Worldcoin Unveils Major Expansion to Its Eye-Scanning Identity Platform

The state of crypto is presented by Tron connecting the world to the power of Cryptocurrency. Good morning and welcome back to first mover. All right, World Coin introduces a protocol update today called World ID 2.0 which the company says is a more powerful privacy preserving humanist digital passport. Joining us now to discuss is Tools for humanity, head of product and World Coin core team member, Tiago, Sara Thiago. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you again. Thank you for having me, Lawrence and Jen could say, yeah, great to have you here. Now tell us what the difference is from the last time you were on the show talking about World ID to World ID 2.0 what's the significance of this humanness update? Yeah. So World ID 2.0 is a huge update. We've been working on it for a while. Uh Some of that was actually already laid out in the original white paper and other things were just feedback that we got from the community uh both for users and developers. World ID 1.0 So there's three main things that are coming and we can dive into each of those. First of all, we're introducing the context, the concept of world ID apps, which is just a much easier way to integrate World ID to your favorite apps. So for example, now there's a new World ID app for Reddit for Shopify, for Minecraft for telegram. So you can use your World ID to prove your personhood on a bunch of services like that. Number two is we're introducing a concept of levels. And so now there is three different levels of verification that you can have on a World ID and that just enables a wider range of applications for developers. So for apps that want a more casual approach, they can now take lower levels of verification and for apps that need even more security than one lady 1.0 offered, uh they're also able to do that with the new orb plus um level. And then lastly, there's a whole suite of very important upgrades to the core protocol that make it even more private, even more open, even more self sovereign than World Lady 1.0 and so this is a pretty big upgrade. Um We're really excited to roll it out um and it will continue to build on all the momentum that World Lady 1.0 has had so far. So World ID 1.0 had problems like with, with the security and things like that. I mean, is there anything people should be worried about, you're saying if it's an upgrade that tells me that, hey, there might have been a problem in that first one. Yeah, of course not. Of course a lot. Um, I think the way to think about it is, um, there's, we're just setting a new standard, right? Like world 1.0 was already the most private protocol of its kind? But we're constantly thinking how can we push the envelope even more? And it give you an example today. World ID 1.0 already represents more than 87% of all of the zero knowledge proofs verified on the Ethereum ecosystem, right? And so just as we set the standard with that release, uh we're continuing to push that forward with new research and development that has happened in the community for the past year. Thiago, you mentioned Shopify, Minecraft Reddit telegram as apps that can now implement the protocol. Talk to me about the user experience. If World ID 2.0 is integrated into one of these apps, what's different for me as a user? Yeah, it's a great question. So let's think about for example, the new Reddit World ID app, right? What you can do now on Reddit is uh moderators for any given subreddit can assign your specific roles if you have been verified with a World ID. And so what they can say is something like, hey, everyone can comment but people that have verified the world ID can comment more often, right? Or they can only comment on this post. And so that way they can use this as a tool for for moderation and sure for branding bots. Uh it's basically like getting a blue check on some of these apps very similar on telegram. I think a lot of us are on a bunch of crypto telegrams and just the amount of spam is crazy, right? And so now with the new telegram integration, uh any telegram chat can say, hey, uh you require some level of verification on World ID to be able to read on this chat or to be able to write on this chat. And so that you can actually apply to a bunch of different things, right? Another very interesting example is a Shopify one, right? Where stores can use it both to prevent fraud, right? And so stores that get um a lot of of chargeback fraud. For example, they can say, hey, to shop here, uh you need to be a verified human or they can also use it for discounts, right? They can say something like, hey, the first time you shop at this store, you get 30% discount. And that's an incentive for you to try this store. But by using World ID verification, that store can make sure that you are only able to claim that discount once right now. The thing that's super important is that all of this is able to happen without revealing your identity, right? And so that is part of the world ID promise. So when world, when World Coiner with that orb thing first launched, there was quite a lot of hype around it and you had a lot of people lining up uh in recent months, ha has the amount of people who shoved their face in front of that thing and got their retina scanned or whatever. I just check however it works, I don't know how the numbers been on that kind of stuff. So things are. So right now, we're in our fastest period of growth ever. Uh in terms of over verifications, we've actually just crossed a couple of really exciting uh thresholds. Uh Now, more than 1% of the entire population of Chile has verified the role with an orb more than 1% of the population of Argentina. And very recently, we crossed the 2% threshold of the entire population of Portugal. And so not only are we continuing to expand availability in orbs in other markets? For example, this week we're launching Singapore but also in the places where or were already available, you start seeing really interesting adoption and really interesting use case. A good example of that is one of the world ID apps that is launching is a Mercado Libre app. Mercado Libre is the largest ecommerce in Latin America. It's based out of Argentina and that becomes very exciting with these new uh really high penetrations that we're starting to see in Argentina, in Chile and soon in other countries in Latin America. What's your marketing strategy in some of these? Oh, I'm sorry, per percentage wise though. Uh Can you give us an indication on uh how much that's increased on, on a month to month basis? Yeah. So honestly, I don't know the number off the top of my head, but I can tell you that right now, we're going through the biggest period of growth that the project has had in its history. And what's your marketing strategy in some of these different countries? Are you leveraging names like Shopify, telegram, reddit. How are you incentivizing people to go out and scan their retinas and get this world ID? Yeah. So all of these apps that we just talked about, they're actually launching today. They launched 20 minutes ago as part of the new World Coin app Store. Uh And so that's things that we weren't able to talk about before. But generally the story is the same one that you will see if you go on the website or that you have heard me talk about in the show twice before, which is just we're building the largest network of real people. That network has a native currency, it has a native passport and it sets up the tools that we as a society we need in this new age of A I, right. So uh in particular with World ID people are quite excited and they see the, the, the problem and, and we see it on other platforms like Twitter, right? And they see how other platforms have tried and failed to address this problem. And so customers are quite excited about the idea of finally being able to solve this. And usually the people are visiting orbs or people that are quite excited about just being first in line to new technologies. So uh has X reached out at Twitter X, whatever the tw uh Twitter, I don't know what they're calling it. Um Have they reached out to you about uh potentially incorporating that? I mean, they've had a huge bot problem. Elon Musk claims to have solved it or at least thwarted it. But last I checked before I got off of there, there were, there were more robots than I don't know, Terminator Two. Yeah, they, they certainly have a big problem with this and I think they've been quite vocal about it. The cool thing about World ID and now with World Ie 2.0 is that it's not just open source, it's actually a decentralized and permissionless protocol. So any platform like Twitter, for example, could just go and integrate it even without interacting with us. And so, uh and that is now going to be even easier with this new app standard that we're launching. We also completely the overhaul the developer platform. And so it just makes it a lot easier for developers to build these sort of integrations. Uh And on top of that, a really cool thing that happened recently is last week, the World Queen Foundation announced a new grants program that includes also grants for building world ID apps. So developers that build on these um world ID apps using this new developer platform uh are able to apply to that program. All right, Thiago, just before we go, we got to ask you about a block report that said Tools For Humanity has been in talks over a potential over the counter sale of the WLD Token in hopes of raising $50 million. Are you able to give us any details there? Yeah, honestly, nothing to share here. Um That's also not uh something I'm personally involved in. So I wouldn't be able to comment on anything on that type. All right, Thiago, it was a pleasure having you on the show again. Congratulations on the 2.0 launch. Thanks for joining us. And if we don't see you before the end of the year, happy holidays. Thank you. Likewise. Have a great year. Bye bye. Hm. All right. That was Tools for Humanity, head of product and World Coin Court team member Tiago, Sada.