180 - Worldcoin’s Sam Altman & Alex Blania on Crypto's Most Ambitious Project

Disclaimer: This episode was recorded on May 14th, 2023 David is joined by Worldcoin Co-Founders, Alex Blania and Sam Altman. Alex is Worldcoin’s CEO and Sam is CEO of OpenAI. Both Co-founded Worldcoin in 2020. Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious crypto projects in the space. It’s Worldcoin’s philosophy that the best way to produce unique verifiable humanness is through human biometrics that map to our unique DNA. This is the most robust way to achieve sybil resistance. That is why Worldcoin created its silver Orb that scans user's eyeballs. Why scan the eye? Is it safe? How is data stored? What’s Worldcoin’s crypto token distribution plan? All of these questions and much more answered in the episode. ------ ✨DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-worldcoin ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:15 Inception of Worldcoin Idea 8:35 How Sam & Alex Met 10:57 Why Scan Eyes 16:35 The Technology Behind the Orb 21:40 Worldcoin & Privacy 25:05 How Worldcoin Data Flows 28:35 Why Worldcoin is Needed 33:02 Proof of Personhood & Crypto 35:05 Worldcoin’s Distribution Plan 36:49 Worldcoin’s Complexity & Pressure 39:25 Sam’s Involvement with Worldcoin 39:47 Worldcoin & Optimism 42:00 Orb Operations 48:10 Worldcoin Roadmap 49:25 The Ups & Downs of Worldcoin 53:10 Reflecting on Worldcoin’s Critiques 56:10 What Does Worldcoin Need the Most? 56:50 Where Sam Stands on AI Alignment 59:20 Closing & Disclosures ----- RESOURCES Worldcoin Privacy Deep Dive https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive Worldcoin https://worldcoin.org/ Alex Blania https://twitter.com/alexblania Sam Altman https://twitter.com/sama ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. 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

  The immediate reaction is like it freaks you out and you really need to understand the engineering behind it to understand that I think none of these concerns are actually grounded.

• 0:14David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is David Hoffman, here without my co-host Ryan Tron Adams, but we are here to help you become more bankless. Today on the show, we have two of the WorldCoin founders, Alex Bologna and Sam Altman, and we are exploring the WorldCoin story, one of the more ambitious projects in the crypto space. And here's what you're going to learn in this episode. First, what is the idea behind WorldCoin? What does it want to do for the world? Second, what is actually inside of an orb? Is it safe to put your eye into? Third, WorldCoin's answer to how it's providing privacy to those who get their iris scanned, and why some people are still skeptical about it.

• 0:59David Hoffman?

  Fourth, what is WorldCoin's identity platform and what can it do for Sam Altman's other company, OpenAI, and the incoming AI-enabled internet that humanity appears to just be waltzing into? Fifth, how WorldCoin plans to become a permissionless protocol, including the manufacturing and operating of the orbs themselves. And sixth, lastly, we had to ask him what Sam Altman thinks of the AI alignment problem. We happen to be recording this podcast on Mother's Day, which means Ryan is in his human format and why he is not here for this episode, but we are still going to record a debrief episode for the Bankless citizens out there, for all of the premium subscribers. So I will fill him in on all my thoughts about this episode, and we'll talk a little bit more about the incoming AI revolution and the ways that the crypto story is a part of that.

• 1:43David Hoffman?

  If you want that extra debrief episode that is exclusively for Bankless citizens, for people who subscribe to the premium RSS feed, if you would like that debrief episode, there is a link in the show notes so you can subscribe to Bankless, get that premium RSS feed, where we post all of our extra bonus content, along with all the other perks that you get for being a part of the Bankless nation. Like I said at the beginning, WorldCoin is one of the most ambitious projects in this space. There's a coin, there's a layer two, there's an identity protocol, there's a mobile app, and of course, there's this physical piece of hardware that's become infamously iconic to WorldCoin: that silver orb. It's WorldCoin's philosophy that the best way to produce unique, verifiable humanness is human biometrics that map to our unique DNA.

• 2:27David Hoffman?

  This is the most robust way to achieve Sybil resistance. And that's why WorldCoin manifests in the physical world with this orb thing. Biometric scanners are hardware, and that physical nature of the orb that you place your eye into to get scanned has these strong dystopian connotations that have triggered so many people. We, of course, talk about this dynamic directly with the WorldCoin founders, Alex and Sam, how they are dealing with this branding that WorldCoin has received, and how that's impacted the company along the way. But nonetheless, the WorldCoin project does seem to be growing in momentum, and it was a pleasure having Alex and Sam on the podcast today. I hope you enjoy this episode, Bankless Nation, but before we get there, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for 2023.

• 3:12David Hoffman?

  If you do not have an account with Kraken, perhaps consider clicking the link in the show notes to get started today. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today.

• 3:54David Hoffman?

  Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network. A brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 on boarded like Game7 for Web3 Gaming and Bybit for TVL and Liquidity and Onramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at ZeroXMantle. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed onto Arbitrum 1. With a flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystem, Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub, and social apps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum

• 5:21David Hoffman?

  and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. Are you a dev, but you don't know Solidity? With Stylus, Arbitrum's upcoming proposal for a programming environment upgrade, developers can write smart contracts in Rust, C, C++ and many more coding languages. Arbitrum empowers you to explore and build without compromise. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app on Arbitrum. Bankless Nation, I would like to introduce you to the co-founders of WorldCoin, Alex Blanier and Sam Altman. Sam, Alex, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having us.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Thanks for having us, David. This is gonna be cool.

