Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project is chopping its name in half and debuting a faster, simpler “Orb” to scan the irises of billions of people.
Now known simply as “World,” the project’s long-term goal remains the creation of an identity-verification system that lets people “prove their humanity” anonymously online. To get there it has already debuted a fleet of wonky Orbs that scan eyeballs of people who get WLD crypto tokens and a world ID in return.
At a media event, anchored by AI-darling Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania, World employees unveiled plans for “Orb 2.0.” It will be faster to build with fewer parts, faster to run with better chips, and run on open source code.
“We need more orbs, lots more orbs, probably on the order of 1,000 more orbs than we have today,” said chief designer Rich Heley. “Not only more orbs, but more orbs in more places.”
World is opening “premium verification experiences” – essentially storefronts full of orbs – in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. It’s also going to stage orbs in more day-to-day places, like a local coffee shop. People will also be able to summon orbs to their home through an app, “much like a pizza,” Heley said.
While the orbs anchor World’s humanity checkpoint, the project also plans to accelerate adoption of its world ID system by letting people onboard simply by submitting government IDs.
“Of course, they won’t have used an orb so we won’t really know they’re human, we just know they’re a thing that has a passport,” said Chief Information Security Officer Adiran Ludwig. He later added this onboarding route has added checks to stop deepfakes.
A new product called World ID Deep Faces will let internet users confirm that the people they think they’re talking to online aren’t deep fakes – presuming of course they have a World ID.
The token WLD, fell about 5% after the presentation.