Fireside With Worldcoin's Alex Blania l KBW2024

we might be actually the tallest two guys in the room here well Alex thank you so much for joining us um I think it's your second time visiting Korea through War coin uh last year you were visiting your co-founder Sam and it was a huge Splash in Korea and the community was quite excited to see work coins these initiatives happening in Korea now uh maybe to start uh tell us a bit more about you know what is worldcoin you know what are you guys excited about well worldcoin uh we we started working on it four and a half years ago roughly and Sam uh started the company back then and the initial motivation was really that he believed that AI will uh continuously make progress over the coming years and decades and it will create all of those like amazing things uh progress in science technology um but also it will require a lot of change and a lot of new infrastructure and so um the the founding of the company the compan is actually called tools for Humanity so that's why I'm CEO of and worldcoin is the project of that and so the thinking behind behind it was what what kind of global infrastructure will we need to react to the change that AI will bring and one of the first problems that came came to mind back then was that we thought well we will have real time U video generation we will have like very very smart AI systems that can interact with us online and the whole internet will shift around that change because if you really think about it I think chbt was a very of course huge technical accomplishment but maybe even more importantly it was the passing of the touring test uh the first time which is actually very profound and um something computer scientists have been talking about for a long time and so with that change uh we believed that we will need a way to verify uh humanness reliably on the services that we care about in a way that is actually Anonymous and not reliable on government infrastructure because that will not work globally and it will um have all of negative side effects or potentially have and so we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort to build such a system uh that can be rolled out globally and we can use and rely on to verify humanness on the services we care about and that is World ID um and to actually launch such a system you needed to get it to scale because none of these systems really matter if they're rolled at a very small scale and for that reason uh we back then we talked to many of the early PayPal people and you might remember that some of you might remember that PayPal launched in the early days by giving out these uh $20 emails that you could send to your friends and they spent a large amount of their Venture funding on that kind of growth in initiative and so we were thinking well like if we find a technological solution to the proof of personal problem and we are able to launch a digital currency by giving ownership in it to eventually maybe every human uh on the planet but at least at the start uh tens of millions or hundreds of millions humans we could use that as a kind of bootstrapping mechanism to get the network to scale and to really get it going so basically just replicate what PayPal did um at a much much larger scale and that is what we did we launched last July and as many of you might remember I think in the in the early days um the reactions were somewhat um skeptical and painful but I think uh now the understanding of what AI is already doing and will be doing I think hopefully changed that perspective awesome uh we were both based in San Francisco and I was lucky enough uh you know a few years back about three years ago I was able to try the first orve uh and as a previously robotics engineer myself thought wow you know there's a a blockchain project that's actually building Hardware side of the business as well um and you know the identity piece on blockchain or even internet generally at bigger scale is one of the biggest challenge you know today we use passwords or a different type of authentication verification to prove that who I am to access internet but that's still not really direct onetoone connection and it's even harder problem in a decentralized network like blockchain to have that onchain identity to be connected to my identity and when I saw the or for the first time uh as the engineer myself I thought it's one of the most bruteforce way to solve that connection to happen and it's very simple but also makes sense and it works um and one of the question I had was like how this actually scale you know with this or and you guys targeting to be everywhere in the world globally every continent and you guys spending a lot of resources you know in here in Asia and across Africa and other parts of the world um you know could you tell us a bit more about how you guys been scaling this and some of the you know numbers around you know what size you guys are at today yeah um I think I I would give a practical answer to how we did it in the past but then I will also talk about how I think this will scate way further so I think um in the past so first of all we are now at I think 12 12 million users roughly um um around 6 million that verified with an actual orb um but that really distributed around uh every every continent and uh every every major region and that was that was actually the goal the goal is to World it out globally and so it's uh we're here in Asia uh Latin America Europe um and Africa so really tried to cover the world and in the past uh what we did is we just hired and worked with a lot of people that scaled such things in the past so um Uber Airbnb DH um these these kinds of people that ran Global operations before but what is interesting is like if you actually do the the math it's not that it's not that much scale um in terms of Hardware devices because I think at scale we will need around 50,000 devices alive to basically have have full Global coverage that is for Hardware devices not that much it will still cost billions of dollars to roll out but we are very committed to make that happen because we think the outcome is very very important and we will achieve the mission but um in the mid to long term I think what will make this uh go hypers scale is uh kind of true decentralization even of the hardware stack so what you will see relatively soon is you will see other manufacturers and other operating companies that uh will have that as a profitable business model to manufacture and roll out and I think that should potentiate the the scaling quite drastically at at the scale now you know I'm sure there are a lot of unexpected use cases