Binance has launched Worldcoin at 17:00 on July 24, Beijing time, and opened the spot trading pairs of WLD/BTC and WLD/USDT.
Huobi has also launched Worldcoin and opened WLD deposits and WLD/USDT spot transactions at 15:00 (GMT+8) on July 24.
OKX has also opened WLD recharge and will launch Worldcoin trading as soon as possible if the conditions for opening transactions are met.
Worldcoin (WLD) token contract address has been announced
The WLD-ERC20 contract address is: 0x163f8c2467924be0ae7b5347228cabf260318753;
The WLD-Optimism contract address is: 0xdc6ff44d5d932cbd77b52e5612ba0529dc6226f1.
According to Etherscan data, WLD-ERC20 tokens began to be minted 6 days ago, and there have been multiple large transfer records on the chain. The maximum supply of WLD-ERC20 is 10,000,000,000. The current number of currency holding addresses is 22, and the total number of transfers is 160.
The Optimism Gateway (Optimism’s native bridge) address has received 166,000,054 WLDs, which is the current maximum supply of WLD-Optimism.
On July 24, Sam Altman announced in an open letter that Worldcoin had launched its WLD token and distributed it to more than 2 million people around the world. Worldcoin promises to deploy Orbs in more than 35 cities in 20 countries around the world to accelerate user registration. Those verified by Orb will receive 25 WLD tokens initially, as well as future periodic grants.
The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT triggered a wave of AI craze. At the same time, OpenAI founder Sam is planning another cryptocurrency craze that will explode in the first half of this year: WorldCoin.
Sam is hailed as the next technology leader to succeed Elon Musk. He is the leader of two global projects, ChatGPT and WorldCoin. Today we will discuss WorldCoin, a project that is still relatively unknown.
Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency project founded by Sam in 2020. Its goal is to create a global fair and inclusive financial open source protocol. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, more than 4.4 billion people currently lack legal identity or cannot verify their identity digitally. Worldcoin's vision is to build the largest and fairest digital identity and digital currency system. They achieve identity authentication by scanning the iris of each person's eyeball, and have scanned the eyeballs of millions of people so far.
Worldcoin is currently in the testing phase and the mainnet is expected to be launched in the first half of 2023. It is raising $120 million at a $3 billion valuation. Supporters of Worldcoin include two entities: the Worldcoin Foundation is used to support and develop Worldcoin's ecology and community construction; Tools for Humanity is a technology company whose goal is to ensure a fairer economic system and is the actual development subject of Worldcoin.
The main tasks of Worldcoin include creating a global identity ID, a global currency and a wallet that can carry the identity ID and currency. People can use their own tokens as well as other digital assets and traditional currencies to pay, purchase and transfer money. These three tasks can be broken down into three parts:
WorldID: A digital identity focused on protecting privacy and personal identification.
WorldCoin: The first Token distributed to people for free around the world, with plans to send it to 1 billion people.
WorldAPP: A wallet for payments, purchases and transfers worldwide.
WorldCoin's goal is to create a global digital economy where everyone can participate and benefit from decentralized collective ownership. Its first priority is to get as many people as possible to hold the same Token. The more people who own and use the same Token, the greater the network effect will be, and the greater the value of each participant to the Token. To this end, WorldCoin plans to conduct airdrops for 1 billion people around the world to quickly expand its financial network.
However, to achieve this goal, the first problem that must be solved is to prevent Sybil attacks. A witch attack refers to the behavior of one person controlling multiple addresses to obtain benefits. This behavior is particularly likely to occur in a Web3 environment because wallet addresses can be easily created without KYC (intellectual property verification), leading to the proliferation of fake accounts. Therefore, the fairness of Token distribution is an issue that must be resolved.
Worldcoin has developed a biometric device Orb for this purpose, which verifies a person's uniqueness by scanning the iris, while ensuring the privacy of the person being verified through zero-knowledge proof.
Orb is a spherical hardware device. After scanning a person's iris image, it will locally generate an IrisHash value as a unique identifier through a one-way function. Then a search is done in the database to check if the person is already registered. If not registered, complete the registration and get the airdrop. This process does not require the storage and uploading of original images, nor other personal information, so user privacy can be strictly protected.
The total supply of Worldcoin is 100 billion, the majority of which will be provided to users and operators. To incentivize early contributors, the number of tokens users and operators receive per registration will decrease over time. Less than 20% of the total supply will be used to fund Orb's early core developers, while 3% will be used for ongoing ecological construction.
It is worth noting that Worldcoin is currently very closely related to the Ethereum ecosystem. It adopts Ethereum’s optimistic rollup and inherits Ethereum’s account anonymity and transaction disclosure features. Moreover, its SDK has built-in cross-chain capabilities and can interact with the Ethereum mainnet, other Layer 2 such as Optimism and Arbitrum, and non-EVM compatible chains Solana and Polkadot.
