Staring into a lens on a cybernetic sphere so it can analyze your iris and generate a cryptographic verification of your uniqueness as a human being may not be for everybody, but Tools for Humanity says that enough somebodies have verified a “World ID” via its Orb devices that its World app qualifies for an upgrade.
The San Francisco-based startup’s Android and iOS apps are adding World Chat, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging platform. The announcement emphasizes how this combines secure messaging with identity verification that isn’t built into such competing apps as Signal (to the dismay of some high-profile users). World Chat displays conversations between users who have verified their World ID in blue bubbles, while other chats appear in gray.
An upcoming feature will assure other people that your displayed profile picture isn’t fake and does match the portrait embedded in your World ID.
World Chat also supports such extra services as person-to-person cryptocurrency payments and the ability to run “Mini Apps” in conversations for financial tools, games and the prediction markets (aka, prop-bet platforms) Kalshi and Polymarket.
Tools calls World a “super app,” echoing the ambitions Elon Musk has raised for X. Neither app seems close to delivering the all-encompassing services available in China’s WeChat, which is probably fine, given how in the PRC that app amounts to a single point of failure under government pressure.
The World App, which already relies on an Ethereum blockchain to record new World ID verifications, is also gaining additional cryptocurrency tools to store and exchange stablecoins with values tied to real-world currencies.
The Tools event treated in-person attendees with the World app to a gift of $10 worth of Argentinian pesos. Then it featured a demo of one Tools developer in Cancun sending a cross-border transaction—often a source of frustration and fees—from Mexican pesos to US dollars via stablecoins for each, to an executive in the room who moved the money to the “World Card” that Visa launched in April.
The company brags that September data from the market-research firm Sensor Tower show that World is now the “most-used self-custody digital wallet globally by monthly active users” in the world.
But Thursday’s announcements from Tools were short on data points about its progress towards its larger mission of ensuring that humans can differentiate themselves from bots online (and sometimes also verify their age ranges) without having to upload live selfies or images of government ID documents.
Who Wants to Be a ‘Verified Human’?
In the US, since March you’ve been able to use a World ID to verify your Razer account and unlock some extra perks in the process. A publicist with that computer-gaming firm did not answer a query sent Thursday about how many Razer users had done so.
On Thursday, World announced a new partner with potentially much wider appeal, considering how many people use dating apps and how problematic fake accounts are on them. But for now, Tinder is only supporting World ID verification in Japan, where users who take that step will get a blue “verified human” badge on their profiles.
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Tools touts almost 40 million users worldwide—to be exact, 37,767,547 shown on the World site just after noon Eastern on Friday—but spokeswoman Lily Gordon clarified that this is a measure of total signups, not daily or monthly active users. Less than half have verified their World IDs: 17,628,865 as of mid-day Friday.
Stepping up to an Orb so that complex device can generate an encoded proof of uniqueness—which it sends to a World App user’s phone before wiping its own records of all the data it collected—remains the predominant way to verify a World ID and then claim a reward in the form of World’s WLD cryptocurrency token.
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But Orbs remain scarce in the US, especially if you don’t live at its southeast corner. Of 1,097 active Orbs around the world, only 29 are in the States, 18 in Florida.
You can also verify your World ID with an NFC passport from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus certain other national ID cards featuring that wireless technology. Gordon did not break out the number of so-called credential verifications on the platform.
I am not among that unknown contingent, as I have yet to get credential verification to work in dozens of attempts with my 2021-issued US passport using the World app on a Pixel 9 Pro.
Most of the time, the app failed to complete the scan while complaining that “You are moving your phone too quickly” even when I had it sitting on top of the passport on my desk. Only once, it got the point of a “no photo loaded” error, which per a support note means “your photo information was not found in the ID’s chip when it was scanned.”
At Thursday’s event, TFH’s co-founders were relatively modest in characterizing the company’s progress to date. Chairman and co-founder Sam Altman, who often talks a big game in his more prominent role as CEO of OpenAI, said the company has reached 1% of the market but called that “a huge amount of the work.”
Co-founder Alex Blania, meanwhile, emphasized how much work remains in the company’s self-assigned quest to build “fundamental infrastructure for society,” in his words: “Where we’re going, we have to get to hundreds of millions of people.”
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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