or you know interesting creative use cases that you know War coin ecosystem has been participating uh anything you could highlight for us one of the one of the most interesting places I think for a lot of reasons and for crypto as a whole is probably Argentina um because I think in Argentina you you have a very specific economic um situation like you had hyperinflation now thankfully melee was able to reduce the inflation numbers um but in any case you have strong inflation but you have a working democracy and you have a a very progressive government and and because of that you have very high crypto adoption um and it's among the highest in the world and so we went super viral in the earlier this year so I think there's now 2 point something million users in Argentina and more specifically in Benz Iris over 50% of people that are somewhere between 18 or 69 have a world app wow I actually didn't know that so basically everyone has World up that you that is like like not completely out of TAC and so um that led to a lot of interesting things like now people actually starting it U for payments because you also have the QR uh API in Argentina is open but also a lot of actually just fun things that are very were very surprising so for example in the last two weeks we had a website go viral that was uh I am a human and they just voted on the most random things so like a soccer player that um had his last game where should where should the soccer player play these games and they had 30 40,000 votes a day um so you see a lot of these like unexpected things happening at that scale that's amazing um and you guys been putting a lot of efforts in Asia as well and especially in Korea uh what are some of the you know uh initiatives you guys are doing here and you know what are you looking forward to in the near future so we um we just signed anou with the Malaysian government and I think that was the that was the biggest one so we will actually roll out the infrastructure together with the government and um I think other than that that's why I'm here I think South Korea both South Korea and Japan are two of the most interesting markets for crypto as a whole and so I think we're still early we're hiring here trying to build out a team um but I think the next big push will be of course scaling Malaysia but then also scaling South Korea and Japan um anyway that so I think uh today when I was walking around conference I also met a lot of developers and Founders uh what are the best way for you know these Builders to participate in war coin uh ecosystem today um we actually have a lot of really exciting things launching in the next coming weeks that will essentially surface uh the large user base to developers so you can actually launch applications to the user base and I think that will be somewhat unprecedented because there's not that many things in crypto that have that much scale um so I think that's something to look out for we are launching our own L2 um broad chain that um well it allows free gas for all users that actually are verified but again much more importantly I think for developers it exposes you to a large user base and then of course I think world ID at its core will turn out to be increasingly more useful as it scales but um thinking about early use cases is always a good idea um in the earlier in the panel um you mentioned a bit about history of uh workcoin on how it started with you know Salman and you while you know Sam Elman is also you know working on open AI uh what are some of the you know visions that aligned with like AI initiative and also uh with the workcoin uh as a blockchain investor myself based in San Francisco obviously we run into a lot of AI Founders and friends and I actually noticed that the ultimate long-term vision of what future we want from the AI Community the method is different but it's actually very similar to what uh decentralized Network Founders are looking for um how do you see that Vision coming together where you know blockchain and AI one of the two of the biggest uh topics uh we have today in the tech industry I think fundamentally AI is a strong force of centralization and I think um blockchains are a strong force of decentralization and that's in a much more meaningful way than just the the technical statement I think uh the same will apply to the social implications the same will apply to um the kind of the governance implications of such technology so I think um in in its extreme I think both Technologies um are very synergetic I think um to be honest a lot of the a lot of the things that people talk about in terms of crypto and AI I never really get um they many of them don't make that much sense I I think like you shouldn't try to force that but rather see AI as the future we are all heading into and I think it's like it's like a little bit like the internet I think it very it will be very um ubiquitous it will be everywhere and I think it will influence the products we we build in crypto and it should um but I think artificially forcing things um is not a good idea awesome um as we wrap up uh the Five Star Chat uh what are some of the exciting you know future Mones of word coin or word chain uh you know word ID ecosystem that people should be looking out for well I think watch out for uh a big announcement coming in the coming weeks um will be the biggest one so far by quite a large margin and um other than that I think for us it's now all about scaling and roll out so I'm flying around the world constantly meeting with governments and uh developers and Builders and it's all about getting that number from 10 million to 100 million which I think we will be able to do that's awesome uh to close um you know why are you excited about you know Korean market Korean Community here uh you know why your team I think you guys are scaling the team base in Korea as well you know could you share a bit more about that yeah I think um Korea is one of the if not even the technology Hub of Asia um so I think it's very it's like a very very important Market by itself I think the government is very forward leaning and and uh which is also not always a given especially in our industry and so and there's a lot of actually already crypto users here um that that understand these products and so is from all three sides users government and overall adoption I think um Korea is very very important awesome as an early investor in workco myself you know I'm very excited to see more and more of a initiative by workcoin in Korea uh thank you so much Alex for joining me in KBW uh thank you everyone for joining our fir side chat thank you for having me [Music]