• 6:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation because the WorldCoin story arc is an interesting one as it relates to both the crypto world and also especially now with the resurgence of and relevancy of AI in mainstream society. And so the timing of this episode, I think, is perfect. And Sam, I think this story starts with you. Can you talk about just like the inception of the idea of WorldCoin? Where it came from and what the aha moment about why we need something like WorldCoin in the future?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I started thinking initially that it would be quite powerful if you could have the biggest network, like the biggest financial and identity network imaginable, if you could have something truly global, and sort of had no good ideas about how to do that. The first version when we started talking about this was something like, well, what if we scanned the palm of everybody on Earth? Or what if we did all these other, you know, like, what if, a lot of complicated ideas about how to verify identity. But the reason I was excited about it is as the world sort of heads towards powerful AI systems, I thought that if we could do something to eventually redistribute wealth through some sort of global UBI at scale, or maybe even access to these systems, which would be the most important component

• 7:14Speaker 02

  of wealth someday, and also be able to verify unique humanness with a different lens on how to preserve privacy, that would be more important as sort of AI advanced. So I started thinking about this years ago, mostly driven by my work on OpenAI, but also just belief that UBI was a cool thing to study anyway. And again, ideas were like deeply imperfect, but I knew something in the space I wanted to explore. Met first Max and then Alex and thought Alex was super awesome. And I'll let Alex talk about how the ideas evolved since then, because that part is really all credit to Alex. But that was how it started.

• 7:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it sounds like the early motivation for WorldCoin came from the idea that we could tackle two birds with one stone, one being UBI and one being identity, correct? And that was really like the elegance of the solution before there was actually a solution known, you kind of saw that you could do the same thing with these two, solving these two problems at the same time, correct?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, to zoom out even more, it was like solve the problem of verified humanness. And that, and that was really like, that's what you need for a lot of other things like identity, like doing the global UBI. You know, if there's, if there's a non-fraudulent solution to that, that also is privacy preserving, that's kind of the goal.

• 8:38David Hoffman?

  And maybe we could talk about where Alex and Sam met. And so when did this, what year was perhaps the idea of WorldCoin inceptioned? And then when does Alex come into the story?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  We really started working on it in January 2020. So I was, I think Sam and Max started working on it already six months before, but then Max had a full-time job, Sam obviously as well. So when I joined, we brought the founding team and then really started working on it. Right before, right before WorldCoin, I was in physics and theoretical physics and kind of how I use deep learning to predict AI systems. So not too close to crypto. And then basically I was, literally got an email from Max explaining with a white paper of WorldCoin back then, kind of the super early ideas. As Sam just said, like a lot of high-level, important ideas where this could go and why it would matter.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  And I drove to San Francisco, had a couple of interviews with Max, then one with Sam, that we spent more time together. And then later became co-founder. That's kind of the quick story. Is there anything I'm missing, Sam?

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  That sounds right. So Alex, where were you in this phase of your life? And what was your skillset that made this project relevant for you?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Well, Max actually reached out to me as a software engineer. So right before WorldCoin, I was, I was quite deep in theoretical physics.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And I had a company before in high school that did vertical farming and actually did reasonably well. But the five years before WorldCoin, it was pretty much just physics. And I mean, obviously I read about Bitcoin super early on. I was early in that phase of the whole, of the whole space, but I could not say that I was deep in crypto at all before. So it was really just, Max reached out, I think he reached out to many people at this point to start building this. And then we just, we explored the whole space. We took these early ideas that Sam mentioned, we went much deeper into them. And then later I became CEO and we just took it from there.

• 10:50David Hoffman?

  Was it obvious that WorldCoin was a crypto project from day one?

• 10:54Speaker 00

  I think so. Yeah, I think so.

• 10:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And okay, and so you had the aspirations. We need verifiable human identity. You could also attach some UBI to that. But Sam, you talked about the prospects of you can scan a palm, but that's not where WorldCoin has landed. It's landed on the iris. Can you talk about that choice? And then we can start to dive into the tech that's actually inside of the orb?

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me take that one. So basically, when I joined, there was this whole paper that

• 11:27Speaker 00

  it was not long. It was like three pages, a lot of high level ideas. And as Sam mentioned, one of the big points of it was you basically need to solve civil resistance to be able to distribute a token to every human being. And why do you want to do that in the first place? Because it would incentive a line, a really, really large network to grow to all of humanity and kind of really bootstrap this huge, huge financial network.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  And then, of course, at some point, you could also distribute UBI through something like this. So you want to do that. You want to launch a token to all of humanity collectively.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Then the first big thing you have to solve is what people in crypto call civil resistance. I'm sure you're quite familiar with that. And simply speaking, what that means is you

• 12:14Speaker 00

  one human is able to verify to a network that that human is actually unique to the network. And why is that important? Because if that's not in place, what would happen is that bad actors would just like destroy the whole distribution of this incentive mechanism and this token and everything would break down. And that's something, as you know, David, that happens pretty frequently in crypto still today. And if you really want to scale it to all of humanity, it's even a much bigger topic. So.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  It was pretty clear very early on that that's one of the biggest problems we have to tackle first. And then we went quite deep. So like, I mean, the whole founding team is pretty much, we all met either at Caltech or Max Planck, so we all, we have all physics backgrounds. So we went through the whole space. And there's three big things you could do if you zoom out. There's KYC, of course. So you basically just use the civil resistance of governments. That immediately falls through because less than 50% of the world actually have

