At a roundtable on Singapore’s Token2049 just past, Alex Blania, CEO of Worldcoin, said that Worldcoin is still not going mainstream due to regulatory issues. But on the other hand, Worldcoin gets a lot of attention every time it reaches a new high in registration. Last week, Worldcoin officially announced that more than 200,000 Chileans have completed World ID verification, which is more than 1% of Chile’s total population of 19.5 million. Is Worldcoin the Key to Crypto Mass Adoption?

At the end of July, Worldcoin published an open letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. “Worldcoin has been in existence for more than three years with the aim of creating a new identity and financial network that all people have,” the letter states. If successful, Worldcoin will increase economic opportunity, provide reliable solutions that differentiate AI from humans, while protecting privacy, advancing the global democratic process, and ultimately demonstrating a potential path to a global basic income (AI-funded UBI)."

Related Read: Sam Altman on Worldcoin: A Decade to See a Combination with ChatGPT

Two months on, how is Worldcoin progressing?

A BlockBeats reporter recently interviewed Alex Blania, CEO of Worldcoin, to discuss the latest developments in Worldcoin, and to answer questions about Orb pricing, how Worldcoin is profitable, how to deal with regulation, and more. The following is the original text of the interview:

With over 2 million registered users, the response in Asia has been surprising

BlockBeats: How did you get involved in cryptocurrency, or how did you meet Sam, why did you decide to join the Worldcoin program, and what are you currently responsible for at Worldcoin?**

Alex Blania: Before joining Worldcoin, I was working in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, where I studied quantum systems through large neural networks, which are now known as AI. That’s basically what I focused on for the first two and a half years at Worldcoin. Before that, I had a vertical farming company. I was an AI researcher at the time, and I was very happy with the state of my research.

I was contacted by Max Norenstern, the third founder of Worldcoin, and I suddenly received an email from Max at Caltech with a paper written by Sam describing the Worldcoin project. This project sounded crazy at the time, even crazier than it sounds today, and it only had a few rough headlines, like, we need to solve the money supply problem, we need to launch a new token, provide a lot of incentives to grow the network, and eventually we might be able to achieve an AI-based Universal Universal Basic Income (UBI).

And in the future, as AI becomes more powerful, all of this will become even more important. This was three and a half years ago, which means that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and AGI-related discussions weren’t mainstream topics at the time. So, even to say that AGI will be implemented in the relatively near future seems crazy.

When I received that email, I replied that I was glad to go. I drove to San Francisco and had my first interview with Max and Sam. At that time, there was no talk about how I was going to run the company or what else I was going to do, I just went through many rounds of interviews as a software engineer. I finally decided that I wouldn’t join as a software engineer because it was too early for me. I’ll probably go back to physics and start my own startup after that.

And then Sam said, “Okay, you can be a co-founder of Worldcoin.” The two of them approached me as a co-founder, and I said yes and brought in other members of the now founding team, many of whom were friends I had made while doing research. So it’s interesting that, for that reason, we have a lot of physicists in our company. We started this work three and a half years ago, and the rest is history.

In the first year, I worked mainly on the technical side, I designed the entire system, and then I was in charge of the project as CEO. The work I’ve done over the years has changed a lot. Initially, I was only responsible for doing a lot of research and technical work, and now, the company is quite large, with almost 200 employees. We have two main offices, one in San Francisco and one in Berlin. And the organization of the company is more decentralized, and we have a lot of employees spread across various locations.

All of these circumstances mean that my job now is mostly to communicate with outsiders and explain our projects as I’m doing with you right now. Communicating with politicians is a new thing in my life, and I love that too. The rest of the work is to manage and run the company, having meetings with the engineering team, the finance team, and so on, just like running a company. In general, nothing special either.

BlockBeats: What is Sam’s role in Worldcoin today? Because a lot of people are interested in Worldcoin because it has to do with ChatGPT and Sam himself. So a lot of people might imagine that maybe Sam still has some sort of influence on the Worldcoin team?**

Alex Blania: He’s a co-founder, and he’s been even more active after the launch of the project than he was before. He’ll certainly focus on OpenAI because he’s the CEO of OpenAI, not Worldcoin. So most of his time is spent on OpenAI. But he and I communicate almost every week. We do external meetings together, and he’s involved in every important decision and helps with the most important workflows, such as fundraisers or recent meetings with politicians, as well as hiring, and of course, helping with strategy. Worldcoin is actually one of the three companies he’s working on.

