If you’ve been in Farmers Plaza or Greenhills recently, you may have witnessed a bizarre sight: hundreds of Filipinos lined up, waiting for their eyes to be scanned by shiny steel spheres the size of basketballs. This is the Orb, and the organization operating them is called the World Foundation.
Globally, over 12 million people have been scanned by one of these Orbs over the last year, and in the Philippines the numbers are starting to climb. As of this writing, there are 7 locations around Metro Manila where a Filipino can visit an Orb, and there will likely be over a million completed eye scans within the next few months.
How much are your eyes worth?
You’re probably wondering why people are lining up at all. The answer, of course, is because there’s a monetary incentive to do so. As its name implies, Worldcoin is also a cryptocurrency with a floating market value currently in the ₱50 range. Every successful scan is rewarded with up to 70 Worldcoin tokens, which the customer can convert into pesos at any local exchange: GCash, PDAX, or CoinsPH.
So therein lies the rub: the throngs are lining up for the money, and at first glance, it does appear as if they are trading their biometric data in exchange for a measly ₱3,500. You are likely filled with questions, and the best way to answer most of them is to step back and talk about why Worldcoin and World Foundation exist in the first place.
An internet of bots
Back in 2020, a few years before ChatGPT changed the Internet forever, OpenAI chairman Sam Altman realized that there would soon be AI agents smart enough to be indistinguishable from humans online. He formed the World Foundation with cofounder Alex Blania to build out a solution that would allow humans to prove that they were, in fact, humans when interacting online.
Five years later and the situation is just as dire as Altman anticipated … in no small part due to his own successes at ChatGPT. Platforms like X and Facebook are littered with AI agents and their associated detritus, and the bots now outnumber the humans online by an order of magnitude. To be fair, the artifice of a modern bot is easy to unmask with enough conversation, but the fact that interaction of any kind is now necessary to ensure another user’s “humanity” is a problem in and of itself.
An ID for the world
Enter the World Foundation and its infamous Orb.
Upon scanning your iris, the Orb calculates a numeric representation of it called an IrisCode. Based on this IrisCode, it then generates a WorldID for you, and stores that on the blockchain. None of your actual iris data is saved or stored – only the assigned WorldID is – so there is no way to recreate your biometrics from the blockchain record. There is also no danger of your data being stolen via an attack on the World database, because no such repository exists. All the critical information is stored on your own device, fully encrypted, and secured by a PIN code or thumbprint.
Every time you need to prove that you are a real human, all you need to do is sign-in using your WorldID. The process is as seamless as signing in to a third-party app with your Google account, and no, you don’t need to rescan at an Orb location to do so.
As you can imagine, there are countless online scenarios where this is useful, everything from dating apps to online video game tournaments to bank verification. (As it happens, World’s biggest new partnerships include both the video game brand Razer, and the dating app Tinder.)
Note that having a WorldID only proves that you’re a human, but it doesn’t prove which specific human you are. Your name, contact information, or location, are all separate pieces of information that exist in other online repositories, like the aforementioned Razer, Tinder, or Google. Your WorldID is simply a supplementary data point that tells these platforms and other users one thing: you are not a bot.
A controversial initiative
With industry backlash swirling here in the Philippines, World Foundation’s continued survival is definitely not guaranteed. The biggest concern is usually privacy-related, although as described above, it’s the least worrisome since no personal data is ever stored by the organization. But misinformation is difficult to combat, and convenient Black Mirror references abound.
At the heart of the problem is, of course, the generous reward. At Worldcoin’s current exchange rate, the old adage “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” is ringing in many an ear. But the reward is not perpetual, and neither is the exchange rate. The size of the payout gets smaller over time, essentially rewarding early adopters, and the exchange rate is likely to fall as the circulating supply increases.
At some point, the payout becomes too small to be valuable. Ideally, if the World Foundation has done its job well, network effects should then take over and motivate the rest of humanity to visit an Orb purely to avoid being left out. The economics of the Worldcoin reward favor the “rest of the world,” and deprioritize industrialized nations, so if the WorldID eventually becomes the standard, it’s less likely that poorer countries will get locked out.
But will it become “the standard?” Even now, competing protocols are arising that will copy the World Foundation strategy and mix in their own ideas. In the realm of high-tech, the first-movers often end up paving the way for their own replacements. It is quite likely that we will be scanning many other body parts over the next few years, so whether you believe in any of this or not, my recommendation is that you at least keep an eye on it.
