Inside Worldcoin’s orb factory, audacious and absurd defender of Humanity
(Bloomberg) The picturesque center of Nuremberg, Germany, doesn’t usually have much going in the way of high-tech flair. It has a castle as well as cathedrals, placards celebrating bratwurst and seemingly endless rows of ice cream shops for tourists. On a weekday in mid-May, however, the city hosted some serious geek peacocking for those who were paying close attention.
Visitors to a future-themed retail store called Josephs, just off the main drag, found a mysterious-looking metallic orb the size of a cantaloupe. The Orb, with its shiny chrome finish, sat atop a black pole, which poked out of a large, rectangular wooden base, and this whole arrangement had been placed near one of the windows at the edge of Josephs’ main show floor. Not far from this odd object was Alex Blania, the Orb’s co-creator. He sat in a chair at the head of the room, where an interviewer peppered him with questions in front of dozens of German computer science and engineering students, who were celebrating Blania as the local boy made good.
Europe has a handful of major tech success stories, but it’s long trailed the US in terms of the quantity and quality of its ventures and the breadth of its entrepreneurial ambition. This is precisely why Blania had been put on display near his shiny sphere. He’s the chief executive officer of Tools for Humanity Corp., which uses the Orb as part of an identity verification and cryptocurrency system called Worldcoin. His company, based in San Francisco and Erlangen, Germany, is the ne plus ultra object of Silicon Valley yearning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who started Tools for Humanity and recruited Blania, is a major financial backer, along with Tiger Global Management, Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and dozens of other investors who’ve contributed more than $250 million to, as the company’s website says, “ensure a more just economic system.”
To achieve that not-so-modest goal, Tools for Humanity wants to create a global identity system for humans. The thinking is that artificial intelligence is improving so quickly that we soon will—or may already—need a way to separate humans from machines. In other words, to prevent supersmart AIs from flooding the internet with deepfakes, scams and the propaganda of their choosing, we must have a way to answer the modern existential question: bot or not? And this is where the Orb comes in. It takes images of people’s irises under the supervision of a human Orb associate and grants them a unique World ID, which certifies that a real person belongs to a string of characters the machine generates. You might then use your World ID to log in to Shopify or Reddit or a Discord server, and everyone can feel safer knowing they’re dealing with an actual, fleshy human and not an AI.
This, however, is just Step 1 in a very futuristic vision. People who obtain a World ID can also receive an allotment of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency. Tools for Humanity, which manages Worldcoin, the Orb, World ID and all the rest, argues that crypto will be crucial to solving the income and resource distribution issues that might arise from AI. The company would thus like to create a financial network that could theoretically do things like dole out regular payments to people in need. In this scenario, the Worldcoin network would function as a non-government-run financial backstop for people across the planet.
“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley. You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea”
Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.
On the other hand, the whole scheme has struck many people as ridiculous and dystopian, a privacy nightmare straight from the pages of Orwell. Numerous countries have halted the iris-image-snapping operation out of fear that the people standing in front of the Orbs don’t really know what they’re signing up for and that the collection of biometric data is “unnecessary and excessive,” as a Hong Kong regulator put it in May.
Blania, 30, is well aware of the criticism and admits the Worldcoin effort didn’t get off to the best start. Bloomberg News first reported what the company was up to in 2021, months before the founders were ready to shape any message about their intentions. “We basically got hit in the face really early,” Blania told the students at Josephs.
Over the past year, though, Blania and his team have tried to address the knocks on Worldcoin one by one. They’ve improved the security technology in the Orb and how the company handles customer data. They’ve met with regulators again and again and managed to sway countries such as South Korea and Kenya to lift their Orb bans. Yes, the Worldcoin project can sound nuts. Blania himself gives it maybe a 5% chance of succeeding. Still, he insists in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek that governments and the public simply haven’t caught up to the technological change that’s coming for them, nor are they making the tools they’ll need to deal with the ramifications of AI when it really arrives. ’Tis better to have Orbed and lost than never to have Orbed at all.