• 13:27Speaker 00

  these documents that you could verify digitally. So if you think about inclusivity, that just does not scale. While it would work super well in Europe and US, it just does not work globally. So that fell through immediately. And the second big kind of topic is what people call web of trust. So you basically try to build up a reputation graph. And that's a super elegant idea. It just never really worked or scaled. But I actually think that's something that will come into real con later. So we can talk about that. And the last part is biometrics. And so we actually built implementations of all three. We looked quite deep into KYC. We looked quite deep into web of trust and then looked into biometrics itself.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  And before we get into this specific modality, which, as you mentioned, we use iris recognition. The first big thing you need to understand is all the things you use in your daily life. So your iPhone, for example, what that does is it re-authenticates you. So it basically realizes that David again tries to log in into the same phone. So there's an embedding stored on your phone of how you look like. And then you try to sign in again, and your neural network calculates this pretty much the same embedding again, matches it, and you can use your phone. So it's a one-to-one comparison. And that's fairly easy to do other than fraud resistance. To solve proof of personhood, however, you need to compare one user against everyone else.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  So you have a one-to-one comparison. And the big problem with that is you just need much more entropy. So information about each user to make that work because otherwise the fraud rate explodes exponentially and you actually hit a wall. So that's something that's very important to keep in mind. You actually don't have a constant fraud rate, but you literally hit a wall. And so things like face, just taking a face image doesn't have enough entropy. Fingerprints doesn't have enough entropy. Palm theoretically actually could have, but there was just no live implementation of this. And Iris is the thing.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  And sorry, Alex, when you say not enough entropy, you mean not enough uniqueness? Like, there's just not enough uniqueness in someone's face to be able to prove verifiable humanness, correct?

• 15:42Speaker 00

  That's correct. At least if you image it with a normal phone camera.

• 15:48David Hoffman?

  Sure. Okay. And so I'm assuming the search for, you come to the conclusion that government IDs don't work.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:56David Hoffman?

  And it's also just not, it wouldn't be very native to the crypto ethos to just use government ID as our identity system. And then you also talked about the web of trust, which there are other web of trust models of civil resistance out there in the crypto world. They're all decently experimental.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:14David Hoffman?

  But I think what you're saying is the biometric solution towards establishing unique human identity is the most robust and the most tried and true model. And so that's how you've come to the conclusion of the Iris. And I'm assuming talking about the entropy of the Iris, you're going to have, you're going to give me a number that's like, and the Iris is sufficiently entropic, correct?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Correct. That's correct. Yeah.

• 16:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Okay. So that, and that also, I think, presents the, why WorldCoin is the way that it is? Why there is an orb? If it was just the United, if it's just like United States ID or nation state ID, or if it was just a web of trust model, the WorldCoin project would be in a digital sphere only. But since we have to collect actual, like, look and map that the DNA of someone, we actually have to establish ourselves in the real world. That's, that's why the orb exists. So can you talk about the technology in the orb and how it does what its job is?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  So to just like quickly summarize what you just said, because I think it's, it's another important piece. Is the world is about to change in a meaningful way. Right in that case that neither digital content. So images or video as well as intelligence are discriminatory anymore of what it means to be a human. So you actually need to bridge to the real world. And I think that's the only way to actually solve the problem.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  And so we started building the orb quite in the beginning. We went quite deep into that engineering. We literally had to build our own lens like it's completely from the ground up custom.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  And so what it does, it has a lot of sensors in the front to just make sure whatever we see is an actually human being. So not a display and not an AI that tries to fool us. And all of that compute happens locally. So first check, we look at a human being. Then second, the eye is imaged and a unique iris code is calculated on the device. Gets signed by the device and that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device. And what's pretty cool and very important is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet through zero knowledge proofs. So what that means is that the only thing we or anyone else could prove is that a user has verified before yes or no.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  And so if you believe what we believe, you believe that something like this will have to happen. Like something like Rollcoin will exist. And I think Rollcoin is the option to make it privacy preserving, open source and decentralized. And so I know it sounds counterintuitive in the beginning because it's it uses bi-metrics, et cetera, et cetera. But you really you kind of you have to look into engineering, understand that I think this aligns really well with the values of the space.

• 19:03David Hoffman?

  Certainly, and scanning an iris is, from what I understand, a known quantity. That's technology that we've had. And I was talking with a team member at the World Coin Project, DC Builder, and he just told me about the technology in the orb. Most of the technology is actually making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb. And so like it can it can scan your iris and that's what it does. But most of the technology is making sure that humans aren't trying to game the orb in the process of getting their iris scanned. Can you talk about the layers of technology that that are comprised in the orb to make this happen?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Sure. So actually, I would not say it's most of it because you have, if you think about why the orb in the first place, like, why did we have to build custom hardware? Which is, like, it was not fun. Back then, we were like four people in a small apartment in San Francisco, and coming up with the idea we need to build hardware devices and ship them around the world was really not fun.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  You actually solve two major problems, as you want, like, one you just mentioned, which is fraud resistance. And that comes down to, one, showing something to the device that actually is not a human being. And two, just physically attacking the device itself. So you can just go to the processor and try to insert data streams that are actually not from imaging. So that's one. And then two is imaging resolution. So all the biometric imaging devices we tested back then, they actually also do not have enough to scale to all of humanity. They don't have enough resolution. So that's why we had to build our own lens and our own imaging system and things like that. So this was like also like a lot of work. So I think it's pretty equally split.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  But to talk more about your question specifically, is the orb has in front, it images multi-spectral. So what that means is you basically, like, you imagine multiple wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. So we have infrared, we have 3D time of flight, and we have multiple wavelengths with an infrared spectrum.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Just to make sure that whatever we see is an actually human being. So you could just now show a display or even more complicated optical setups. So this was quite, quite some engineering to get there. And then the cool thing is, everything happens locally on a device. So there are seven neural networks that in real time just like do all of these checks. And that's important because privacy, yet again.

• 21:28David Hoffman?

  Is it accurate to say that the retina scan inside the orb is perhaps the most advanced retina scan technology that exists?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Probably, we don't know, like, whatever military has, but yeah, probably.

