Can Worldcoin Fix The Internet's 99% Bot Problem? | Co-Founder Alex Blania

The bots are winning. AI-generated spam, fake profiles, and deepfakes are turning the internet into a digital hall of mirrors. But what if there were a way to prove you're human, without sacrificing privacy? Worldcoin Co-Founder Alex Blania returns to Bankless to share a bold vision for addressing the online identity crisis. From 14 million users already “Orbed” to new integrations with dating apps and DeFi protocols, Worldcoin is evolving rapidly and facing significant questions. What happens when governments come knocking? And why does Alex think we’re heading toward internet-native citizenship? Whether you're curious about AI-proof identity or sceptical of eyeball scanning orbs, this conversation cuts deep. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/podcast/debrief-can-worldcoin-fix-the-internets-99-bot-problem-co-founder-alex-blania ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance 🦎COINGECKO API | REAL-TIME CRYPTO PRICE & MARKET DATA https://bankless.cc/coingecko ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:15 The Bot Problem 9:28 Orb Scaling Limiters 15:40 Miniapps & Orb Use Cases 23:31 World ID Integration Plans 31:02 Incentives to Get Orbed 35:55 Civil Resistance & Sybil Attacks 40:14 Privacy Concerns: Will You Get Tracked? 46:26 Global Regulation 54:56 The Future: Internet Citizenship 58:42 Closing Thoughts ------ RESOURCES Alex Blania https://x.com/alexblania World App https://worldcoin.org/world-app ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think the general headline is everything that we believe or work as a proof of human, we will also build ourselves and integrate into world ID. So we're not like orb maxes or anything. It's like if it really is about getting to scale and about being inclusive and about working in a world of increasingly powerful AI, I think the orb is actually the only way to get there.

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alex Blania is the co-founder of WorldCoin. Alex, welcome back to Bankless.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. Excited to talk. It's been two years.

• 0:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has been two years, almost exactly two years since we released an episode with you and Sam Altman. And I wanted to start by maybe asking you a question about this because two years later, I feel like my social media experience hasn't gotten better. It's actually gotten worse. Like the whole problem that you were talking about, which is like you won't be able to tell who's a human and who's a bot online. You were right about that.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  We're here.

• 0:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And it's gotten like really bad. And I feel like AI is making all of this so much worse. AI is pretty much passed the Turing test with respect to text. I can't tell who's a human and who's a bot. So let me ask you, two years later, there's a lot of traction for WorldCoin. We'll talk about some of the stats. But why hasn't WorldCoin fixed the bot problem online yet?

• 1:15Speaker 00

  I think it's a couple of things. One, first of all, I agree. I think the kind of the AI general bot problem on social and in general, I think is going to be a thing. But like even more importantly, I think we're still pretty early on that trajectory. Because I think if you now take like a very competent open source agentic system or something like that, which I think we will see probably later in the year, if not early next year, I think you will kind of another 10x whatever we experience right now.

• 1:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's going to get way worse.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Way, way worse. Meaning like, yeah, I think we're kind of heading to a place where way north of 99% of everything happening on the internet will be AI driven. And that's like, for like most things, I think that's going to be amazing. You know, it's going to be agents that do like all kinds of things for us. But I think for things like our social networks, these systems will be smarter than us. They will understand us better. They will know everything. And actually, there was like one very interesting paper that I think is like important to reference is like from the University of Zurich. I think two, three months ago, where the University of Zurich tried to change the opinion of subreddits with AI.

• 2:33David Hoffman?

  There are change my view subreddits. So there's a subreddit out there that's supposed to be like, here's an opinion. I challenge you, other readers, to change my view. And what happened is that people leveraged AI to provide compelling, but also oftentimes false answers.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:48David Hoffman?

  And not only were like they extremely effective, but one of the reasons why they were effective is because the bots had the time of day. They had the patience and the ability to just write out long responses and actually engage with the people. Where like typical change my view posts on that subreddit go mostly unanswered. And so they were, it was incredibly effective. I remember reading the story. It was incredibly effective at changing people's opinions.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Right. And they even targeted on the people that made the comments. So like they kind of the AI was kind of tuned on the individual of like, what's their political view? How they, what are the things they talked about before? So it's like, it's very targeted towards you and can change your opinion. And I think that's like, that is something that will be pretty scary to us, I think, in the coming years, where these systems will be smarter than us. They will know everything. They will be targeted to us and can change our opinion. And I think we will really need a proof of human for many of the things that we care about, like a social networks.

• 3:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So is that what you guys mean when you say way worse? Like it's going to get way worse? Cause the way I experience it right now, it's more of an annoyance. So what I see is a lot of slop, I would say, on my replies on social media.

• 4:00David Hoffman?

  And you kind of know it's AI.

• 4:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  You kind of do, or you're like, oh, that's like a low, actually, sometimes I don't, David. Sometimes I'm like-

• 4:07David Hoffman?

  Sometimes the reply guys are that dumb.

• 4:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot of times, honestly.

• 4:12David Hoffman?

  The Turing test is being passed at the 80 to 90 IQ level.

• 4:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, but so it's slop, it's annoying, it's almost like getting spam in my email. I feel like there could be some like auto filtering out. That feels annoying to me right now, but when you guys describe, you know, 10x worse, I guess maybe I'm at the picture of somebody I've developed like a long-term relationship with, someone that I know online and follow and maybe do business deals with. And it turns out like this person who I've been working with for the past year and interacting with and reading their blog post was actually a bot the entire time. That's a way I can see it becoming worse. And in addition to me being targeted, like just being fooled at that level for a long period of time, that's very, I don't even know if I can picture a world like that.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It will be accounts to just like build up reputation essentially. They just like post over time, interact with users over time. And will really look like, it will not be slop anymore because it will be very somewhat sophisticated answers.

• 5:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sophisticated slop, yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Sophisticated slop, yeah. So you will just not at all be able to distinguish anymore what is real and what is not. I think that's kind of the default we're currently heading into.