“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley,” Blania told the students. “You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea that, if it works, will change everything, and, if it doesn’t work, at least it was worth a try.”
Blania is 6 feet 4 inches and rail thin, with a disarming, easygoing charm even when talking about protocols, the blockchain and biometric identity systems. He has all the highfalutin tech industry patter down but approaches Worldcoin and the problems it’s trying to solve with a stereotypical German engineer’s precision.
Sitting at a cafe next to the Pegnitz River, Blania says he grew up in a small, rural town about 45 minutes away from Nuremberg by car. His father had an unusual consulting job, stepping in as an interim CEO at various companies that found themselves in a state of crisis. His mother worked in accounting and finance. From a young age, Blania took to mechanical and electrical engineering and computer programming. He worked on a variety of projects at home: rebuilding an Austin Mini car, creating an automated beetle counter to monitor forest health and constructing a vertical farm before vertical farms were cool.
In college, Blania developed a fascination with physics and AI. He pursued a master’s degree in physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, then later at the California Institute of Technology, and appeared set for a career as a theoretical physicist.
The stories of Silicon Valley and its wonders, though, were calling to Blania. He made occasional trips from Europe to San Francisco to find a way into the entrepreneurial set. Once at CalTech, Blania drove a dilapidated Toyota Corolla up to San Francisco every weekend in a bid to meet anyone and everyone in the startup scene. These efforts eventually paid off. He’s still not sure how it happened, but Blania had made enough connections to receive a random email one day from Max Novendstern, a young Harvard University grad-turned-entrepreneur known for novel ideas around financial technology.
It was October 2019, and Novendstern said he and Altman, who’d been noodling on the idea of a cryptocurrency project, wondered if Blania would like to interview for a job. “I was not at all in the crypto world,” Blania says. “The email had this two-page vision statement that Sam and Max had written, and I literally didn’t understand any of it.”
Blania, though, was enamored of Altman—a former president of the startup incubator Y Combinator and at the time the newly minted CEO of OpenAI—and his approach to building companies. Blania took two weeks off from school to read as much as possible about crypto and such things as universal basic income, a personal obsession of Altman’s, in which governments agree to give their citizens unconditional, regular payments as a type of safety net. The more Blania read, the more the ideas appealed to him. He came to believe that if crypto were truly mainstream—and not just the stuff of financial speculation and scams—it had the potential to offer people more economic freedom and financial possibility. “The other idea was that artificial general intelligence will happen, and society will reshuffle in meaningful ways, and we will need infrastructure to make all of that for the better of humanity,” Blania says.
OpenAI wouldn’t release ChatGPT for another three years, and the public wasn’t yet discussing the ramifications of AI on a daily basis. Altman and Novendstern, however, were already thinking deeply about it, and now so, too, was Blania. Altman, who declined to be interviewed, talked to Blania repeatedly about a future in which AI could overrun the internet if left unchecked and deliver an economic upheaval that could only be corrected by a nimble financial system allocating funds and computing resources to people around the globe. Blania saw the Worldcoin plan as a combination of “outrageous and ambitious,” and he liked this mixture so much that he chose to go full Silicon Valley and drop out of school to join the venture as a co-founder.
Seeing Green
The Worldcoin project was meant to happen entirely in San Francisco because—of course it was. The global pandemic, however, sent the effort in a different direction.
In March 2020, Blania boarded a plane for Germany. He’d planned to visit some of his former schoolmates to ask for advice on how to engineer a top-class biometric identity system. In the moments before the plane took off, President Donald Trump announced that the US would close its borders. When Blania landed, he expected the travel restrictions to last for a month or two. Instead it became more practical to hunker down in Germany, and the Worldcoin project ended up with a second headquarters in the university town of Erlangen, where Blania assembled the team that would make the first Orb.
The early Worldcoin staffers spent months analyzing existing biometric systems and poring over technical papers, hoping to find the best way to register billions of people on a single identity platform. They quickly realized that some of the most common systems, such as facial recognition and thumbprints, wouldn’t fit Worldcoin’s technical requirements.