**BlockBeats: Congratulations, Worldcoin now has well over two million registered users. **

Alex Blania: Yes. But I hope that we will be able to achieve faster growth in a relatively short period of time. Hopefully, the next time we talk, that number will be our number of registered users per month or week, hopefully it’s just a very early state of what we’re going to do.

BlockBeats: This is indeed a very fast pace of adoption, as people have to use an actual device to register the app. Can you share some information about the types of users who signed up for Worldcoin, or describe the profile of the users, such as which regions and which regions have the most users?

Alex Blania: Before the rollout, we made sure that we knew at least all the major regions, what challenges might be faced in each region, and what the pace of adoption would be, so we tested in each of the major regions.

We tested it quite deeply in Europe. And then it’s mostly concentrated in Portugal in Europe, because there are a lot of developers there, and Lisbon, Portugal is probably the place with the highest density of crypto developers in Europe. Then we went to Latin America, mainly Argentina and Chile, and one of the countries with the fastest adoption of cryptocurrencies at the moment should be Argentina and Chile, so that’s a very interesting market. In Africa, we mainly went to Kenya because it was a cutting-edge technology country and it was a very stable democracy.

Then when Worldcoin launched, we also went to some parts of Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. Tokyo’s reaction was actually quite surprising. It gave me the surprise of a rocket launch, we have a very small number of devices in Asia, and the number of downloads and registered users is very high, which is very, too amazing for me. When I went to participate in Token 2049, I also found that many people knew me and would take selfies with me.

How much does an iris machine cost?

BlockBeats: Were there any technical bottlenecks in the development of the Orb iris machine, and what was the hardest part??

Alex Blania: It took a long time to build the Orb device. It is a very complex device because of the need to meet multiple constraints at the same time. First, it needs to be able to scale to billions of people, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. That is to say, image capture, uniqueness checking, these aspects, they need to be accurate enough, which most biometric scanners can’t do, and ordinary mobile phones and other devices are far from meeting this requirement, they can never do it. And even commercial equipment can’t do that, because no one is going to design a device that can work on the scale of billions of people, and more often than not, such a device simply doesn’t exist.

The second is security. Usually the use of this technology is carried out with the involvement of the government. It will be done in a regulated environment with the presence of government staff, which means that the actual risk of fraud in terms of registration and so on is quite low. Worldcoin, on the other hand, has to work in a completely adversarial environment, and we have to expect people to try to cheat all the time, to try to attack the hardware, and we can’t even trust the people who operate the equipment, so the hardware itself, as well as the software on it, needs to be very secure.

The third challenge, of course, is privacy, as this must be a decentralized protocol that is not controlled by the government. So it needs to be completely privacy-preserving and there can be no wavering in that regard. So we’re basically building the whole system from scratch to make sure it can only be.

These are basically the three main challenges. Now that the Orb device can overcome these challenges, it can reliably distinguish between at least one billion people, and with the advancement of software, we will be able to distinguish between three or four billion people next year. But our growth rate may not reach that level. So it can do all of these requirements, it’s secure, it’s able to protect privacy, and now the real problem is production, to make enough of these devices, and roll them out globally.

So the issues that we’re trying to solve right now are mainly the operational side of things. Two or three years ago, Worldcoin was primarily an engineering problem, and now it’s starting to gradually turn into primarily an operational problem. How do we roll out this product globally, how do we cover every country, how do we do a good job of compliance with government restrictions? These are the main issues that we are currently solving.

BlockBeats: Vitalik has talked about some of the decentralization issues with hardware, such as the possibility of backdoors. Given that manufacturers are mostly centralized, how can the team prevent the people who make the OLB devices from cheating or setting up backdoors in the devices?**

Alex Blania: I think Vitalik’s article is very good. But some media misunderstood it as negative. He didn’t mean anything negative, he just described the engineering challenges we had to overcome. I basically agree with him in that regard.

Regarding the centralization of manufacturing, it is indeed very centralized at the moment. At the moment these devices are manufactured by a very capable manufacturer, who will be under our strict control. So it can actually be assumed that we are able to control the manufacturing process of the Orb to make sure that there are no backdoors or other issues. In the next few years, though, there will be cases where other people will produce OLB equipment, and maybe not even companies that we control. It could be some big tech companies, and I’m not saying we’ve been in contact with them, but here’s something that could happen.