• 5:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like this begs the question, is Web 2 just cooked then? Like if Reddit, Twitter, all of these things are not equipped to manage bots. This is, they're just not built under that construct. So like if these bots actually get effective at what they do and sufficiently prolific, where I think you said 99%, like it sounds like Web 2 just can't operate under that environment.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  We know from some of these platforms, they're really racing to try to find a solution. And some of them we were talking to, so like it definitely is becoming top of mind. Of course, like the different platforms have different kinds of problems. For example, like Reddit is very, very far on the anonymity scale, where you basically by default interact with someone you don't know. And there's like, it's very comment heavy versus, for example, Snapchat is mostly your friends. And so like these two platforms have like very different shaped problems of what kind of AI will do to the platform. So in any case, I think like that moment is here now and I think it's accelerating. I think to your question of why is world not solving that yet is it's a matter of of scale,

• 6:35Speaker 00

  obviously. I think like we're like it's a very, very hard problem to to solve. And I think us being able to, I don't know, serve 90% of the users of Reddit, or even 20% of the users of Reddit is gonna it's gonna take some time. And we recently launched the US, which is going to be a key to that. And like, we're still only, we have 200 devices across the US. So it's like, it's pretty hard to verify yourself right now in the US. And so we just need to really, really ramp up operation, get to scale, and allow people across the US and then eventually across the world to to verify within like five minutes wherever you are. That's like a big, big, a big challenge for us right now.

• 7:17David Hoffman?

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• 8:02David Hoffman?

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• 9:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so you think some of the reason the world hasn't solved this yet is because you haven't scaled up yet? And I guess maybe, my question is, what are the bottlenecks to scale? Is it literally the number of orb hardware's that exist in the world and that are deployed? Is that the scale limiter? Are there some other scale limiters that you think of when you say, hey, we still have to scale it or bottlenecked?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually different things at different points in time. Like, for example, in the previous administration, we did not launch the US just because, given Sam is a co-founder and the stance of the SEC back then, we were just very, very cautious. And so, yeah, if we would have launched the US two years ago, we would have been at scale here already. But now that we're here, it's just a matter of actually just ramping up, scaling up. You need to, currently, we're actually manufacturing constrained. So currently, we just produce much more orbs that will start hitting us in September, end of September. So currently, we're hardware constrained. At some point, we will be deployment constrained.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  So you need an operations team to actually make deals with, I don't know, chains across the US. Like, maybe you want to have an orb in every Walmart or in every clothing store or every convenience store. And so, currently, we do a lot of that BD to get these devices in there and roll them out that way. So it's different things at different point in time. And then, we always go viral in different countries. And it's hard to predict. Like, currently, it's like, I think in Thailand, we are at a K factor of 1.7 or 1.8. So it's like, it's going pretty ballistic in Thailand. Early in the year, it was Argentina. Last year, it was Spain. So it's like, it's always.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  It's always different things. It's a pretty, it's a pretty complex network at this point.

• 11:06David Hoffman?

  The numbers that we can see out of World Chain are pretty impressive. For those that aren't paying attention, 1.5 million daily transactions on World Chain, coming from 20,000 to 30,000 daily active users today. It's fun to be able to go look at these numbers. Today, there's been over 31,000, 31,043 users. In regular crypto world, non-World Chain, non-World ID crypto world, when we see a daily active user number, we all kind of just like reject it, right? Because we cut that, we cut that number down by like 50 to 75%. So like, if you tell me some chain's got 30,000 users, I'm like, alright, you, you've got like 3,000 users at best. But on World Coin, on World Chain, this is different, right?

• 11:50David Hoffman?

  But is it one-to-one with a human? Like, really? Like, what does a World, World Chain daily active user actually mean? Is it actually a one-to-one relationship?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  So, well, technically, you could of course use the chain without your World ID, because the chain is just an Ethereum M2.

• 12:08David Hoffman?

  Chain is permissionless, okay, yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, the chain is, like, you could just like send transactions on there. What practically is happening, and that's, that's actually, that's a big focus for me this year, is like, what we, of course, like what we are building, has to be a protocol, and there have to be many other clients that you can get your World ID through, you can interact with World Chain with, and that's like practically just not the case. We're like, right now, pretty much all the usage happens through World App. Like, because that's what we launched with, and that just went viral, and like, that's the best product right now to kind of to verify with and use a World ID with. And so pretty much like everything that is happening on World Chain right now is a result of World App. And World App is just pretty large. It's like, it's now 30 million users in total,

• 12:53Speaker 00

  13, 14 million of which are verified. So it's like, it's a pretty large app. And so like the numbers you just quoted, they are pretty much 100% rolled up. And so like, these are real numbers. We know many of these is verified and most of them come through a single client. And these numbers will continue to go up throughout the rest of the year. But the big focus is ready to allow kind of many more clients and that kind of really turn into kind of true permissionless protocol, which is in our case, again, is like, is hard, but we will get there.

• 13:25David Hoffman?

  So how many people have you actually orb'd? And then how many of those people get converted to world chain transactors?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  So like 30 million have a account in the app. Then roughly half of that verify. So like, we're now at 14 million that are verified with an org.

• 13:43David Hoffman?

  14 million people have looked into the hole and gotten their eye scanned.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And then, yes, exactly. And, and then of these, we have nine to 10 million monthly actives. So that kind of transact and roll chain, do things. So that's the rough ratios.

• 14:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I am one of those users, I've not gotten verified, which David called getting orb'd. And getting verified means I think you have to, you have to go find one of these hardware orb devices. You have to stick your eyeball inside of it. It takes a picture.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  You don't have to stick your eyeball in it.

• 14:20David Hoffman?

  You're just looking into it, yeah.

• 14:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, really?

• 14:21David Hoffman?

  You're just looking into it.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, actually, I think it's a cooler experience than clear at the upper, for example, because we just invested much more into imaging, but like, it's, you just stand in front of it and it's just like taking, taking a picture. It's very, it's very fast.

• 14:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so.

• 14:36David Hoffman?

  You don't, you don't have to do like, you don't have to do like this.

