DOHA, Qatar—I’m pretty sure that I met Adrian Ludwig, chief architect of Tools for Humanity, at Web Summit Qatar here in late February.
But while the person across a table from me could not have gotten into the room without showing a conference badge he obtained by presenting a government-issued photo ID to conference staffers, I did not ask him to show me that document. He did not ask the same of me. Instead, we could trust that no impostors had shown up at the meeting set up by a company publicist because enough other parties had verified our identities by the time we sat down.
Bot or Not
The problem Tools for Humanity says it aims to solve, however, exists not IRL but online. There, verifying an account as a human can be hard and verifying that it’s a specific human can be harder. TFH’s solution to a growing plague of bots is a roughly 8-inch-wide spherical device called the Orb that scans people’s irises to generate a unique and anonymous “World ID.”
“I come from a security background,” says Ludwig, who earlier led those efforts at Google’s Android and Nest divisions and joined TFH in January 2024. “The framing that I have is that there is no root of trust for what a human is on the internet.”
(Credit: TFH)
The Orb, as explained in the FAQs of this company backed by investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, takes pictures of a person’s eyes to generate a record based on the unique patterns in their iris. It then encrypts that in a way that can’t be later reversed to extract biometric data and sends this code in a “personal custody package” to the person’s World smartphone app. That app then checks the code against TFH’s “uniqueness service” to ensure it’s never been created before. If that checks out, a corresponding entry for the code gets written into the Ethereum-based World Network blockchain.
Finally, the Orb deletes all the biometric data it just processed, leaving it up to the user to safeguard that package and back it up as they see fit.
TFH has gone through a few iterations of this process. Last May, it switched to a “secure multi-party computation” protocol that encrypted existing iris codes (after which it deleted the old stored codes), and in October it launched an “anonymized multi-party computation” protocol that it says “ensures that no iris codes ever leave the user’s device.”
For more details—so many more—consult World’s roughly 35,000-word whitepaper.
Not All Locations Eligible for This Offer
I can’t speak to how this works from personal experience, as Ludwig did not bring one of these devices to Doha. He suggested that an Orb isn’t the kind of hardware you want to take to a security checkpoint: “Anytime you bring something interesting to an airport, it gets complicated.”
I may not get a chance anytime soon: World’s site lists 817 Orb locations worldwide but none in the US. TFH spokeswoman Lily Gordon says the company is working on an upgrade to US-based Orbs. Other countries, such as Portugal and Spain, have issued temporary bans on Orb data collection as they research privacy implications of its operation.
(Credit: TFH)
World ID holders can also use the World app, available for Android and iOS, to import data from an NFC-enabled passport into their ID. They can then use the app to attest to their humanness and individual identities without revealing private details. In other words, this is not online authentication with Chinese characteristics.
In January, TFH introduced a simpler, Orb-free way to verify a World ID that lets people skip ahead to that option: Use the app to verify a World ID by reading data off a passport, US ones included. That leaves the issue of where to use a verified World ID: Services have to build in support for that, and not too many have done so. It’s the same problem that other proposals for decentralized, user-controlled identity have faced. See, for example, the digital-wallet ambitions of Inrupt, a startup co-founded by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
World App (Credit: TFH)
For example, you can bring a World ID to Discord and Reddit groups as an added form of verification, if an admin enables it.
On Monday, Razer took a more significant step when it announced a partnership with World to support World ID verification of Razer ID accounts. TFH did not disclose financial terms of this deal.
In Doha, Ludwig says the largest social networks should be interested in World ID as a solution to their struggles with fake users and bots: “They already do pay millions if not billions of dollars to solve this problem with custom infrastructure that’s not very effective.”
Dating apps should also be on board; some have “actually reached out to us,” he says. Foreign governments with national ID regimes have voiced interest too. “We’ve had that conversation in a lot of depth with several governments,” he says, name-checking Malaysia and Taiwan.
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The Coin of This Realm
Ludwig emphasizes that TFH is not the gatekeeper of this service and is not “trying to extract value from the user.” He says, “It’s a permissionless protocol, so anyone could build an application that uses this.”
But operating a blockchain, even one as relatively efficient as Ethereum, is not a cost-free exercise Gordon says its blockchain-writing costs per each new World ID are about $.0008, and World’s breakdown of the Orb’s custom hardware makes clear that it’s an expensive item.
World Network has its own Worldcoin cryptocurrency that’s meant to make the project self-sustaining and give participants a monetary incentive, at the cost of making it more complicated to explain. World’s January post announcing passport verification said using that ID-authentication method would earn a user about 20 WLD over time, and verifying via Orb would get almost 41 WLD over time. People who complete both steps would claim about 61 WLD after a year.
That’s real money; at current rates, finishing both verification paths would net almost $50 in WLD tokens. But for US residents, the total would be zero because TFH isn’t issuing these tokens to people here. “We are waiting for regulatory clarity and are in the process of evaluating that,” Ludwig says. “We’ve been very conservative.”
Asked if the proliferation of meme coins made that regulatory diligence frustrating prompts a smile in response.
With 11,567,689 verified humans on this platform as of Wednesday afternoon—out of 24,744,146 total World app users—the entire concept has a great distance to go. It also should have plenty of runway in the form of money from Altman and others, even if Altman’s habit of making sweeping predictions about AI’s potential (punctuated by occasional warnings of risks up to human extinction) makes him a less-than-ideal hype man for this concept.
Ongoing real-world upside would be much more persuasive and in keeping with Ludwig’s prediction that World ID ”will create value for everybody who’s interacting with that protocol in the future.” But this is the internet, so even a one-time digital-money bonus that didn’t exclude the home of the internet would probably help too.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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