By Christopher Mims

Imagine a world full of basketball-sized "Orbs" that stare deep into our eyes, capturing the unique pattern of our irises.

These ubiquitous Orbs would allow us to do anything requiring identification, online or in real life, from buying bread to paying taxes. It's a vision reminiscent of other recent efforts -- including Amazon's attempt to replace credit cards with our palms, and Ant Group's efforts in China to make it possible to pay with your face.

The big difference? The builders of an app called World -- including Chief Executive Alex Blania and his co-founder Sam Altman of OpenAI fame -- envision a time in the not-too-distant future when you can't do much without an ocular check-in. AI agents will be so prevalent, and so humanlike, that we'll need to repeatedly prove we're real to prevent those AIs from masquerading as humans on everything from payment platforms to social networks.

To accelerate adoption of what World calls its "anonymous proof-of-human" system, the company recently launched a mini app store inside its app, which is available for iPhones and Android devices.

World's mini app store is part of a broader strategy to create an "everything app." These apps -- also called "super apps" -- are common throughout Asia, where WeChat, Grab, Alipay and KakaoTalk allow users to do everything from shopping and chatting to ordering a meal or a ride.

World's mini app store, which currently includes services to send and receive cryptocurrency, chat with verified humans and access microloans, is a first step toward creating what Altman, Blania and their team hope will be a vast ecosystem reaching more than a billion people. And as the company's identification system expands, they anticipate their main competitor will be Elon Musk's own attempt at an everything app: X.

"I think it will take a while until we seriously collide," Blania told me on Tuesday, "given that X is primarily now a social network." The app formerly known as Twitter has yet to launch its payment service, a key component of Musk's vision. Besides, World has yet to properly launch in the U.S. No Orbs to gaze into...yet.

Within about 12 months, however, Blania believes the two services will start to compete in earnest. If so, it would be a notable development in part because making everything apps work in the West has proved extremely difficult. The bottom line is that, for most people with an Android phone or iPhone who haven't grown up in the tech ecosystems of Asia, those app stores already offer the versatility and flexibility that everything apps do.

Sam Altman's involvement in World might also encourage competition between World and X, by virtue of Musk's pugilistic nature and the already intense rivalry between Altman and Musk. World is no mere side project for Altman, says Blania, who speaks with him a couple of times a week: "He's involved in essentially every major decision that I make."

Few people in the U.S. have heard of World, formerly known as Worldcoin. If they have, it's probably on account of the company's unique biometric identification system, the Orb. So far, Orb-ing millions of people hasn't proved popular with governments around the world, as more than a dozen have either suspended its operations in their countries or else examined its handling of personal data.

World investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on a recent episode of his podcast with Marc Andreessen that with the loosening of restrictions on crypto companies in the U.S., he anticipates World will become "legal" in the U.S. this year. At present, the company doesn't scan eyeballs in the U.S. or allow Americans to hold its Worldcoin token, for fear of regulators, Altman has said. When I asked how long it will be until World sets up locations in the U.S. where people can walk in, present their irises and become part of the network, Blania declined to say. But, he adds, the effort is "top of mind" for him.

In general, Blania brushes aside concerns about regulators both in the U.S. and abroad.

"I know the properties of the system, I'm extremely convinced about its compliance, and about the fact that I think it exceeds the actual expectations of these regulators," he says. "It's just a matter of getting them to understand every part of the system."

World recently hired a former X executive to be the company's head of privacy.

Other systems that rely on biometrics have unnerved users and governments in the past. It's easy to forget the hue and cry once raised about Face ID on the iPhone, the face-scanning technology most people now use to unlock their Apple devices. When it was introduced, there were concerns about it both as a potential security liability and because of the way it evoked mass-surveillance systems in China that rely on face recognition.

World says its network is anonymous and secure, and only proves you're a person -- but it could be made part of a broader identity system. One of World's distinguishing features is that it is an "anonymous proof of human" system. That is, its eyeball scan can verify that you're a human being and not an AI, but without additional software and systems, it can't identify who you are. What could drive people to adopt a system like World's will be the rise of ever-more-sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the internet almost impossible without something like it, says Tiago Sada, chief product officer at the company.

World's "proof of human" powers were a unique enabler of a new mini-app in the World app store called Credit, says Diego, the Argentina-based developer of the app, who goes by only his first name. Credit gives people microloans of between $5 and $100 with no collateral -- but will ban users who default on loans. People can't circumvent the ban by creating a new Credit account, because of their unique, durable, and bot-proof identifier on the World network, Diego says. The app has racked up 70,000 users in Argentina since its launch in December, and is turning a profit, he adds.

While it seems that the ambitions of both World and X put them on a collision course, there are also plenty of reasons to be skeptical about how likely they are to achieve their goals.

World has only Orb-verified 11 million people worldwide, despite the fact that it literally pays them -- via Worldcoin crypto tokens -- to get their eyeballs scanned. (At its start, World doled out 25 tokens per scan, roughly $25 at today's prices, and now offers 16 tokens per scan.) And the launch date for X's Money Account service is unclear. The company has said it will count Visa as its first partner. X did not respond to requests for comment.

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said on the company's most recent earnings call that X Money will use Visa's systems to allow users to fund their "X Wallet" with a debit card, which will also enable peer-to-peer transactions on X.

X has vastly more users than World does, but it's unclear how many people will be eager to entrust an Elon Musk-owned company with their financial lives.

In the end, it's trust that is most likely to decide the fate of both companies. Blania says he's sure that in time, regulators and privacy experts will validate his confidence in the security of World.

"The way this system is built, it is provably much more secure" than its potential competitors, he says. "It's like actual privacy rocket science that I think has never been deployed in that way in the world."

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 07, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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