• 14:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, see, that's what I, when I look at the device, when I look at the actual orb itself, I get a picture of like going to my optometrist. You know, you know those things where you ever get your cornea checked and they shoot a burst of air into your eyeball?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  No verse of air anywhere. No, you just stand in front of it. It's like, it's like at the airport, like clear or something, or even just the border control. And you just stand there and 20 seconds later, you're verified.

• 15:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I've got the app itself open. And this is the world app. One of the, you know, I see all the world IDs out there. So you said 30 million. I can see all the kind of the accounts. I'm playing with this right now. I see the world coin price. And then there's this section called mini apps. And this is kind of curious. This reminds me of like, you know, Apple, Apple Store or something like this. And I've got some top apps here. There's an app called Ad Money. There's an app called Uno Drop Wallet. And then I've got these, you know, gift card type apps. And then I've got this whole category, which is somewhat interesting called human only. So the idea, of course, with World Coin and the world app is basically, once I get verified, then you know, in a civil resistant way, the app does, the network does, the protocol

• 15:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  does, that I'm a human and I'm not a bot. Right? That's the whole thing that you're doing here. That's the entire point. And then you can create classes of apps like human only apps. Maybe, maybe just talk about this whole mini app idea. Is the goal for world to essentially create kind of an app store type of experience? And once you get people into the, the world app itself, then you get them into the app ecosystem? Is that, is that how you're going to market? What are all of these mini apps? And what's the strategy?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Well, so kind of the, at a 10,000 feet level, the idea, I think that I think back then we already discussed in two years ago, is that once you have that proof of human property and you're actually civil resistant, you can use the token to bootstrap that network to kind of critical scale. So let's say, I don't know, 100 million users is roughly what we think it will be. And so you're civil resistant. You use a kind of a token ad drop as an incentive to get the network going. And then you build out utility for the network as you go along. And so that was like the very, very early strategy. And as the, as the app got bigger and bigger, and we talked to a lot of developers,

• 16:58Speaker 00

  what they mostly asked for is like, how can they get this distribution? How can they get people to kind of ship their products to? And that was the starting point for mini apps. It's like, we have a lot of users in world app. We will not be able to serve every use case. And how do we just make it easy for devs to, to ship something to all these users? And I think what it will end up being is that I think in a, if we talk again in a year or so, is that you will have mini apps for more so like a launchpad for kind of startups, devs and kind of companies that are just getting started. And them using the distribution of world app to kind of get a product going.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  So for example, kind of something that is really picking up right now is, is micro lending. So there's many app called credit. I think there's still waitlist only, but there's a lot of lending apps that are picking up right now. And so they use the distribution. And then on the other side, you will have large companies that actually use world ID, the proof of human, you will probably have some of the social networks. You will have, we had an integration with, with Match Group, Tinder. And so like, yeah, I, I think these will be the two sides. You will have like apps with a large distribution themselves that use, use the proof of human, use world ID, use other features of the network. And then on the other side, you have developers that just need distribution and use mini apps for that.

• 18:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So let's talk about maybe the external. I want to come back to the internal with the kind of the mini apps. That's why I'm calling your app ecosystem, we'll call that the internal. The external is where they're using, you know, world, world ID outside in an external app. You mentioned Tinder, which is just like, are you telling me on like Tinder right now, there's like bots posing as like your, your next relationship? And like, that's a problem for Tinder? And Tinder can tap into world ID and basically prove some humans on the, on their app?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Well, the, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is, the, the longer answer is one, one thing that we, we, we believed in pretty early on is that like, It's not just that you will need to have a kind of a proof of human, but you will need to be able to prove things about yourself. So for example, like when you sign, when you verify for world ID, you actually get a signed face image that the orb captures and you have that on your phone and a self-custodial biometric package. And you can then use that to prove things to apps. So for example, you can, you can prove to Tinder that not only that you're verified human, but the kind of the individual that is actually shown on a profile picture is you.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Or you can, you can log into Zoom and I can, I can prove to you on Zoom that what you see right now is actually me because there's a real time comparison to my world ID package. And so these are all the things that are rolling out now. So it's like you, you will be able to do video calls. We call it product deep face. So you can prove yourself on video calls. You can prove your profile pictures on, on dating apps, for example, on social networks. So it's not just I'm a human, but also I am who I claim to be on Tinder. And then the next step will be you will be able to actually like prove specific actions. So like, I will be able to send you a message and be like, hey, on Tinder, you just asked me to meet in person.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Is that really you? And you have to prove like it prompts essentially like a face ID check on your phone to agree, yes, that was actually me and let's, let's meet, let's meet in person.

• 20:28David Hoffman?

  Is this a problem on Tinder?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  There's a big problem on Tinder, yeah. I like, there's a, there's like a, a big catfishing situation going on. We're like, there's AI, AI created, there's like AI created profiles all over the place. And they kind of catfish of like.

• 20:45David Hoffman?

  Information, like what are they trying to get from their targets?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Well, there's a whole range of things. It's like, it starts with simple things like phone numbers or gift cards to actually convince someone to go to a date. And then on the. Robberies to to kind of even worse things. So it's like it's it's a real thing.

• 21:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  The dating world wasn't complicated enough. You have to worry about this now.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  It is. It is a thing. It is a thing. And I think like the but but that is like in general. I think the general statement that human interaction on the Internet will will require a new version of trust. Like Zoom calls, like there's all these like news now of CFOs of companies getting scammed. Because like you had a Zoom call of the CEO calling the CFO and tell them to wire something. But it was actually a deep fake. So, yeah, so so dating gaming is another big one. So we integrated with with Razer, which you might know from the from the gaming hardware, to kind of bring World ID to to gaming, where bots are now obviously better than professional gamers and like most of these games.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  And if you play for hours a day and you train to be good at a certain game, and then you actually you play against an AI, that's that's really annoying. And there's a lot of money involved in the business, too. So it's like it's gaming, dating, social, all of those different industries that we currently get into.

• 22:12David Hoffman?

