New Delhi: Sam Altman, the project’s creator and CEO of OpenAI, introduced Worldcoin on Monday. It is an innovative cryptocurrency concept. The World ID, a ground-breaking idea described as a “digital Passport,” is central to this trailblazing endeavour. Its purpose is to establish the identity of its possessor as an actual human rather than an AI bot. An in-person iris scan utilising the ‘orb’, a particular silver ball about the size of a bowling ball, is required to receive a World ID. To confirm the person’s human identification, the orb scans their iris and creates their unique World ID.
The organisation known as Tools for humanity, with offices in Berlin and San Francisco, is the force behind Worldcoin. Following Monday’s Launch, the project set out on an ambitious aim to expand its ‘orbing’ operations to 35 cities across 20 nations, with a vast user base of 2 million from its beta phase. Early adopters in specific countries will receive the Worldcoin cryptocurrency token, WLD, as a lovely incentive.
The price of WLD has grown significantly since its launch. Early on Monday, trading on Binance, the biggest exchange in the world, saw the cryptocurrency reach on an amazing top price of $5.29. By 1000 GMT, the price had risen significantly from its starting point of $0.15 to $2.49. Data from Binance’s website show that the total trade volume was an astounding $25.1 million.
A key feature of Worldcoin is its utilisation of blockchain technology to store World IDs while preserving privacy and avoiding central control by any single entity. Co-founder Alex Blania emphasised the importance of this aspect during an interview with Reuters. He said that Worldcoin firmly believes that World IDs will play a vital role in the era of generative AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, which can produce eerily human-like language. These unique IDs are poised to serve as an effective differentiator between real individuals and AI bots in the vast expanse of the online world.
Sam Altman told Reuters that he thinks Worldcoin can have a big impact on how the economy is reshaped in the wake of generative AI. In his future worldview, AI will significantly improve human capacities, with significant economic ramifications. As an illustration, Altman uses the social welfare programme known as universal basic income (UBI), which grants everybody the right to recurrent payments.
With AI taking over many human jobs, Altman sees UBI as a potential solution to combat income inequality. Furthermore, World IDs can act as a potent tool in reducing fraud when implementing UBI, as only genuine human users can possess these IDs.
“People will be supercharged by AI, which will have massive economic implications. We think that we need to start experimenting with things so we can figure out what to do,” he said.
Altman sees Worldcoin as a crucial first step towards turning this vision into reality, even while he acknowledges that a society with UBI is most likely still in the far future and that the specifics of such a system are yet unknown. Worldcoin is helping to build a future in which the potential advantages of AI may be used to build a more just and inclusive society by building the foundation for a safe and trustworthy identity verification system.