One of the trickier, but potentially one of the most valuable, gadgets that people in the Ethereum community have been trying to build is a decentralized proof-of-personhood solution. Proof of personhood, aka the “unique-human problem“, is a limited form of real-world identity that asserts that a given registered account is controlled by a real person (and a different real person from every other registered account), ideally without revealing which real person it is.
Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, who is best known for being the CEO of OpenAI. The philosophy behind the project is simple: AI is going to create a lot of abundance and wealth for humanity, but it also may kill very many people’s jobs and make it almost impossible to tell who even is a human and not a bot, and so we need to plug that hole by (i) creating a really good proof-of-personhood system so that humans can prove that they actually are humans, and (ii) giving everyone a UBI. Worldcoin is unique in that it relies on highly sophisticated biometrics, scanning each user’s iris using a piece of specialized hardware called “the Orb”: