The Orb: How Sam Altman's Worldcoin Project Is Using Biometric Data to Create a Global Identity and Financial Network

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If anyone, anyone approaches you with a device that looks like this, my best advice is to turn around and walk away.

The “Orb” | Source: World

The Orb - built by the innocuous-sounding company Tools for Humanity - is a biometric capture device. It is designed to capture a picture of our face and scan our iris to create a biometric signature that can be used to verify our identity and that we are, indeed, human.

The company pitches the process as being “simple, safe, and easily done in just a few seconds.” It promises that our biometric data is safely encrypted and secured on its centralized systems and that “you can choose to delete your data at any point.”

Sure.

A Network for the World(coin)

Longtime readers of The Bleeding Edge will probably recognize the Orb. It’s the biometric device linked to what was known as Worldcoin - a Sam Altman-led blockchain project with a “mission of creating a globally inclusive identity and financial network, owned by the majority of humanity.”

The company has built its technology with a concept of “Proof of Human” (PoH), a digital identity verification to confirm that an individual is actually a unique human and not an artificial intelligence (AI).

Its even grander vision is to “enable global democratic processes” and “show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.” In other words, universal basic income using a digital asset.

I haven’t written about Worldcoin in quite some time because there just didn’t seem to be much going on at all. That was a good thing from my perspective.

But in the last month or so, it appears there has been some movement. Some new capital has been raised, and Worldcoin has been rebranded to just World with a new website URL - world.org.

Part of the rebrand has also included the launch of the World app wallet - a chat function that allows users in the World Network community to both message one another and send or receive digital currencies. The screenshot below demonstrates two humans chatting and transmitting a stablecoin - USDC.

Source: World

But this rebranding from Worldcoin to World doesn’t mean the “coin” has gone away. After all, the digital coin is the honeypot.

The Digital Honeypot

As with almost all blockchain projects, there is a digital token. In the case of World, it’s WLD, which currently trades on a variety of digital asset exchanges with a market capitalization just shy of $1 billion right now.

Price Chart of Worldcoin (WLD) | Source: Messari

WLD is used as a lure to get unsuspecting humans to sign up and allow their biometrics to be scanned. In exchange, they receive a small amount of WLD which is transferred to their World app wallet.

Back in 2023, when the program was rolled out, the offering was 25 WLD for signing up plus some recurring smaller payments after signing up. It appears that has been scaled back, but there is still a monetary incentive to sign up, however small in value that might be.

Again, the pitch is that the World Network will scale to more than a billion users. The model suggests that higher utilization may result in higher prices for WLD, so however small the signup payments are today, the value of WLD may grow significantly.

I can imagine the kinds of things that Orb operators might be saying to humans on the street to get people to give up their biometrics scans and join the World Network…

For anyone who isn’t deeply uncomfortable yet, you should be…

Legitimate Tech, Dubious Motivations

It’s important to remember that Tools for Humanity, the parent company behind World is a for-profit company. And the person behind this whole project is Sam Altman, one of the most prominent figures in the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Altman is a founder of OpenAI, which I believe all my readers know, is one of the leaders in building frontier AI models. OpenAI is well known for programming heavy bias into its AI models with strong political leanings.

There are red flags everywhere.

The technology, however, is legitimate. World’s blockchain technology leans heavily