• 21:40David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure. Okay, and so, just to really just drive this point, point home, because I think this is really important. The, the goal of WorldCoin is to produce humanness, right? One human is one human in the world of, of WorldCoin. And this is especially important as the world of AI comes and, and those lines start to blur. We need to understand who is a true human. And crypto has other identity projects, other civil resistance projects. But I think the, the point here that stands is that there's no identity project, proof of identity, proof of human project that is as civil resistance, civil resistant as biology, as DNA. And so the WorldCoin orb is meant to map onto an iris. And that is the strongest form of civil resistance that, that we have.

• 22:25David Hoffman?

  And so I think just the, the question I want to ask, and I think this is kind of gets to where there are always like concerns about the WorldCoin project, is that serializing humans is a double edged sword. We in the crypto industry don't have a source, a source of truth of who is a unique human. But the history of serializing humans has not been a good one. And this has been like the cause of concern around the WorldCoin project is like the concern of privacy. So since you can scan someone's iris and prove that they are human, what, what's the story behind the privacy side of things? Like, how does, how does WorldCoin address the, the privacy issue?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, we agree, right? So that's, that's why we built it the way we, we have built it. So the first, like, there's this counterintuitive thing going on that, of course, you have bi-metrics and that first, the immediate reaction is like, it freaks you out. And you really need to understand the engineering behind it to understand that, I think none of these concerns are actually grounded. And so with WorldCoin, it actually comes down to, to three big things. The first one is that the biometric data is not stored. So basically, the imaging happens locally on a device, the computation happens on the device. And the only thing that actually leaves the device is an iris code that gets signed by the orb.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  And then that's the thing that gets compared against all users. Then point number two, which is by far the most important one, is that the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet with their knowledge proofs.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Which brings me to the third point is it's actually self custodial setup. So when the user signs up, he just like the user has a non custodial wallet that generates then later these zero knowledge proofs to prove included and enter a set of users. And that gives it like quite extreme privacy. I don't think there's anything else I'm aware of that could solve the same problem on that scale without any like literally any privacy implications. And then the other thing is everything will be open source. The majority of the hardware is already open source. The Fender is getting released slowly because there's still some security concerns, but we're getting there.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  The whole setup will be fully decentralized. It's of course a challenge because you have hardware, but but it's going to happen. So yeah, it's it's I think it's actual rocket science. Like we spent a lot of time, a lot of money to make this, to build it the way we've built it. And so, yeah.

• 25:08David Hoffman?

  Understanding the system at a high level, it does seem like there's so many moving parts. There's the hardware inside of the orb. There's the zero knowledge cryptography. There's the mobile app. Can you just walk us through an example of someone goes and gets their iris scanned? That turns into data and then that goes through a line of steps that turns into somebody being able to be verifiably logged into their world coin app. Or and like, can you talk about just like how that data is carried? The processing of the data in the iris scanner, the zero knowledge proofs? Can you just do an end to end story for how this goes from an iris scan to somebody's phone?

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Sure, I will. I will keep it relatively high level, but we can go as technical as you want. So

• 25:52Speaker 00

  a user or a person is excited about world coin, learns about it, downloads an app. It's called the world app right now. It's right now. It's the only client for world coin, but many other wallets will support it too as well. So I mean, all of this is a protocol, so many other wallets should connect to it. But right now you download the world coin app and you click on a map. You see where the next orb is, you show up in front of this device. And then what happens when you verify is you click and verify now. You generate a key pair, actually two separate key pairs, because you have one on Ethereum wallet. And the second one is basically your identity wallet. So these are two separate key pairs that basically live on your on your phone.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  And then, once you verify, you show that public identity key to the device, and that gets air gapped just via camera to the device. Then the orb does first the humanist check, then the uniqueness check, which means it images the eye, calculates a unique embedding out of this with a neural network, then signs that, and that's the only thing that actually leaves the device. Goes to a backend that later will be decentralized as well. But right now, goes to backend, uniqueness check happens. And then, when the user uses WorldID, the user does a proof of inclusion with zero knowledge

• 27:16Speaker 00

  that the user is actually, that that public key is included into that set. And so, what that enables you then to do is you can use that proof across many different ecosystems, so not only in Ethereum, but also through all other chains. But then also in Web2, you can just use it to log in wherever you want, without revealing any of your personal information. And then, another thing that is important to mention is, actually, WorldID is an identity protocol on top of that, on top of this idea of proof of personhood, that then lets developers and other people attach verifiable credentials and things like that. So it's even more than, more than just this.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  But yeah, that's, that's the flow.

• 28:03David Hoffman?

  And importantly, nowhere in that flow does WorldCoin ask for your name or date of birth or address. Is that, is that correct?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  No, the only, the only time where this comes up is when you actually use a ramping solution, because in the app, also in World app, there is a non-constancy wallet and you can on-ramp through ramping providers and they ask for your name, but it's not us.

• 28:26David Hoffman?

  Right. So if you want to get money into the app,

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 28:28David Hoffman?

  you will give the on-ramp provider your information. But WorldCoin, the system does not require your name, date of birth, address, or anything like this.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 28:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, cool. And so this provides us a place for unique humans to be, to have a public address, right? And so that is the net output of this is like, there is a new public address from the WorldCoin protocol, and that is because of the way that that address is derived, verifiably human. And I think Sam, one of the reasons why you're a co-founder of WorldCoin and the vision behind this is that you would find it. And from the OpenAI side of things, and I think you hypothesized that the world will find it in the world, in the age of AI, that having a list of addresses of verifiable humans to be supremely useful. So why would that be useful in the next decade or century? Why do we need this in this coming era?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there will turn out to be other reasons besides the ones that I'll mention now. But when we think about these very powerful systems, these very powerful AIs that will exist in the world, I think the benefits from them, access to them, governance of them, that belongs to real people. And I think it's very important that AI is being built as tools for people. Now, there are a lot of ways that we could think about doing this, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of advantages we like about the WorldCoin solution. And as Alex just explained, I think although the privacy vision is different than what people have maybe traditionally thought about, I think it's one that's very compelling.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  And I think it's also one that is very fair. Like, this is sort of the maximally inclusive system we can imagine.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  I also think that the ability to say, I'm a human, I created this content, or I'm at least endorsing this content, that's going to turn out to be important, too, and another advantage to sort of this sort of a structure.

