoin.org and I hope to see all of you build more wonderful things on top of our proof of personal protocol thank you [Applause]