  Amazing. Yeah, so there's the potential MMO RPGs out there that can gate their app with World ID so that we have a humanly, a human verified only MMO RPG that that we can play.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Yes, correct.

• 22:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think for me, the two things like maybe stopping me from getting like fully arbed and going all the way here are like maybe the incentive to get arbed. But I would I would call this like like number one is there's there's some monetary incentive. You get world coins in order to do this. I think when I checked in my app, it's like $50 worth of world coins. Right? I'm like, well, I mean, if that was $5,000, all right.

• 22:52David Hoffman?

  If that was an airdrop size, yeah.

• 22:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, for me, $50 is not quite enough. But what can compensate for that is if I'm getting utility on the other side, right? And I don't yet know, in the mini app ecosystem you have internally to the world app, whether there's anything there that would provide me enough utility to go do that. The other piece that's kind of stopping me is like privacy. And that's a separate conversation. Let's stay on the utility piece. One thing to me that would probably push me over the finish line in terms of utility is if the world ID was like integrated in some of the commonly used social media apps that I use on a day to day. So I'm not a Tinder user. Bankless listeners will know. It's a long time since I've been in any of the dating games. So this is not a problem for me.

• 23:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  But on Instagram or Twitter, I mean Twitter, like X for me is just like if we had some sort of proof of humanity on X, then that would be a game changer. So I guess my question is, when you think about scale, you're thinking about the internal mini apps and then you're also thinking about these external apps. What's the plan to get world ID integrated into all pockets of the internet that a user like myself might locate to add utility that way?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Well, we're working really hard on that, just a short answer. And then comes the longer answer is like, I mean, a year ago, so two years ago, people just made fun of us. Three years ago, everyone made fun of us. Two years, like a little bit less people made fun of us. A year ago, people appreciated, it might be a thing, but it's not yet. And so like people didn't want to meet with us. And now suddenly like all the big companies want to meet us and figure something out. And it's still like on the on the cusp of things where like you have some of these social networks that really already have the problem, like X and Reddit, I think are two examples of that. Snapchat, not really yet. And so like it's still, it's still ramping up. But kind of my short answer is I, yeah, I would bet that we will be integrated with

• 24:51Speaker 00

  many of the services you care about in the next 12 to 24 months. I think then it will still not be the case that a large fraction of the users of these platforms use world ID. So it's going to be then a status thing of like you will have a human badge and maybe like you will get. You will ranked higher and kind of in the ranking, your comments will show up earlier, something like that. And it's then still going to take us time to kind of really get to, I don't know, 10, 20, 30, 40% of these platforms. But I think like the early, the actual integrations, I think are about to happen pretty soon for many of these platforms. So in my mind, all of this is an equation. You have like utility, which is like the integration first, they need to exist. And second is what does the product of these integrations actually look like?

• 25:36Speaker 00

  So for example, I think for people like us that are maybe in tech and use these products a lot, I think status will be the, will be actually the kind of the biggest pull initially. Like maybe you're able to do things that other people are not. You have like, you can prove things about yourself that other people cannot. So I think that's going to be a big pull. And so these product integrations, how they look in detail really matters. And then the third bucket is we need to bring down the friction for you to verify by a lot. So for example, like if you could imagine in Argentina and Buenos Aires, you can already do that. Like if you can imagine, let's say world ID would be integrated with X and then you get a human badge and whatever, like you get a kind of verified check mark and maybe

• 26:21Speaker 00

  your comments are ranked higher, your posts are ranked higher, something like that, some combination of different things. But then also you can verify by, with Uber essentially, like Uber Eats kind of situation where the device actually comes to your home, you get verified, you get your world ID and you don't even have to go anywhere. So like if the friction, and so like that, actually we do that with Rappi and Latam. So you can just literally order an orb via the Rappi app and get verified. And so like, there's many, many different things coming together. The friction needs to go down to zero. Integrations need to happen. The product integration needs to be great.

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let me ask a question about these platforms, the Web 2 platforms that you were talking about, that most users would love some sort of proof of humanity inside of today. What's their alternative to what you're doing with World, right? Is it basically like driver's license and passport, basically citizen ID, a lot of the AML KYC type stuff? Because that's from a practical user perspective on the internet today. That's the only other form of ID that seems to do something. And of course, that's like so easy to get. I mean, all of that information is just like everywhere. But I guess maybe you answer the question. What's the alternative to what you're doing with World for them?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  It would be KYC, but it would actually, I think the most promising approach would be you use the NFC-enabled passports. So like some of those passports have NFC chips in there where you get the actual signature and then you could deduplicate on that signature, for example. And we actually, we do that in World ID. So you can get a World ID already today with an NFC-enabled passport. Just so we make it easier for these platforms to like scale out the users and it's not just ORP gated. Meaning like, I think the general headline is everything that we believe will work as a proof of human, we will also build ourselves and integrate into World ID. So we're not like ORP maxes or anything.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  It's like, it's just that if it really is about getting to scale and about being inclusive and about working in a world of increasingly powerful AI, I think the ORP is actually the only way to get there after thinking about this problem for like a very, very long time. So I think there will not really be a way around this or something that looks a lot like that. It's like there's also now competitors that are emerging. A lot of companies raising money to kind of build a world competitor that build different kinds of hardware that are palm-based, face-based. Like, I think you will see different offerings in that direction. But the only alternative would be government ID's that are, I think the privacy implications are

• 29:10Speaker 00

  conceptually really, really bad. Especially if you talk about social networks. Because I think like the freedom of speech, the anonymity, protecting all of those rights, I think is so critical. So I think it would be a horrible outcome for that. And Then yeah, I could go much more technical, but I think that's the high level.

• 29:31David Hoffman?

  I want to turn the conversation to the incentives because like Ryan said, you get about $50 at the current prices of World Coin. You call it World Coin?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Well, we need a bull market.

• 29:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so I would imagine because one of the big reasons why people are getting on boarded into World ID is because of the incentives. I don't know if you have any like intuition or notion about like, is that 50% of the people getting orb'd? Is it less than that, more than that? I don't know if you have any sort of idea about that?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  It is more than 50%, I would say.