• 30:24David Hoffman?

  MetaMask has something new. Introducing MetaMask Portfolio. MetaMask Portfolio is the best way to view your crypto portfolio from a holistic level. See everything across all the chains all at once. In your portfolio, MetaMask will report the aggregate value of all the assets in your MetaMask wallets, and even the other wallets you import too. But MetaMask Portfolio isn't just a passive portfolio viewer. It is a place to do all of the money verbs that make DeFi so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets. So not only is MetaMask the easiest place to see your wallets in aggregate, but it's also a powerful battle station for all of your DeFi moves. So go check out your MetaMask portfolio, because it's waiting for you to open it up. Check it out at portfolio.metaMask.io. Are you planning to launch a token?

• 31:09David Hoffman?

  Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Toku will help you navigate across the lifecycle of your token, from easy-to-use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing post-Cliff taxable events with payroll. For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge, complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll, and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space:

• 31:54David Hoffman?

  Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to toku.com/bankless or click the link in the description below. Introducing Polygon 2.0, the value layer for the internet. For too long, the limitations of blockchains have held back app development and stifled user adoption. The internet allows anyone to create and exchange information. What's missing is a value layer that lets anyone exchange, store, and program value. That's where Polygon 2.0 comes in. Polygon Labs has unveiled a series of innovations that will radically alter the Polygon ecosystem and Web3 as a whole by leveraging groundbreaking ZK innovations such as Polygon ZK EVM, the next iteration of the best-in-class blockchain ecosystem.

• 32:34David Hoffman?

  P2 proving system and a first of its kind ZK-powered interoperability layer Polygon 2.0 will give users and devs unlimited scalability and unified liquidity. Right now, there is a Polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon proof-of-stake. If approved, Polygon proof-of-stake would become a Layer 2 ZK-EVM, Vilidium. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to help the Polygon community give the internet the value layer it deserves. Alex, are there any other use cases that you see in the crypto space? Like airdrop farming is another one, but just like the distribution of tokens is muted by the fact that we don't have this proof-of-personhood. Is there any other crypto-native applications that you see?

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Oh, man, so many.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  I'll start with crypto first and then we can go a little bit broader. But I think within crypto, one of the things that like one of the things that is an outcome of blockchain for me personally is that I travel the world, which I didn't do when I was in grad school. So I saw many different countries. I talked to so many users in Latin America, in Europe, in Africa, literally everywhere. And I think there is a lot of financial primitives that technically the space can deliver. But right now, it does not for a couple of different reasons. One is just UX, but a really big one is you need reputation for many of these things, right? This whole idea of a credit score, basically, like an on-chain credit score.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  So you can do undercaliberized lending, I think is a really big idea that hopefully is coming. And proof-of-personhood, generally when you just like you try to build your mental model, what proof-of-personhood actually means.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  It's the foundation for identity. It's not identity. These are two different things because identity means I'm a unique person and this is my name, that's my date of birth, or that's my GitHub account. So proof-of-personhood is like the foundational building block to make all of these things happen.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  So yeah, this was like a little rant, but there's a couple of things here.

• 34:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure. Sam, most people know you from your work at OpenAI and ChatGPT. Are there any specific or concrete paths that you see between integrating OpenAI and WorldCoin?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  I think it's too early to talk about specifics there, but you know, as we sort of watch this play out in the coming decade,

• 35:03Speaker 00

  hopefully it will reveal itself.

• 35:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, so how does the actual distribution of the WorldCoin token, and that's the name of the token, correct, WorldCoin?

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:12David Hoffman?

  How does that actually get into people's hands? And what is like the distribution plan for like, how do I get WorldCoin? And how much do I get? And what are the details behind that?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Look, many, many of the details we can just not talk about here for, for the regulatory uncertainty in the United States. You're, you're certainly aware of, so we will not go too much in the details here. But the, the broad mechanism is, is super easy. You download an app, you verify with an, with an ORP. At some point you get your proof of person out and then you receive a weekly ownership in WorldCoin. And the whole system is built in a way so this can actually scale to billions of people. And it will remain like this over the coming, the coming decade or so.

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  So is there's an incentive to getting your WorldCoin ID earlier? Cause then you start to get your distribution of the coins sooner?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, like you have like this whole reinforcing flywheel, right? It's not just about a roll ID. It's, you kind of, I mean, at launch, WorldCoin is these three things that we, we talked about is WorldCoin. It's WorldID and then it's the world app. Of course, the world app is like way less important for the grand scheme of things than the other two. But I think one mental model you can have is WorldCoin is a protocol that is designed to scale itself to all of humanity, which is something we've never seen because civil resistance was never there, right? So you have. It's unclear to me if you zoom, if you go 10 years in the future, what will be more important? Will it actually be the token or really deep world ID? Because we have never seen a token being held by 3 billion people, let's say.

• 36:49David Hoffman?

  Zooming out a little bit on the same thread, Alex. The WorldCoin project is a bunch of very ambitious moving parts. So there's the orb, which is the hardware component, which is for like on its own frontier of hardware. There's the coin with its own frontier of distribution mechanism. There's the mobile app. Then there's like the actual boots on the ground scanning effort. Then there's the layer two, which we haven't even talked about, built on the OP stack. There's a ton of moving parts here. I probably missed a few, so maybe you could also like finish, finish the list. But also, once we're done finishing the list, what's it like managing a startup that requires like and probably an extreme level of excellency across so many of these domains?