Its biometric scanner would need to confirm first and foremost that it was processing a real human. This meant the scanner would need to check for things like the heat signatures of a living being. It would also have to certify in an instant that the person being scanned was different from the millions of people who’d been verified previously. The only system that seemed up to many of Worldcoin’s aims was India’s national biometric database, which relied on iris scans for its strongest form of authentication.
One of the drawbacks of the biometric methods used in many smartphones is that, in a Mission: Impossible-style scenario, a person (or superintelligent robot) could fool them by wearing a mask or making a copy of a fingerprint. The iris, though, is far more challenging to mimic, because it carries with it so much variation, or what people in biometrics call entropy. There are diamond-shaped holes of various sizes known as crypts that dot the iris and lines called furrows that form rings at the iris’s outer edge. Every person’s iris also has wide pigment gradients, making the eye appear like a marble. Even identical twins have different patterns.
The task for the Worldcoin team was to borrow from the iris-scanning techniques in India and elsewhere and complement them with an array of other technologies to certify that a human was present at the time of scanning. The engineers would have to do all this while making the scanning as quick and easy as possible.
Worldcoin could’ve designed a simple box to hold all this hardware, something a factory could churn out with relative ease. But the founders felt compelled to make a splash. Naturally they settled on a shiny, metallic sphere that looks like a giant cyborg eyeball.
The first Orb designs came together in humble settings. Blania had recruited Fabian Bodensteiner, a former schoolmate from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, to join the Worldcoin effort. Since graduating, Bodensteiner had started a hardware engineering consulting firm, and he had a space at his office in Erlangen for the initial tinkering. He, Blania and a few others filled the cramped space with circuit boards, cameras and beds so they could sleep next to their hardware.
By the summer of 2021, Blania and his team had a prototype they were testing in the wild. Not only was the Orb spherical and flashy, but it also spat out a physical metal coin from a slot at the front of the device when people registered. (This “feature,” which was meant to make the crypto payout feel more real, came at the suggestion of a design consultant who worked closely with Kanye West. Worldcoin later abandoned the gimmick.) Blania and his team decided to head to the Erlangen city square, tell people about the product and try to sign them up on the spot.
The outing went poorly. The device’s speaker issued bleeps and bloops as directives for people to get closer or farther away from the Orb to improve the focus of its cameras. Off to the side, one of the Worldcoin engineers had to connect wirelessly into the product and debug its software in real time for the registration process to complete. The Worldcoin staff dished out their complex sales pitch in the middle of all this chaos and somehow were able to sign up a few customers. “We were standing there like idiots with this thing,” says Chris Brendel, one of the early Worldcoin team members and its current head of AI and biometrics. “It was so bad.”
Fast-forward three years, and the Orb of today is a technical marvel. At its heart are several interlinked circuit boards that perform a variety of tasks. One checks to see if anyone has attempted to crack the Orb open or manipulated it in unusual ways. Another contains an Nvidia Corp. chip for running computer vision and other AI software across a series of neural networks right on the device. Other sensors track the Orb’s location via GPS and deal with wireless communications to send data to and from the product. A hunk of aluminum nestles among all the electronics to dissipate heat.
Beyond those are the optical systems that take more care and customization to build. Worldcoin wanted to make it possible for people to stroll up to an Orb and scan their iris without requiring detailed positioning instructions or time-consuming adjustments. This proved to be a tough ask. During its tests, the company found that some people would stick their face right up against the Orb, while others stood back at a distance and bobbed and wiggled.
To address this, the Orb uses two lenses. A wide-angle lens assesses the scene and taps into a neural network that forecasts the likely position of someone’s eyes. A telephoto lens paired with a gimbal moves to get the close-up. Worldcoin worked with a Swiss outfit to create a lens with novel focusing technology. The lens is built out of a thin membrane combined with a pool of oil that can be shaped via an electrical current. Oil can be pushed into the membrane to alter the focus of the lens in milliseconds and zoom in on a person’s iris without the addition of any bulky mechanical parts. “It’s much more compact than trying to achieve the same thing with the traditional approach that requires multiple lenses,” says Bodensteiner, who’s led much of the engineering behind the Orb.