• 30:05David Hoffman?

  And they're coming for the incentives?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that's.

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 30:10David Hoffman?

  And that was always part of the plan. The plan was to like.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was part of the, yes, I think that's that is the plan. I think it's going to remain like that for probably another year is my guess. Where like now you actually already start many, like some mini apps pull users in, some integrations pull users in. Like you already start seeing that transition happening, but I think until you see that being the case for like, I don't know. Everyone that signs up for World because like, let's say World is integrated into X and that's now kind of a core user flow in X. I think that's going to take another year at least.

• 30:42David Hoffman?

  Right, right. And then in addition to that, there's also incentives to use some of the applications. And I think with Morpho, Morpho is a, is deployed on the world chain. And so you can go use Morpho, but you typically with DeFi incentives, they come like they're TVL based, right? So, you know, if you deposit $10,000 into Morpho, you'll get some amount of incentives. And then if you deposit $100,000, well, you get, you'll get 10 times the incentives. But that's also not how it works on world chain because you guys have world ID. And so you guys are able to deploy world incentives on Morpho on an individual account basis, which is pretty cool.

• 31:23David Hoffman?

  Can you talk about just like, because you have the world ID, talk about how you can leverage your guys' treasury, the world incentives differently than anyone else can? Because you have this feature of proof of personhood. How are you guys getting creative with incentives?

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So first of all, like the Morpho mini app is actually a good idea, is a good example where like, I think on base, there's around 3,000 depositors of Morpho. And on world, on world chain, it's like 30, 30,000, 30,500, something like that. So it's, and essentially what the incentive is that Morpho is giving is. And I think the foundation is a combination of both is the first $250 that you deposit, kind of you get additional yield and we can do that because we have world ID. So it's not, it's not just whale based in some sense. And so of course, it's a different user group. It's like, it's everyday people that deposit their money into our more familiar app versus like some mega whales, but I think that's, that's, that's why we're building this. I think that's cool.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  And other than that, like other than the actual core kind of token incentive, like the core idea of like, eventually every human will have some amount of world coin. We actually don't do that much. We give rewards to mini app devs that are kind of somewhat early, like we have a mini app dev fund, which we support them with, but, but that's pretty much it.

• 32:44David Hoffman?

  What is the size of the actual like war chest that you guys have? How much do you have of world coin to actually hand out for incentives?

• 32:52Speaker 00

  The overall tokenomics was right from the beginning. That's like pretty much 75% will go to users.

• 32:58David Hoffman?

  Okay. And it's essentially 70% has been the war chest.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is, that is what we're gonna, what are you gonna use it for? Like it's again, most like pretty much all of that is going to be the kind of the core world coin airdrop. So the simply, eventually every human will have some amount of these tokens. So we actually don't freely just play with these tokens, but rather they're dedicated to when you sign up, you get some amount of world coin and we will follow that kind of curve. So, and I think that a treasury of, of the foundation at this point, yeah, a couple, couple hundred million WLD.

• 33:32David Hoffman?

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah, well, at a $10 billion fully delegated valuation, the war chest is like pretty damn good. One of the better ones you've ever seen.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  Which like, the reason why I'm getting here is because this is also a bug bounty of the Sybil strength of world ID. Right. And so if there is this much money to be given out, certainly people are trying to figure out how they can

• 33:56Speaker 00

  They are.

• 33:56David Hoffman?

  get their hands on world coins that, you know, just not just theirs, but everyone else's that they can get their hands on. So how, how is that going? How has the strength of world ID's Sybil resistance held up? Are people poking through? How are you managing that? Tell us about this.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  So actually, like, the last time we spoke two years ago, this was one of my biggest concerns. I was like, okay, if this, if the launch goes amazingly well, this is gonna be, as you just said, like, a multi-billion dollar bug bounty on a new hardware platform. We actually did not see, we saw a lot of attacks, but the system held up against everything so far. So that's, that was like, very, very, very good.

• 34:36David Hoffman?

  When you say the system, what does that mean? Does that mean the orb? Does that mean the chain, the world ID app?

• 34:40Speaker 00

  I mean, so like, I think the biggest one was the orb, definitely. Because like, that is, that is where you actually could, could fool the entire thing. Like, if you get-

• 34:49David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, if the orb gets cracked, then everything falls apart, right?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Still, like, the orbs would be rate limited. So meaning like, you cannot, so like, even if you get one orb and you attack that orb and you succeed with that, it's not that you can just like, mint a billion WLD or something. And like, there is a, there's a spoof detection system going on at any point in time, where if an orb behaves not the way that it normally would, like, just much more synapse, or it doesn't move, or things like that, like, that will be detected. And the cool thing is, like, actually, all of this will be in the public pretty soon. So you will have public watchdogs of people that can monitor the entire orb network and can spot if something is, is not working the way it's supposed to. But yeah, like, we had a lot of people try to attack the orb.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  We did not see any kind of meaningful breaches.

• 35:40David Hoffman?

  Okay, orb is still holding strong.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Still, still holding strong, yeah.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  Okay, where have you seen things break down? And how bad have those breakdowns been?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  The biggest one was, like, honestly, world app. I think world app, then, before, at some point, we were on OP mainnet before we launched world chain. And back then, the combination of, like, a lot of user traffic and kind of-

• 36:07Speaker 00

  A pretty high market sentiment and they're all like led to kind of chain congestion back then. And so like transactions would not go through, which was a pretty annoying experience on rollout. That was like a big part of why we actually launched our own chain, just because I think we have been like 80% of the block space of OP mainnet back then, which was bad for us and bad for everyone else in OP mainnet. So we kind of were forced to launch our own chain back then. Uh, that was problem number one. Problem two is like world app in general. I think we now it's pretty stable, but in the early days of the launch, we had outages and, and like, again, just bad UX around that. These would be like the main, the main two, like the, the chain itself and the app.

• 36:50David Hoffman?

