Outlining a path to a permissionless protocol owned and governed by all of humanity.

The goal of the Worldcoin project is to ingrain humanness and financial equitability in the global digital infrastructure. Grand challenges in the next decade are global income inequality, governance of existential risks and distinguishing humans from artificial intelligence. Humanity needs a protocol to solve these challenges. Worldcoin aims to be this protocol.

To succeed, Worldcoin must grow beyond its current community, to be built, owned and governed by all the people. You can join the community and help make the protocol robust by:

- joining the Community Grants Program
- reading the Worldcoin Whitepaper
- reviewing the Worldcoin Tech Tree

To become part of the global digital infrastructure, Worldcoin must be as robust, widespread and neutral as the internet itself. Any lesser standard is insufficient to effectively address the grand challenges. This has been a priority from day one, and much has already been achieved. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with advancing Worldcoin, the goal itself needs to be defined more concretely.

Outlining a path to a permissionless protocol owned and governed by all of humanity

Advancing Decentralization

Learn about zero-knowledge proofs, Semaphore and how they help the World ID protocol enable anonymous actions.

The above content speaks only as of the date indicated. Further, it is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and so may be incorrect and may change without notice. A full disclaimer can be found in our Terms of Use and Important User Information can be found on our Risks page.

Intro to zero-knowledge proofs, Semaphore and their application in World ID

World App is the first Worldcoin wallet, designed to bring digital identity and global finance to everyone.

* Worldcoin tokens are not intended to be available to individuals or companies who are residents of, or are located, incorporated or have a registered agent in, the United States or other restricted territories.

World App, the first wallet for the Worldcoin ecosystem, is launching today. It’s designed to be friendly, and it supports private digital identity and a new financial system. You can use it to authenticate with World ID to prove you’re a real person, get your Worldcoin tokens and send digital money anywhere.

After extensive development and beta testing in a limited number of countries, we’re excited to share Phase I of World App and to make it globally available for the first time. Over time, it will evolve into a toolkit to empower individuals in the Age of AI, enabling the usage of proof of personhood, the equitable global distribution of digital currencies and ultimately a path to AI-funded UBI.

Worldcoin-app-web-globe-animation.mp4

The first Worldcoin wallet, designed to bring digital identity & global finance to all.

Introducing
World App

A path to an open and permissionless identity protocol.

The Worldcoin project is initiating an open and permissionless identity protocol called World ID. It empowers individuals to verify their humanness online while maintaining their anonymity through zero-knowledge proofs. Advancements in AI make it difficult to distinguish between AI and humans on the internet, highlighting a need for authentic human recognition and verification. To help address this, individuals can receive a future-proof unique human credential through a secure biometric device in a privacy-preserving manner. Importantly, this enables a path to AI-funded non-state UBI and the equitable global distribution of digital currencies. The project's early contributors have developed initial versions of a hardware device, a mobile client, and a deployment mechanism—all of which will gradually become decentralized. World ID will ultimately enable the protocol to be governed by the people, ensuring that the protocol benefits everyone.

"participants in the study could only distinguish between human or AI text with 50-52% accuracy, about the same random chance as a coin flip."; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208839120

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/FilteringOutTheBotsUnique2017NetNeutralityComments1024Update.pdf

Facial geometry mapping and audio style transfer facilitate digital impersonation via audio and video deep fakes. Notably, in 2022, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, was impersonated by a deep fake. The attacker managed to conduct video conferences with several mayors of European capitals for up to 15 minutes. Some of the attacks were only uncovered days after the call. 

Democratic voting (one person one vote), quadratic voting, square root voting or any other weighting that requires the notion of a unique person see https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html. Note that this is unlikely to replace the need to nevertheless prove relationships for certain applications.

Note that this doesn’t prevent users from creating a limited number of alternative accounts. Any platform could still allow several, but limited amounts of accounts to be created.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763

Note that the FPR (false positive rate of 1:N comparison against everyone who is enrolled) which can be approximated as N*FMR (false match rate for each individual 1:1 comparison) increases with the number of enrolled individuals. Therefore a false match rate of far beyond one in one billion is required to get to a global scale.

https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~az/lectures/est/iris.pdf

Although minor aging effects can be observed, they are negligible and considerably less significant compared to the variability within the image capture process (source). Employing optimized hardware and software can improve image capture consistency.

Humanness
in the Age of AI

World ID is a new privacy-first protocol that brings global proof of personhood to the internet.

Introducing World ID and SDK

The thinking, ideas, and technology behind a more human economic system.

The Worldcoin Blog

Advancing Decentralization

Intro to zero-knowledge proofs, Semaphore and their application in World ID

Introducing World App

Humanness in the Age of AI

Introducing World ID and SDK

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