To further ensure the verification system’s integrity, the Orb combines a body-heat sensor with two others that scan the depth of field and infrared wavelengths of light to detect, for example, if a person is holding up a screen with an image of a person’s iris instead of presenting a live eyeball.
Jabil Inc., a contract manufacturer, assembles the Orbs in Jena, a town with a rich history in optics technology about two and half hours north of Nuremberg. Carl Zeiss opened his first optics lab there in 1846, and to this day Jena is full of veterans from the industry, some of whom now build the Orbs by hand. It takes about a dozen people working at several different stations to pull together the electronics and test them before the final step, where the chrome shell goes on and creates a seal around all the components. Each Orb costs about $1,500 to make, and, unlike a typical consumer electronics device, there’s no need to produce millions of them or put them in fancy packaging. A second line at the Jabil factory has just opened, which should be able to churn out the tens of thousands of Orbs Blania thinks will be required to register a billion people. So far, Worldcoin has built 3,300 of them.
Irony and sci-fi-flavored doom have surrounded the Worldcoin project at every turn. With OpenAI, Altman seeks to create the powerful AI systems that would make something like Worldcoin necessary. He’s building the problem and then offering to sell people a solution. What’s more, one can only imagine how superintelligent AI will feel about being relegated to “nonhuman” status on the internet and whether it will harbor any animosity toward Altman and Blania or even the rest of us.
We do know exactly how a lot of humans feel about the Worldcoin effort. Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a think tank in Washington, described the two major concerns surrounding the project quite clearly in a statement. “Worldcoin’s approach creates serious privacy risks by bribing the poorest and most vulnerable people to turn over unchangeable biometrics like iris scans and facial recognition images in exchange for a small payout,” wrote Jake Wiener, the group’s legal counsel. “Mass collections of biometrics like Worldcoin threaten people’s privacy on a grand scale, both if the company misuses the information it collects and if that data is stolen.”
Regulators have, at least for the moment, agreed with some of these sentiments. When Worldcoin first came out, people in more than 20 countries could visit an Orb and sign up. That list has dwindled to 12 countries listed on the Worldcoin website, with many governments throughout Europe, Asia and Africa pausing sign-ups on the grounds that the service might take advantage of people and that Worldcoin might lose or abuse the identity information. In the US, people can have their irises scanned at a handful of tech-forward retail outlets if they’d like to join the Worldcoin identity system but don’t receive any of the Worldcoin cryptocurrency—a result of the regulatory uncertainty and headaches that still accompany crypto, as well as an indication that Worldcoin has plenty of work to do to be seen as a mainstream service. Although its Orb sign-ups have increased at a steady rate over the past year, Worldcoin remains well behind its initial targets.
Of course, people have been trading privacy for convenience for decades. Alphabet, Apple and Amazon—just to do the A’s—have vast stores of personal data on billions of people, and it’s arguably much more personal and valuable information than a random string of characters produced from an iris photo. Many people with a smartphone have already ceded their location, calendar and email to their tech titans of choice. A startup proposing to become a global identity and financial broker is new, though not that different from what came before it.
On a recent weekday morning in Mexico City, about 15 people stood in line at a Worldcoin registration site, prepared to make their modern-day trade-off. The people—mostly young and middle-aged men—were in a historic part of the city amid bridal and formal wear shops with quinceañera dresses on display in the windows. The Worldcoin registration center, run by a contractor, had less gloss and permanence, as evidenced by the white folding chairs in the waiting area and a temporary sign advertising the service hanging from a rope. A security guard and two local workers, one in a Worldcoin hoodie and another in a black T-shirt, staffed the center and guided people through the registration process.
Juan Juarez, 45, who’d registered weeks before, brought his 18-year-old son Santiago to get scanned. Juarez fixated on the money he’d made from Worldcoin’s rise in value since he’d first signed up and hoped to use the gains to invest in other cryptocurrencies. He liked the larger aims of the technology, too. “I think it’s a good thing, because in the future it’s going to help us see who is truly a human and who isn’t,” Juarez said. His son said he hoped to use his Worldcoin earnings to pitch in for the cost of his education in electronics.