  So if you had to give yourself a grade, if you had to go back two years and tell yourself, prove yourself, hey, here's how we did. We got, we got A minus, we got a B plus, we got an A plus. What would you, what would you give yourself versus your expectations two years ago?

• 37:02Speaker 00

  I think, I think, I think it depends on the, do you want me now to do a grading exercise on the company? I think, let me think. So I would say on, I think on theses I would give us an A plus. I think like overall strategy and theses I think was an A plus or like, I think, again, back then everyone was giving us shit. Everyone was making fun of us and I think like the core idea was actually pretty good and made sense. And I think the timing was pretty good. So like, I think like thesis strategy, pretty good. I think on hardware engineering, I would give us an A. I think like we could have been faster, but like everything is working. So like the whole like biometric pipeline, I would give us an A. So all of that system is working pretty well.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  On operation, I would give us a B to C, actually. I think we could have been much faster in the overall rollout. Uh, so it was a lot to learn there and like dealing with privacy regulators, dealing with governments. Like it was like a lot of, a lot of stuff back then to go through. Overall engineering, like an A to B.

• 38:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about maybe the other thing that's holding me back from getting my eye. Photograph by the orb.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, orb'd.

• 38:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Orb'd, getting orb'd. The thing that's holding me back properly is privacy. And it's like, truth be told, I haven't done an exhaustive deep dive on world privacy, right? But this is important biometric data. I mean, there's all sorts of ways this has gone wrong in the past when, you know, data has been shared. I mean, like, people have recently, recent memory, is this the past year, 23andMe? Where's that data? Who owns that? I mean, like, who knows, right? Even look at something like ChatGPT. And you're like, this is not the self-sovereign data privacy that like I want as a crypto user, basically, right?

• 38:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, internal employees, under certain circumstances with controls, can access your chat logs in AI. It's not just ChatGPT. I assume all of the AI chatbots are like this. Even, even, even when you turn it into like disappearing chat mode or whatever with ChatGPT, that can all still be accessed. Tell me about privacy here. And how can I? I don't want the trust, this is crypto, right? So we can't do the trust me, bro. Hey, we'll keep your data private. And like, if you get subpoenaed by a government, for instance, doesn't have to be the US government, some governments, somewhere in the world, like, does that government just get my data? And what, what does that mean? How, how do you answer my, my concerns about privacy?

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so actually, I think like, this is the audience to, where all of this should resonate with. Because I think in all the other cases you just mentioned, what of course has been missing is cryptography. And that's why this space exists. So I think like, you can, many of these things are counterintuitive, like zero knowledge proofs in general, I think are still counterintuitive to most of the population. But there's more things here. We have like multi-party computation, we have C K Ps, and I will walk in kind of in, in, in that direction in a second, but like. I we kind of a general idea for this project right from the beginning. It obviously did not resonate like that in the beginning, but I think that will change is

• 40:17Speaker 00

  that I think proof of human will become this very, very fundamental thing on the internet that people need to use for pretty much everything we do. And I want this to be the signal equivalent of like, this is like the hardcore privacy alternative that is independent of governments, that is fully provable and decentralized. And like that, that's actually what we're aiming at. So we have a big, big chunk of the team. It's now 500 people company. So like a pretty, it's a pretty big company. It's a pretty big team and a large chunk of the engineering is sitting on privacy. And kind of the core idea is without not going too much into detail, but is making like, so you sign up with an orb.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  First thing that happens is it checks that you're an actual person. So it, there's not a display. So it takes a picture in multiple wavelengths, actually infrared, near infrared, RGB. All of that happens on a device and then you have neural networks on the device that check against all kinds of attacks. Then takes a picture of the iris. That is because that's actually one of the very few modalities that will get us to billions of users because Face ID, for example, on your iPhone, that is a one-to-one comparison. So it just checks that you're again Ryan logging into your phone. But to solve the proof of human problem, we will need to compare you against, let's say, everyone else that is using X and make sure that you as Ryan, you only get one X account versus like a thousand.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  So it goes from one-to-one to one-to-N in our case. And so face doesn't work, fingerprint doesn't work, like some palm veins could work and iris certainly works. And so that is why, why that. Then it calculates an iris code out of that picture on the device. And it actually splits that iris code into many different pieces and sends it to a multi-party computation. So like right now, there's the university of, it's Berkeley, like a German university, which I did, I don't get at FAU. Another mind and a couple others that all have to come together to do one comparison. That means like any, any of the party doesn't actually have the data, but they need to come together for one multi-party computation.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  If that uniqueness is then given, so we know that you, Ryan, actually don't already have a world ID account and that MPC computation comes back positive, then public key gets inserted into a Merkle tree. And which is on the Ethereum may not. And then how I actually use my world ID is if I go to a platform, I go to X, I prove to X that I'm actually the private key that I have on my phone self-custodially is included in a Merkle tree. Or a public, public key generated by the private keys is included in a Merkle tree. And so, meaning you have the multi-party computation, there is no central storage of

• 43:09Speaker 00

  any information, but then the actual usage of world ID is decoupled even from that with zero knowledge proofs. And so you remain fully anonymous using your world ID and there is no database or anything that can get compromised. That was, again, there's like a lot of things that I think still can improve, like we want to have the MPC computation not before parties, but like 50. And, and like many other things that I think can be tweaked and kind of improved. But in general, I think this is the most, the most private, by far the most private solution we have for that, for that kind of problem. Like for example, using, yeah, even, even using like NFC IDs from a government with

• 43:52Speaker 00

  zero knowledge proofs would not get you nearly as far in privacy scale.

• 43:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Alex, if a three-letter agency shows up and they're like, hey, this, this Ryan Adams guy, he's, he's kind of a shady dude and we need you to give us all of the information, everything you have on Ryan Sean Adams, what can you give them and what can't you give them?

