July 24 (Reuters) – Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, launched on Monday.
The project’s primary offering is its World ID, an account that only real humans can have. To get the global ID, a customer signs up to have an iris scan in person with a silver ball roughly the size of a bowling ball. Once the orb’s iris scan verifies that a person is a real human, it creates a global identifier.
The company behind Worldcoin is Tools for Humanity, based in San Francisco and Berlin.
The project has 2 million users since its beta period, and with its launch on Monday, Worldcoin is expanding its “spin” operations to 35 cities in 20 countries. As an enticement, those who sign up in certain countries will receive WLD, the cryptocurrency token of Worldcoin.
Co-founder Alex Plania told Reuters that the cryptocurrency aspect of global identifiers is important because the cryptocurrency blockchain can store global identifiers in a way that maintains privacy and that no single entity can control or lock them down.
The project says global identifiers will be essential in an era of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, which produce remarkably human-like language. World identifiers can be used to tell the difference between real people and online AI bots.
Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it will list Worldcoin with the tentative opening of trading expected to be Monday at 0900 GMT.
Altman told Reuters that Worldcoin can also help address how the economy is being reshaped through generative AI.
“Artificial intelligence will supercharge people, which will have huge economic ramifications,” he said.
One example Altman likes is universal basic income, or UBI, a social benefit program usually run by governments where everyone is entitled to a payment. Since AI “will do more and more of the work that people are doing now,” Altman believes UBI can help combat income inequality. Since only real people can obtain global identifiers, they can be used to reduce fraud when deploying a UBI.
Altman said he believes a world with UBI will be “very far in the future” and he didn’t have a clear idea of which entity might be distributing the funds, but that Worldcoin is laying the groundwork for it to become a reality.
“We think we need to start experimenting with things so we can figure out what to do,” he said.
reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Gopi Babu. Editing by Kenneth Lee and Shri Navaratnam
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
[ad_2]