In Singapore, registering for Worldcoin has become something of a tourist attraction. During a recent visit to an Orb center inside of Centennial Tower, there were customers from Bangladesh, China and India all performing iris scans in exchange for some crypto. About a dozen people, including an electrician, a couple of students and others who worked in the tech field, were in line going through the two-minute sign-up process. Mitesh Kha, a 33-year-old from India, celebrated the quick payout. “That’s free money,” he said. “I am happy to scan my iris and let Worldcoin get the data. If I want, I can always delete my data, according to the app.”
“There are incentives to monetize that data, and you have to rely on the notion that those incentives don’t overcome their promise to you”
If Blania has any ill intent, he’s done a decent job hiding it. The Orb itself stores no personal data. The iris scan is erased from the Orb instantly and never transmitted across the internet. The only data that does get sent, he says, is the encrypted string of 1s and 0s that make up the iris code and verifies that it belongs to a unique human. (People can, however, opt to share their data with Worldcoin for training purposes, in which case the encrypted information would be sent across the internet.) Worldcoin used to manage such data in a centralized way but is developing relationships with universities and other more neutral parties to chop up the character strings into parts and store them piecemeal across different data centers. A hacker would need to assemble all the parts and somehow defeat their encryption to have any chance of re-creating an individual’s code.
On top of this, almost everything to do with Worldcoin is open-source. Anyone can go to GitHub and download the detailed schematics for the Orb hardware or inspect the Worldcoin protocol. The organization will begin making friendlier-looking Orbs in different colors this year and some in different shapes as well—a bid to move away from the Black Mirror aesthetic. The near-term hope is that other groups will opt to make Orbs of their own and build services on top of the Worldcoin protocol. And the ultimate goal for Blania and Altman is for Worldcoin not to be run by them but by a community of the project’s supporters. They’d like to see the service managed as a type of public good.
Some critics look at all this and give Worldcoin a pat on the back for effort and intention while calling it a fundamentally flawed approach to security. “Worldcoin is doing something really important by bringing to the forefront the value of identity and biometrics,” says Charles Herder, a cybersecurity specialist and the co-founder of Badge Inc., an identity startup. But Worldcoin has produced vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit, which it later fixed, and according to Herder’s analysis of Worldcoin’s public documentation, the service has basic flaws in how it stores data. Plus, it’s still a company. “You have to trust that, 30 years from now, their business model does not change because they’re going bankrupt,” he says. “There are incentives to monetize that data, and you have to rely on the notion that those incentives don’t overcome their promise to you.”
Altman initially backed Tools for Humanity out of his own pocket and then helped raise the money to build and distribute the Worldcoin technology. The investors own 13.5% of the Worldcoin currency, which is the 113th-largest digital token by market cap (several spots behind Floki, a crypto homage to Elon Musk’s dog). The rest of its value is distributed among the people who purchase the currency or get it through an iris scan.
For Blania and Altman to meet their aspirational, AI-doom-blocking goals, they need the value of Worldcoin to soar. Their belief is that governments won’t spring into action fast enough as AI starts altering the global economy and putting jobs at risk. People in need of money, the theory goes, will be able to fall back on income provided by Worldcoin. “We will definitely need to try new things that do not currently exist,” Blania says.
Speaking to the students at Josephs, Blania downplayed the reaction by regulators over the past year. He’s been going country by country explaining the technology to governments, and he expects that their thinking will catch up to his in time. The sudden rise in the power of AI technology over the past year, he says, has already started to alert governments to the threat. In this context, Worldcoin was an early warning system and not the evil identity hoarder it’s sometimes been made out to be. “I think the predictions we made four years ago were correct, and the time lines have aligned really well with where we are,” Blania says. “It’s about execution now and explaining to people that, actually, we’re not going to steal your soul.” —With Suvashree Ghosh and Kelsey Butler.
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