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Well, we can, we can give the, your transaction history, your financial transaction history, because it's a, obviously it's a, it's an Ethereum wallet. It's like transactions are, are in the public. We can give them app, some app usage. Files of like, when have you been online? What have you done in the app? Which screen did you use? So there's, there's things like that. We cannot give them your bi-metrics. We cannot give them your kind of where did you use your world ID? None of those things, because all of it is self-custodialy with you on your phone. So, so yeah, I think it's like, we, we, again, app, app usage is like the TLDR would be as tools humanity could give someone.

• 44:53David Hoffman?

  So if Ryan logged into some application that integrated world ID. So like he, he logged into how to build a nuclear bomb.com with world ID. You would not be able to report that to the A3 letter agency. Neat.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 45:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why'd you use that example, David?

• 45:10Speaker 00

  It's Ryan's hobbies.

• 45:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cause it's incredibly unlikely that I would ever do that, right?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I don't know. Let's, let's go to the website right now, actually.

• 45:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, just, that was by the domain. Just on the, on the privacy issue, what, what kind of privacy regulations have you run up against? Maybe another jurisdictions? I'm not sure if there's any in the US, but I mean, EU has all sorts of things, you know, like privacy. What's, what's been kind of, I guess, interesting or at odds with how you've designed things? Or like where things fit together, maybe? What, what has your experience been with regulation, privacy regulation that governments are putting out?

• 45:44Speaker 00

  There was like a whole scale of things that I think we, we encountered. I think like the first, the first thing is like, we launched back then and you might remember that, but it was like a very, very loud launch. Where I think pretty much in every country that we, we already were operating at or re-operated before. It was like a national TV type situation and kind of in, in all the big newspapers.

• 46:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Was it basically a Sam Altman's orb is coming for your eyeballs type of thing? Yeah. Okay.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Actually it was like.

• 46:13David Hoffman?

  It's a pretty easy headline to write.

• 46:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a pretty easy headline. There's some lazy reporting there.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  For better or worse, actually like back then it was already much more positive. Like, meaning like, I was like, it was still Sam Altman is like doing X, but it was like, oh, Sam Altman's like crypto project is launching in Germany or something. It was like, I'm originally from Germany, like on every major newspaper, it was like headline, Sam Altman is, is, is doing this new thing. And it's a new kind of, it was actually, it was the reason of like the, the sentiment back then was pretty positive around the launch. But then the second thing that happened is like. Back then, we didn't have a GR team. It was like me and my, and my, and my GC. Back then, the company was like much, much smaller. And we had like within the span of two weeks after launch, we had pretty much every regulator

• 46:59Speaker 00

  you could possibly think of reach out to us from like financial regulators, crypto regulators, privacy regulators, like, like everything.

• 47:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this just how it happens? Like you get a big media splash and then governments are gonna, all the government agencies are gonna splash.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  That is totally how it happens. And for what is like, if I were a privacy regulator and I wake up to a newspaper saying there's like Sam Altman with orbs in like all of our big cities and it's somehow scanning eyeballs and crypto's involved, like of course I would take a look at that. Like it's, it's like, that's the, that's the job description of a privacy regulator. And so, yeah, we, we, we basically got outreaches from like every privacy regulator in the world that we, even in countries we didn't touch. I was like, just like, hey, just FYI, if you want to launch here, we want to talk. Like, like that, that kind of hundreds of emails. And, and then of course we also fell like squarely into all the crypto regulation debate

• 47:55Speaker 00

  back then, where like Europe was forming their crypto regulation. In Southeast Asia, you had many countries that didn't know yet what, what crypto regulation. And like me and my GC facing, facing all of the drama. And then the, the second, the second order was like, so you now actually meet with a privacy regulator and you have to explain them, multi-party computation, zero knowledge proofs, all of that stuff, proof of human, we will have AI on the internet and it's going to change everything. It was like the, the conversation was so disconnected from the normal conversations that it used to have, that it really took us like months to just get through the basics. And so the, the good thing is like,

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Every, like, some of the conversations are still not concluded, meaning we're still having conversations or still kind of going through, because some of them really went pretty deep. Like, they went for Source Code or, like, hired consultancies to kind of go into things. But either they conclude positive or they will be concluded positively pretty soon. So overall, it was a pretty positive story, but of course, a lot of work to get there. And then actually, like, my favorite stories are the ones where, like, backdoor government kind of conversations that are like, well, you would allow democratic, democratic, uh, kind of votes or something in our country. We don't like that, and so we would never want you to launch here. It's like, and all kinds of crazy conversations over the last two years, you have no idea.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  And like, every scale, so, yeah, I have a lot of, a lot of stories to tell.

• 49:27David Hoffman?

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• 52:20David Hoffman?

  Or, I don't know, something exciting? What's something that you daydream about?

• 52:25Speaker 00

  That it becomes like some version of internet citizenship, where you, you, you like, you plug in both your, you have some version of internet native identity and internet native finances that kind of almost like give you an internet native citizenship. And there's like billions of other people that have that. And it doesn't matter where you come from. You have like access to the same kind of tools and systems. I think that's the, that's the future where we're heading to. And I think that's like the cypherpunk dream. To some degree.

• 52:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's certainly been a bankless dream for a while, having internet citizenship. And you guys have come a long way in the past two years. And the way you're building it, I think, has been impressive, at least to David and I. I've been, as we've been watching this with kind of a layer two, doing everything with, you know, ZK, building it with, with privacy in mind, actually scaling it. Thirty million users is, you know, pretty impressive, fifteen million of which have gotten the orb treatment.

• 53:20David Hoffman?

  So it's worth pausing and reflecting, actually. Like, the, the topic of identity has been with us since getting into crypto. I think it's one of the, when you're going down the crypto rabbit hole and you get to the identity part of the crypto rabbit hole, you realize like, oh, an Ethereum address is an identity. And then, and then it kind of goes from there. This was on Bitcoin Talk forums, like Bitcoin addresses mean identities. And that kind of, then it opens you up. It's like, what is an identity? And then we have to like, deconstruct an identity. And there were so many different ways to solve identities. There was Martin Koplman's circles project. There was, there were so many different like, identity projects trying to solve identity.