• 37:34Speaker 00

  I mean, I think Sam can give a little bit of the high level answer after, but it certainly has been a crazy, a crazy journey because I think what people always say is like in the beginning, we literally have been like four people. All of us came right out of university, so we never worked anywhere.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  And now it's this big machine of 180 people across these different fields making this happen. And as you said, we have like, we have a quite sophisticated hardware team. We have quite sophisticated protocol team, economics team, AI teams. There's like so many things here, so many moving parts. So it's, it definitely was quite a ride. And then over time, it went from the early focus was hardware. That was the big thing to focus on and after that product. And right now it's pretty much operations. So it's going to become this like big operational machine. I don't know, Sam, how was it, how was it for you?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been very cool to watch how good the WorldCoin team has gotten at getting good at new challenges.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  One of the things I love most about startups is just is watching people learn just how much they can get done and just how much they're capable of, small teams in particular. And that's been very fun to see the WorldCoin team do all these things. I don't remember who I first heard this from, but there's like a sort of somewhat famous saying in startups, if you knew how hard it was going to be, you would never start. So it's important that you're like a little naive at the beginning, but you can accomplish it like, like smart, driven, aligned, small groups of talented people can accomplish so much more than they realize because they're like, their comparison is working in a big company or being in school or something like that.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  But even then, like the WorldCoin team has certainly outperformed expectations, even adjusted for that.

• 39:25David Hoffman?

  Sam, what's your more like day to day involvement with the WorldCoin project? Maybe it's not day to day, but like where are, where does your rubber meet the pavement with WorldCoin?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Kind of whatever Alex needs. I try to underestimate, but what that looks like varies a lot. And I try to just sort of help anywhere I can, but there's no sort of specific like, oh, this is like my area or my project.

• 39:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, so Alex, one component that I want to delve into is the layer two. This was actually announced not too long ago that WorldCoin is building on the OP stack with optimism. Can you talk about a little bit more about that choice? Why that choice? Why a layer two on Ethereum? And also like, what does the actual protocol do for WorldCoin? What's the actual mechanism in the entire, the inside of the whole project?

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, actually, what we, what we announced last week, what you're talking about is actually that the token itself will launch on OP mainnet.

• 40:20David Hoffman?

  All right. OP mainnet.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we did not, we did not alone announce the OP stack layer two. We will certainly do our own layer two at some point, but not at launch. So this is going to come later in the year.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Why optimism is we just spent so much time with the team like Liam, Carl, kind of the whole crew. And actually, over the last couple of months, like so many things, they gave us so much feedback on the whole technology stack. And so we just decided, I think, two months ago, that we have to intensify this and actually really start working together. So of course, it starts with the migration, but it goes much deeper than that. So we will, people work together on identity primitives, then of course with base as well. Like, so yeah, there's many things coming.

• 41:11David Hoffman?

  So the simple implementation is just putting the WorldCoin on optimism. That's where it starts. I'm assuming there's additional infrastructure that WorldCoin will also use the optimism chain for?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So quick, just like zooming out, what does it actually mean? Infrastructure for WorldCoin? So WorldID is completely separate because WorldID is kind of if we abstract it away, it's a Merkle, a Merkle tree that sits on Ethereum mainnet and users then make an inclusion proof to that. So that's, and that then is bridging to different ecosystems. So that will not only be the case for Ethereum. Then again, as you just said, yes, the token will be an OP mainnet. And then later in the year, we will have our own layer two, which is in our case important for a bunch of reasons. I think also because just of that identity primitive and making it useful for a bunch of native applications.

• 42:05David Hoffman?

  So key to the WorldCoin project is that everyone actually gets their iris scanned, which is funny if you think about it, it's like if WorldCoin is successful, everyone's putting their eye into the orb. But I want to talk about the boots on the ground effort as it's been so far. So like, how many irises have been scanned? How many people have gotten their WorldCoin ID? And what's been the strategy behind producing that?

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Sure. So in total, right now, it's 1.6 million, actually 1.7 million as of yesterday, 1.7 million total. All of that still with a very small operation for us at least. So it's like, it's right now 210 devices. Most of the time it was around 50. And that's mostly because we actually had to iterate on product. And scale really only matters once everything is launched. So we are weeks away from launch. That's why we talk right now.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And how was the strategy? Well, once we learned we had to build hardware, which was, again, a really painful insight. The next big question was, I think this was like the super early days when I also didn't know Sam super well, but back then it was okay. How many people will sign up once you show up with an ORB on a public place? Was the first big question. Like, does this actually work? Can you generate enough throughput with one of those devices to actually scale to the billions? This was like our super early definition of what product market fit would mean. And so we built the prototype and it was literally me running through Berlin with these devices and kind of signing up users.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  And I remember back then, Sandra, one of my colleagues, did 70 signups a day. And with that 70 signups a day, we raised a Series A back then. Because if you take 70 signups a day, you multiply it by a week, then you arrive at 3 to, I mean, back then it was 300 to 500 signups a week. That means that tens of thousands of devices would be enough to scale to the billions. So that's the, it was like one of the very surprising things. And then from there, this was like phase one, which was like super early proof of concept. Then two, as we took it global, we had 15 devices that we just tried to deploy globally and across many different markets to understand if there's any fundamental roadblock that

• 44:24Speaker 00

  we are not aware of. So we went from Tromsø, Norway, which was, the capacitors blew up because it was so cold, to Nairobi, Kenya, to Latin America, and all of that in COVID. So it was like quite a, it was quite a ride. We had these team members that traveled through five different countries to end up in the one we actually wanted to go to because of COVID. And then most recently, now we have obviously like a much more professional team in that regard specifically. We focused on four markets, which is Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lisbon, Portugal, Nairobi, Kenya, and well, Bangalore and Delhi, both in India.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  And these four, because these are kind of the perfect launchpads for the larger region. So if you want to build product, these are the four regions we believe you should actually start. So we basically parachuted product teams in all of these four locations. I try to travel a lot to them and we're going to scale from there.

