Digital Currency With Eye-Scanning Orb Aims To Build Largest ‘Identity Community’ Possible

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project featuring an eye-scanning orb that issues a digital passport is planning on creating the largest “financial and identity community” possible, Reuters reported.

Worldcoin is distributing orbs around the world that scan an individual’s irises to verify whether they are a human to give them a “World ID,” according to Worldcoin’s website. The project is on a “mission of building the biggest financial and identity community that we can,” Ricardo Macieira, general manager for Worldcoin developer Tools For Humanity, toldReuters on Wednesday.

To obtain a “World ID,” customers need to make an appointment for an in-person eye scan using Worldcoin’s “orb,” a silver ball that can “verify humanness and uniqueness in a secure and privacy-preserving way,” according to Worldcoin’s website. The orbs are currently in numerous countries around the world, including the U.S., according to the project’s website.

Maceira told Reuters that Worldcoin will keep up its expansion to “all the parts of the world that will accept us.”

Individuals at registration locations in Britain, India and Japan told Reuters they were signing up to get 25 free Worldcoin tokens the company is offering to people in certain countries who verify their humanity through the eye scan.

The WorldID can solve the problem of differentiating between humans from artificial intelligence (AI) while preserving privacy, Worldcoin stated in its late July launch. Worldcoin asserted it could “enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path for AI-funded UBI [Universal Basic Income].”

UBI is a recurring cash payment distributed to everyone regardless of financial background, according to Stanford’s Basic Income Lab. Altman previously told Reuters that UBI will not be put into place until “very far in the future” and he was unsure of the way it would work, but he asserted Worldcoin is a crucial step on the way to its implementation.

“I don’t think we are going to be the ones generating universal basic income,” Macieira told Reuters. “If we can do the infrastructure that allows for governments or other entities to do so we would be very happy.”

“The idea is that as we build this infrastructure and that we allow other third parties to use the technology,” Macieira added.

Worldcoin did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.