There will be other large companies that produce their own Orb devices that follow the design, and then the Foundation will provide the keys needed to activate those Orb devices, and we will audit them. So at first, the number of manufacturers will not be very large, maybe only about ten, and all manufacturers will still be strictly audited and controlled. At some point in the future, of course, it is also possible to achieve full decentralization, to conduct decentralized audits, and to increase the number of manufacturers.

This kind of problem is not new. Of course, it is much more difficult to implement than decentralized financial products, but it is clearly not impossible. So we can get it done.

BlockBeats: How much does it cost to make an Orb device today?How many Orb devices have been deployed to the market?**

Alex Blania: That’s one of those interesting things, production and manufacturing are not bottlenecks from a cost perspective or production speed perspective. The current price of the Orb is around $4000 per ORoB device. This number will continue to decline for years to come, as the larger the manufacturing batch, the lower the cost. We are also working on a new OR device that will be more sophisticated, more secure, and more advanced in all respects. As a result, all these costs drop below $1000 in the next few years. But then again, the main challenge for Worldcoin right now is actually deployment and rollout, not just cost.

Worldcoin is not yet profitable

BlockBeats: What is the main area in which the Worldcoin team is investing its resources right now?**

Alex Blania: The biggest cost is everything that currently revolves around operational rollouts, and there’s a lot of work to be done in that area. When a product enters a country, a legal analysis of all local laws is required, and in order to comply with local laws, it may be necessary to make minor changes to the product, which requires working with different local consultants. In order for a product to actually go to market, you need to hire a local team. So, if I tell you that we’re looking to get into Hong Kong in a couple of weeks, there’s a lot of teams in the back office that need to work on 10 different things in parallel to get there. This is the first aspect of cost.

The second biggest cost is the actual engineering work. The number of engineers is the largest in the company, with both hardware engineers and engineers in protocols, applications, and software, which is the second largest cost area. And then there’s all the general business of the company, including all kinds of consultant fees, and so on. Building a product and promoting a product is the biggest area of overhead.

BlockBeats: Where does the company’s main profit come from at the moment, is it selling Orb iris devices?

Alex Blania: This is very similar to other crypto projects. A digital asset, it has a certain value, there will be investors who believe in its future. It’s too early for our network to generate a lot of revenue at the moment, but there will definitely be revenue in the coming years. So like any other crypto project, it’s just that for us, it’s much bigger, it’s much more ambitious, and it’s much faster.

Also, there was a period of time before the launch of the product that there was some sign-up arbitrage, but none of these things are possible now.

BlockBeats: Worldcoin is facing some regulatory pressure in different countries or regions, what do you think about the regulatory issues around Worldcoin and cryptocurrency, and how will you deal with these issues in the future?**

Alex Blania: I think it’s understandable that there are some regulatory measures for countries that are in the early stages of a product rollout. We’ve made a splash in a lot of places, it’s a sensation on the positive side. Everywhere people want to sign up on a large scale, and we’ll be in the news everywhere, and it’s been a hot topic in the global tech community for almost a few weeks. So there’s too much attention, too much registration, and regulators are going to ask questions about that to make sure everything is done in the right way.

So for us, there’s nothing to worry about in that regard. We just work with regulators and answer their questions. There are two main aspects here. One is the privacy regulator and the other is the cryptocurrency regulator. When it comes to privacy regulators, there’s nothing to worry about since everything we do is fundamentally privacy-focused. In fact, we just need to respond to the (crypto) regulators, work with them, and solve the problem. There are some markets and some countries that are hostile to cryptocurrencies, while others are a little friendlier. So it’s not a special situation for us, we’re just going to stay away from countries that have problems with cryptocurrencies to avoid trouble.

BlockBeats: In addition to Worldcoin, what tools or infrastructure do you think will be needed for “Proof of Humanity” in the AI world in the future?

Alex Blania: I think regulation, especially good regulation around AI, is definitely the most important thing, and that’s important on a global scale. But this is not new, and a lot of people are talking about it. Another fundamental constraint is energy, and producing large amounts of energy in a cheaper and more scalable way is another important area that we will need to consider.