• 45:27David Hoffman?

  How does one scale out to, you can't be employing every single individual operator of an orb to get to the world's population, correct? So how do you get the orb spread around the world into the hands of people who are operators? Are you employing every single orb operator? What's the strategy there?

• 45:46Speaker 00

  No, and the much bigger part is it actually has to become a decentralized protocol. Right? So this is not, that's not a strategy. So how it works is when you operate an orb, you get paid by the protocol for every sign up you do.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  In short, and there's a lot of-

• 46:02David Hoffman?

  The orb itself is an affiliate program?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Well, in some sense, it's like, there's a lot of incentive mechanisms behind it to actually kind of make it work. But that's where it's going to go. And then also the Rokon Foundation is basically just setting the standard. And then later, other people will be able to produce their own hardware devices that connect to the protocol. Right? So this is just a kind of stage one of this large process that it's going to take probably 10 years to get done, to fully decentralize this. But Rokon Foundation sets the standard. Everyone can produce orbs. At some point, everyone will be able to operate them as well. And the protocol basically pays people. So that's the high level abstraction.

• 46:43David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Okay, so the orb actually turns into a commercial product that can be built by anyone who desires to participate? And there's some sort of financial incentive coming from the protocol for orb manufacturers to manufacture orbs?

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, correct.

• 46:59David Hoffman?

  Interesting. And then just what are the learning lessons from the boots on the ground for the orb operators? Like, since they are not part of the actual company, how, what's it like to manage these people?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Oh man, so many. It started with the very obvious ones, right? So now we have a team of people that worked at Airbnb and Uber and all these companies. So they brought a lot of experience of just how to operate these decentralized models. There's a lot around quality control and fraud detection and things like that, which we don't have to go super deep in. But then the other thing is just like get as much power to the user, right? So put as much in the app as possible, educate the user as much as possible before to sign up. So there's a bunch of things there, but it certainly was a journey and it still will

• 47:58Speaker 00

  be because it's 200 devices, not tens of thousands. So this is going to be the major thing for this year.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't think we've ever seen a project from humanity that has this kind of like spec. Where are we, would you say, Alex, in this roadmap for WorldCoin? So it started in 2020. Alex, Sam said that the progress of WorldCoin, the professionalism from WorldCoin has exceeded expectations. So maybe we're a little bit further ahead in the roadmap. So where are we in the grand arc of the WorldCoin project and how much left is there to do?

• 48:33Speaker 00

  I'm going to give my answer then. I'm actually curious about Sam's, but even though we worked on this now for a while, we are still extremely early. I mean, we are literally ahead of launch. That's why we talk right now. But there was just so much engineering that went into this and so much building that had to go into this. So we are super early and of course, everything we have seen so far is extremely promising. That's why we are here. So we have like 600,000 MAUs in the app. We had more than 40,000 users a month with only 200 of those devices. There's like a lot of things that are super exciting, but, oh, sorry, 40,000 a week, not a month.

• 49:13David Hoffman?

  What do you think, Sam?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  We have three orders of magnitude, three and a half orders of magnitude of growth in front of us, you know? It's hard to say it's anything but extremely early.

• 49:25David Hoffman?

  Alex, I remember when the WorldCoin project debuted and WorldCoin got absolutely hazed by the crypto industry. And I think it was kind of an expected outcome, like, hey, stick your iris in this orb and then you'll get some tokens. It was the spinal reflex, I think, is pretty obvious. One thing I've noticed, however, is that it has attracted talent in ways that I haven't seen other projects. There's been a number of people who, there's actually been two instances in my life that I've been in a social situation, a social setting, and somebody from the WorldCoin company pulls out an orb. People inside of WorldCoin love

• 50:07David Hoffman?

  the orbs. And so slowly, the WorldCoin team has continued to build, continued to iterate, attracted some talent, attracted people that were not on the WorldCoin team, that are now on the WorldCoin team, that I've respected just as builders and thinkers and developers in this space. And so there's been, not only has the project of WorldCoin progressed in its own, on its own trajectory, but the perception around WorldCoin has changed. Can you just talk about that experience?

• 50:35Speaker 00

  So the initial, we actually didn't want to announce back then, there was this, there was this super annoying journalist leak that had us to react. So I was, just imagine this, like, imagine this vividly of like, we were, back then, a super small team, and because of COVID, I just lost my student visa. We were locked in this ridiculous situation, we were like, sitting in a small town called Erlangen in Germany. And on a Friday night, I think 11:00 PM, I get this email from a Bloomberg reporter. It's like, okay, if you don't react, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna write about this. And everything blows up. It's like, just, the internet melts. Sam Altman is launching this like, thing. And

• 51:20Speaker 00

  so there's 10 people in a small village in Germany trying to figure things out, it's like, as early as it gets, basically. And of course, it was incredibly hard. It was like, managing, managing the team through this, and then also managing the, just like, actually scaling the company, raising capital with that, with that early pushback was super, super hard, but.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Then, I mean, we just, as you said, I think we attracted incredible people, one of the best, one of the best teams in the space for sure, but then not even within that industry, I think broadly speaking, we have like incredible people here. Just like this flywheel started happening, then people also outside of Rokken got excited about it. And I think, of course, AI helped a lot with this because people just understand why this matters so much and why it's important and that actually might be the solution to one of the biggest problems we face. And the recent weeks has, it was just incredible because now we get so much excitement and people are hyped about it. What do you think, Sam? How was it for you?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  I've been through some of these up and down cycles before, so I was less fooled by it. But this was the, the, um, the level of like personal attacks and hatred was, was definitely high. I remember like logging into Twitter one day. I try not to read a ton of Twitter. I think it's a little bit unhealthy, but I logged in one day right after and just spent like a long time scrolling through whatever we were saying. I was like, wow, this is like, these are quite personal attacks.

