In a modern space near the San Francisco Pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated her next evolution and her rapidly expanding ambitions. And it starts with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind Project World, announced Friday that it plans to integrate the verification technology into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email and other areas of public life.
“The world is getting closer to very powerful AI, and it’s doing a lot of wonderful things,” Altman said, speaking to a packed crowd at The Midway. “We’re also heading into a world now where there will be more things created by AI than people,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you say, “Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) differentiates itself from many of its identity verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, live person is using a digital service while protecting that person’s anonymity. There’s some complicated cryptographic alchemy behind it (something called “zero-knowledge proof-of-identification”). The result: The company creates what it calls “proof of mantools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world filled with AI agents and bots.
Its main tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, turning their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified global identifier). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access the World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH co-founder and CEO Alex Blania was absent due to last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned over much of the presentation to the world’s head of product, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was rolling out the newest version of its app (the latest version was released at an event in December), along with a slew of new integrations for its technology.
People have been preparing for some time now to develop a verification service for dating apps – most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder released one World ID pilot program in Japan. This pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder will be rolling out verification integration in global markets — including the US.
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where music artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for people verified with World ID. This is designed to ensure fans are safe from frequent scalpers automated ticketing bots; to scarf up the seats. The Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it through partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to address a perceived deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the web agency, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can assign their World ID to an agent to conduct online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication company Okta has also been formed a system (currently in beta) which verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be linked to a specific agent, and then when the agent goes out on the web to act on that person’s behalf, websites will know that a verified person is behind the behavior, Okta chief product officer Gareth Davies said at the event.
So far, it has been difficult for the world to scalewhich is largely due to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and get your eyes scanned by an Orb—a pretty inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
However, World has continuously made moves to increase the convenience and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it has offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to certain members who have signed up and distributed its Orbs to large retail chains so that users can verify themselves while out for shopping or coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have people bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a chat with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World tried to solve the problem of scaling by creating different levels of verification. The highest level is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level level, which uses an anonymous scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level, or what Sada called “low-friction” — meaning low-effort, I guess, but also “low-security” — that just involves taking selfies.
Selfie Check, which was unveiled by Sada’s team during the event, is designed to preserve users’ privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means we maximize the local processing that happens on your device, on your phone, which means your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and scammers have been around for a while managed to mislead it. “Obviously, we’re doing our best and it’s like one of the best systems you’ll see for it. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from three different levels of verification depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
