The Sam Altman–backed Worldcoin announced a development road map on Wednesday, including a $5 million grants program to support developers in its eye-scanning ecosystem, as well as an outline of its plans to decentralize—a steep challenge for the ambitious and capital-intensive project.
Decentralization is a core promise of crypto. Rather than traditional finance, where money and transactions are controlled by governments or intermediaries like banks, crypto acolytes promise a future where systems instead are governed by code.
The best example is Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency that functions as a decentralized software protocol. Although its infrastructure is maintained by a core set of developers, the foundation of Bitcoin—the decentralized ledger called a blockchain that records every transaction—is immutable and viewable by anyone.
As the applications of crypto have proliferated, the idea of decentralization has become trickier. A project has to originate from somewhere, after all, and the creators often maintain some degree of control, influence, and incentives, even as they promise a more democratized future.
Do androids dream of decentralized orbs?
Worldcoin, one of the most prominent projects in crypto, is currently grappling with the question. Cofounded by Sam Altman in 2020, it has a futuristic premise of proving someone’s “personhood” by scanning their iris, and giving them a crypto token as a reward. As the presence of artificial intelligence grows, the project hopes to create both a mechanism to differentiate between human users and bots online as well as a system of universal basic income to stave off any economic upheaval created by AI.
Like many crypto projects, Worldcoin has positioned itself as a decentralized protocol that will be in the hands of all of humanity, not just powerful figures like Altman and the deep-pocketed investors like Andreessen Horowitz who backed the company. As such, Worldcoin created the Worldcoin Foundation in 2022 to serve as a nonprofit steward of the project. Its development is still maintained by Tools for Humanity, the for-profit entity that’s received hundreds of millions in venture funding and counts Altman as its chairperson.
The costly process of Worldcoin presents a key challenge to decentralization. Its “proof-of-personhood” protocol requires users to be scanned by its proprietary orb, which costs thousands of dollars to produce, and concerns around privacy due to the capture of biometric data require a high degree of due diligence. Currently, Tools for Humanity is the only manufacturer of the orbs, although the project has made its designs open-source.
In an interview with Fortune, Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania and Worldcoin Foundation head of protocol Remco Bloemen laid out their vision. In the not-so-distant future, Tools for Humanity would be just one of many manufacturers of the orbs, and developers could create another system to verify users’ humanness that didn’t involve complicated iris scans. Governance and decision-making would no longer be concentrated in Tools for Humanity, or even the Worldcoin Foundation, and instead through a more democratically inclined DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization.
Most crypto protocols only exist as software, meaning that the industry’s definition of centralization is “very narrow-mindedly focused into this platonic space where everything is defined by cryptography and numbers,” said Bloemen. “What we need to do in order to make this work is push that definition out to actually include the real world.”
The grants program is part of the vision, with funding theoretically going to developers who could expand Worldcoin’s development outside Tools for Humanity.
Still, for a project that’s aiming to upend global conceptions of identity and economics, escaping accusations of centralization will prove difficult. Even the Worldcoin Foundation seems inextricably tied to Tools for Humanity, creating a confusing knot of entities both independent and intertwined. Bloemen, for example, worked at Tools for Humanity before joining the Worldcoin Foundation. Two of the Worldcoin Foundation’s three directors were both early Tools for Humanity employees. The third is not named online, nor are the rest of Worldcoin Foundation’s 10 or so employees.
Decentralization remains a slippery concept, especially for regulators, which has meant that Worldcoin chose not to launch its token in the U.S. for fear of running afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blania told Fortune that Worldcoin is not releasing a timeline for its decentralization goals because of the gulf in different stakeholders’ definitions.