• 52:57David Hoffman?

  Sam, do you also get that from the OpenAI side of things?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, OpenAI has like, you know, super fans and super haters. So you kind of get used to both.

• 53:10David Hoffman?

  I think that there are certain people that regardless of what you tell them about the tech inside of the orb and the zero knowledge cryptography that just simply won't accept the privacy side of things and

• 53:23Speaker 02

  And they're super welcome never to sign up.

• 53:25David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Like I, you know, I think that's like really important to keep saying.

• 53:29David Hoffman?

  Right, yes. I talked about on a recent Bankless episode, the weekly roll up that this episode was happening and that I got breakfast with the WorldCoin member and there was like an orb sitting on the table, just like a little ornament. It's kind of fun. And some people were like, oh, yeah, Bankless is talking to the WorldCoin people? Like, wow, like, can't believe they're doing that, right? So some people are going to be this extreme, extreme case where

• 53:52Speaker 02

  That's, that's for sure. But it's been amazing to me. And I don't even fully understand why, like how much it feels like the kind of like overall.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Meme has changed.

• 54:02David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, the the the less extreme side of the crypto world seems to be keeping an open mind. But then

• 54:10Speaker 00

  More than that, it feels like me, like an enthusiastic mind at this point, which is a big turnaround.

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what would you say? It's like, I don't have the technical skills to actually be able to explain the separation of the privacy between like the identity and the app and all that stuff. There's great documentation that's very, very robust that that listeners could go read and they get the technical explanation as to how the how the privacy is actually maintained. But then there's, I want to present the argument that like, there's also the world of unknown unknowns. Like ultimately, there is every like, the goal of WorldCoin is to scan everyone's irises. And while there is the technical explanation for why this is still secure, there's also just like, yeah, but there you're still doing it.

• 54:55David Hoffman?

  And so maybe we could reflect on that, like Alex, what would you say to that feedback or criticism?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Well, as you, as you could imagine, I have a lot of these conversations. And I think for for 99% of these conversations, the answer is usually just they actually did not read the docs or they just did not try to understand what is happening. And so you can usually calm down people quite a bit, but just actually going through the details and going to keep it. There's like much bigger headline, which is you should not have to trust us and you will not have to trust us, right? Because things already are open source and like, that's actually, that's a common feedback we get right now. And I think it's totally fair that not everything yet is open source.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  So this is obviously, we we move on that as fast as we can, but there is just like real world kind of trade offs we have to, we have to work around.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  So yeah, just don't trust us, like look at the documentation, look at the code. If if you find something you don't like, like literally our head of engineering was the head of engineering of C cache before. All right, just talk to us and we we will figure things out. But I think we're in a pretty good place.

• 56:13David Hoffman?

  So if people are piqued by WorldCoin as a result of this episode, what is WorldCoin looking for? What does it need the most to help move the needle the most? What do you guys need?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  We need, I mean, we literally hire across the spectrum. Everything from, everything from product to AI.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  I mean, in our case, it's not like, it's not AGI. It's neural networks on edge to detect all kinds of fraud attacks. So it's a different kind of skill set, of course. But, but yeah, like literally across the spectrum. What do you, what do you could imagine? If you're super operationally talented, if you're technically talented, just, just reach out.

• 56:53David Hoffman?

  And Sam, since I have you here, really quickly, where do you stand on the AI alignment debate?

• 57:01Speaker 02

  I, I think there's,

• 57:04Speaker 02

  let me try to talk about it in three different ways. Number one, we need to make a lot more technical progress. We've laid out our, part of our roadmap for how we think we're going to solve it. But one unarguable thing is we need new techniques beyond RLHF. I think OpenAI has been characterized, I don't characterize, I don't understand how, for saying that, oh, alignment is solved because we have RLHF. Absolutely not, like I want to be super, super clear. So there's a ton of work to do there. I think the shape of it all is going to look fairly different than what people think in a vacuum. I think like with all really hard, complex problems at the intersection of technology and society, like it's, it's kind of hard to sit in an ivory tower and think, think it through all the way.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  We've had really smart people doing that for a long time. Say they've made limited progress and a lot of the progress or

• 57:55Speaker 02

  assumed progress they thought they made has turned out to be wrong because the technology went in a little bit different direction. So we need to do more work and I think the way we need to do that is contact with these systems as we develop them, contact with reality. Number two, I think, once there is a technical, once we have the technical ability to align a super intelligence, we then need a complex set of international regulatory agreements, cooperation between the leading efforts. But we've got to make sure that we actually like. Have people implement this solution and don't have sort of, for lack of a better word, rogue efforts that say, okay, well, I can make a more powerful thing and I'm going to do it

• 58:35Speaker 02

  without paying the alignment tax, or whatever that is. And so there will need to be a very complex set of negotiations and agreements that happen. And we're trying to start laying the groundwork for that now. And then third is, I think we talk a lot, and this is, I'm glad we do, about the alignment problem. But what we talk less about is what about humans misusing this? Or even much weaker things than AGI to cause like great havoc or do great damage to society. System is like aligned with its operator, but doing something we don't want. So how are those rules of what the limits are going to get written? And how are we going to

• 59:16Speaker 02

  enforce them on limiting intentional misuse?

• 59:22David Hoffman?

  Awesome. Guys, Sam, Alex, thank you so much for joining me on Bankless today to walk through the WorldCoin project. And I'm excited to see what it produces in the future.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot for having us, David.

• 59:32David Hoffman?

  Guys, Bankless Nation, you know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.