Worldcoin’s practice of collecting biometric data from billions of people may cause people to panic, but in fact, accounts and transactions on Worldcoin will never be associated with any biometric data from Orb. Iris scans are used only for personality verification, and only locally generated one-way irreversible IrisHash is passed into the database. Even if the database is leaked, there is no way to know the true identity behind each IrisHash. Therefore, Worldcoin's Orb is only used to verify that this is a unique person and does not require knowing who this person is.
The process for users to obtain Worldcoin is divided into two stages:
Register and detect uniqueness:
The user uses the Orb device to scan the iris and generate the IrisHash value and public key. Then, the system will check whether the IrisHash already exists in the database. If it does not exist, the system will save the IrisHash and public key to complete the user's registration.
Claim Worldcoin:
Users generate a wallet address in the APP and then verify via zero-knowledge proof that they own the public and private keys registered in the first phase. They then send the proof to the sequencer, which verifies it and deposits the token to the wallet address. Finally, the system will record that the user has received the reward to prevent secondary claims.
As a global currency, Worldcoin must also gradually achieve decentralization. This mainly includes three parts: governance, development and operations:
Governance:
The project's governance structure must allow for decentralized decision-making. At present, a foundation has been established. Next, IP and grants will be handed over to the foundation for management to realize the launch of DAO.
Development:
Worldcoin must be open source, allowing a large number of developers to work together. The protocol is currently open source, and Orb’s open source plan is in progress. Next, more protocols will be opened, a community communication mechanism will be established, standards will be developed for third-party APPs, and community code submissions will be accepted.
operations:
Worldcoin should be operated by multiple teams to offset the risk of single points of failure. Currently, most of the work is done by Tools for Humanity under the guidance of the foundation. Next, operator incentives will be increased, and the foundation will also support third-party operation teams.
Overall, Worldcoin is a passionate and challenging project. It has the potential to become the infrastructure for global digital citizens, build a world digital currency, and achieve financial inclusion. But at the same time, Worldcoin is also facing huge promotion pressure. Digital identity, digital currency, and the collection of more sensitive biometric information are a big challenge for any country with strong sovereignty. Therefore, currently most of Worldcoin’s users are from third world countries. Nonetheless, if Worldcoin can be successfully implemented, its impact will be far-reaching.
In order to successfully implement and promote WorldCoin, they are working with operators around the world. These operators must be legal businesses registered locally. At the same time, they will not provide services to countries with legal restrictions such as the United States, which shows that WorldCoin takes compliance very seriously. This is because collecting national biometric information is a very sensitive issue in any country.
Once a company applies to become an operator, the WorldCoin team will enter the review and interview process, including KYC, compliance training and other steps. Enterprises that pass the review will receive a set of Orb equipment and begin local user science popularization and scanning work. Whenever a user's registration is completed, the operator will receive Token rewards. This method is very similar to the popular push tactics five years ago. Therefore, if WorldCoin does enter the Chinese market, we can foresee that large companies like Meituan may become the largest operators.
Technically, WorldCoin’s design is also unique. Although biometric technology is very mature, including face recognition, fingerprint recognition, DNA testing, etc., the reason why WorldCoin chose iris recognition is mainly due to its uniqueness, fraud prevention and performance. Iris is more difficult to forge than faces and fingerprints, and if one billion people are to be airdropped, the performance of iris will be more advantageous in terms of the difficulty of face recognition database comparison and DNA testing.
Of the total supply of 100 billion WorldCoins, the majority will be provided to users and operators. To incentivize early contributors, the number of tokens received per registration will decrease over time. Less than 20% of the total supply will be used to reward Orb’s early core developers, while 3% will be used for continued ecological construction.
As for WorldCoin’s close relationship with the Ethereum ecosystem, we can see from the documentation that it adopts Ethereum’s optimistic rollup and inherits Ethereum’s account anonymity and transaction disclosure features. Moreover, its SDK has built-in cross-chain capabilities and can interact with the Ethereum mainnet, other Layer 2 such as Optimism and Arbitrum, and non-EVM compatible chains Solana and Polkadot.
9 Niu’s point of view: WorldCoin is deployed on the Optimism network of ETH Layer 2. WordldCoin may become the largest traffic entrance in the Web3 world in the future, which will inevitably bring immeasurable prosperity to the Optimism network. At the same time, WorldCoin is an exciting and challenging project. If WorldCoin can successfully achieve its goals, it will build a fair digital identity and digital currency system on a global scale and have a profound impact on the global financial system.