• 53:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nothing that scaled, though.

• 53:57David Hoffman?

  Nothing that scaled, nothing that worked. This one has gotten so far down the line of actually solving identity. And actually, it doesn't feel like there's any unknowns. It's just an execution at this point on world, world coins part. It's no longer just like a science experiment. It's actually like in production. And so it's actually, I think it's kind of worth like pausing to reflect on like, oh, like, I didn't expect it to come from hardware. Turns out the key unlock was hardware. But there were so many other like, attempts at building identity that never really went anywhere. And this is actually the one that is so far showing plenty of fruit and promise of actually getting us to the, to the internet citizenship, which we all kind of daydreamed about.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  So first of all, thank you. I think the, we're obviously still very, very early and it could, it could go like, could fail for like a thousand reasons. But I think it actually has a meaningful shot at getting to kind of internet scale. And I think actually if it does that, it's going to be much more than an entity. I think that's the, that's the cool part. I think like the, the early vision of you create a real human network on the internet and you have financial primitives built in will become one of the most valuable networks on the planet, I think is fundamentally the right idea. And I hope we get there. And actually to your, to your point, one of the, one of the funniest things is actually

• 55:15Speaker 00

  how, how Finney had proposed proof of human in the kind of very early Bitcoin forum. They're like, eventually you would get to a biometric device and you would get a proof of human, you would be able to use it across the internet. So it's like a, it's a pretty, it's a pretty OG idea.

• 55:30David Hoffman?

  Hal Finney concluded biometric hardware?

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:34David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 55:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are the contenders for maybe Satoshi, who is Satoshi?

• 55:39David Hoffman?

  Yes, this is, when I hear Hal Finney, I'm like, okay, so you mean Satoshi?

• 55:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  OG. Alice, this has been great. Maybe as we close this out, I want, I want you to reflect, if you will, on, on kind of some convergence here that, that seems to be going on. So we have another podcast that David and I sometimes occasionally guest host called Limitless, and that's exploring the frontier of AI, the way Bankless explores, you know, crypto. We're seeing a lot of interesting developments, right? If we're looking at kind of a, the next generation of social media platforms, feels like there's like four things that are kind of emerging as important there. The one is it's got to have money and that's like a crypto wallet, probably. And you guys have a crypto wallet inside the app. The other is it has to have media, right? So you have to have the breaking thing. You have to have a bunch of humans congregating over some sort of information, whether that's prediction markets, whether that's traditional media tweets, that kind of thing.

• 56:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  The other thing is it has to have intelligence. So that's some kind of a model, right? So Grok is kind of X's attempt at this, XAI. And ChatGPT, of course, is the OpenAI attempt at this. And one wonders whether OpenAI is actually going to launch its own social media platform. And then the last ingredient, the fourth, is basically some sort of identity, some sort of proof of humanity. And it seems like all of these ingredients need to be active together in order to launch our next generation of internet experience, social media experience. And so I don't know how people are assembling the building blocks here, right? A bunch of companies building models. Obviously, we have the crypto thing in the background. We have World, which is working on kind of the humanity piece.

• 57:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if there's maybe some smaller competitors on this. All sorts of like, there's a milieu of part, like, it's kind of a stew of all of these bits and pieces. What do you think happens next? Do you think all of this converges together and creates a better internet, social media experience for us all? Or do you think there's like some Balkanization where there's maybe the Elon Musk world? There's the Sam Altman world. There's the Google world. And these are all kind of separate using different protocols. What do you think is going to happen?

• 57:40Speaker 00

  So first of all, I do agree with, I think these are the, these are the fundamental building blocks for the next generation of such a platform. And I think probably right now is the opening to take a new shot at something like that. And so like, I think the timing is very interesting. I think the observations you made are pretty correct. I think the money part is probably initially secondary, but I think the idea of like, you have an AI native social network that somehow also is able to have kind of a positive coexistence of AIs and humans, meaning you will need some version of identity or proof of human. I think that will happen.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  I think the other big thing that will happen is the, there's going to be some form of flywheel where the kind of the big model, certainly the big labs will have it, but probably other startups will have it too. Where like, I think you will get more and more personal context about everyone by usage of these models, which then I think should allow you to build a much, much better feat, a much more personalized feat that actually just shows you the things that you're interested in. And I actually think like the It's like, it's not, it's hard to say that X makes you a better person. Is it like, it's like, it's really hard to claim that like X is like truly just improving my life and it's making me a better person. I took a break for three months and I felt great.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  Right. And, and so like, I think we all feel like that. It's like, it's like, it's like a mix of like, the craziest shit on the internet all thrown at you all day long and like, and like some, some percentage of interesting things in between. So like, it's not, it's like, it's really hard for me to say this like it makes my life better and I really, really need that. I, I use it a lot because I need to use and then I kind of, I take down all the negatives that come with that. But I think my hope for the next version of such a, such a product would be that because it understands me and it knows what I care about, it actually shows me things that either just make me better or just improve my life, improve my experience.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Versus like a hellhole of the craziest shit happening on the internet. Like, that's actually nothing I need to know. And so like, I think the, the other big flywheel from the things you just mentioned, I think is personalization to, towards all of us and it comes with a lot of danger, actually. Because the, the potential downside of that level of personalization is that we actually don't have a public town square anymore, but rather we just like build dopamine maximizing systems that like, they will make me very happy and feel great, but actually I, I miss out on what is happening in the world. So there is like a balance you need to make. But T L R is, I think it will be balkanization. I think there's going to be, just that's the nature of that.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  I think these networks will get more and more personalized. I think these networks will include financial problems. They definitely will include some form of proof of human or identity. Otherwise they will break. And if there is a moment to start a new major network, it probably is now.

• 1:00:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe I'm reading some into, some things into what you just said there, Alex, but maybe it sounds like there's some announcements to come. Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fascinating discussion.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Thank you, Rob.

• 1:01:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I feel like we got to do this more than every two years because the world is moving so fast and maybe we should get you on next year, too.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:01:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got to let you know, Bankless audience, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.