How World Network Wants to Change the World ft. Tiago Sada from World Network

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26:08So when you go to the orb, it checks whether you're a real human or not. And if you are, it basically stamps your passport as verified. But that stamp doesn't say anything about your biometrics, right? When you go around and you show on the internet, look, I have a verified world ID. We're simply showing that stamp. Biometrics is not used for identification. And so you show up to an orb, you show it your QR code. It looks at you for 15 to 30 seconds. And then it either says, yep, you're a real and unique human or you're not. And then you're on your way. You can now start claiming stuff on the app.

26:38You can use other mini apps. You can use integrations like the Tinder one. And so it's actually the simplest part of the whole experience of the world. And why? I mean, because the Orb was either marketing genius or a marketing disaster, I'm not sure. When I met the team in Cayman, we talked about it because everybody got the wrong idea immediately. They said, oh my God, it's retina scans. They're taking our biometrics. They're going to sell them. They're going to do all of this stuff. Everyone's like, this is so dystopian and that's the narrative around it when i met the team in cayman i'm like and we started talking about this i'm like oh okay this is actually very different why the idea of the all why do it that way why not do a standard human to human you know way of proof and was it a marketing disaster or a stroke of genius or or a bit of both i think the project would not be here without the orb.

27:36It's as simple as that. One of the most, the hardest thing when you're building something new is to just get people to care. And I think the orb always had to be iconic for people to care. But on the sentiment side of things, I would actually push back. Did you think about that when you're planning, you're a product guy. Did you think, how are we going to make this so it appears on every news headline? It's like we're going to make something that looks like it's a science fiction film. We wanted something special. We definitely wanted something special that could help people understand that we were going into a new world and that this was just fundamentally new technology.

28:14And so we did think about how do we make it special. Eventually, we landed on the orb because the device represents the world. And actually, when you look at it, I don't have one with me right now, but the orb actually has two halves. And where they come together, that's actually at the exact angle at which the Earth rotates. So there's a ton of engineering, like months of engineering that went into making this thing a sphere. Our team would have been much happier making that into a box. It's a lot easier to make a box than a sphere, like the PCB is round and all those things. But going back to your other question, I actually think that on the sentiment, that's actually not the case.

28:53I think that if you go on Twitter sometimes and like certain bubbles, like, yes, there's a lot of like very valid questions. But our experience around the world is that every time we launch in a country is very similar than like any other kind of technology. So I'll give you an example. When the iPhone 5S came out, I was still in high school in Mexico, and I had a friend that saw it. And he was like, immediately he was like, I'm never getting another iPhone, like this biometric scanner, whatever. six months later he had the iphone 5s and then when the iphone 10 came out i was actually running yc he was still in college and we were talking and he was like no this time i'm never getting an iphone again and six months later he had it and he had it with a little piece of tape but uh and then that little piece of tape went away when he actually understood that look this is super convenient and it's like genuinely super private and then when apple announced the vision Pro with OpticID, which is the same iris scanning technology that we use, I called him.

29:53I was like, so you're not going to get it? And he was like, no, I am going to get it. Like, I get it now. I think that any kind of technology like this has adoption curves. And we've gotten to see that as we launch in each country. When you launch in a new country, we spend a lot of time speaking with regulators and with media and with the technology space to explain. And first, you're growing slowly, right? And you is only the early adopters. And as you start building trust, as the network starts being more useful, as people start hearing about it from their friends, you start going mainstream because people understand the technology a lot better.

30:28And where that ends up in is we have many cities around the world where we've grown like a lot, like Lisbon in Portugal, more than one in three people have verified. Buenos Aires in Argentina, also more than one in three adults have verified. Kuala Lumpur is more than one in four adults. And there's a bunch of cities like these where we're farther along that adoption curve. And that is just many things. It's people understanding the project better. Is there being more use cases and utility on the ground and just generally more trust? But that skepticism that you sometimes see on a Twitter bubble or here and there, it's really not the experience of the vast majority of our 30 something.

31:13It can't be because so many people have done it, right? So it proves that there's a difference between crypto Twitter, which is quite hardcore and difficult to navigate, versus the average person. When you've set up in a mall or a shopping center in Lisbon, what is the pitch to people? Why should they come? Do they come out of curiosity? Do they come for the airdrop? How much is the airdrop? What is the mechanics that gets people to do this? because it's difficult to explain to people, listen, you're going to be competing with AI online and the big story. They're like, okay, that's too much information.

31:48So how do you get them to do it? Yeah. And by the way, on the crypto side of things, I think also the questions are very valid, right? Because I had many of the same questions before I joined the project. When you hear there's going to be a biometric system that's going to give you free crypto with like a shiny ball, There's a lot of very valid questions like you should be asking, especially if you're a technical person. And what I really respect is a lot of our biggest advocates are people that were skeptics before. And then they took the time to go in and understand the technology. And they're like, well, this is not just private.

32:25This is like one of the most private and one of the most cyberpunk things I've ever seen in my life. But I think the questions are super valid, right? Because the way you would imagine something like this would be built if Facebook built it, for example, is incredibly creepy. And so part of why it took almost four years from the time when we started to when we launched two years ago was because building new technologies, new type of cryptography to make this possible was really hard. Going back to your question on what people hear about. I mean, how do you get them to join the network? How do you come, get them to go to the orb and prove that they're humans?

33:08Yeah, it's very simple. It's just like PayPal. You download it because you want the 20 bucks. And then once you have it, the app just does a really good job at explaining you what it is so you stick around. That's basically the same thing we do. Most of people first hear about it because they want to get the ownership in it. They want to get their first crypto. What we hear a lot from people is they feel like they missed out on Bitcoin or they've always been intimidated by cryptocurrencies. agencies and here's one that they can get for free and that is all built around a really friendly experience and so a lot of them come for the token but then stay for the network because when they go verify to a location both the operators explain it but as they get to experience new things on the app they're like well this is an incredible ecosystem and what where that ends up is like our retention rates are through the roof yeah i want to talk about that retention rate so we've now i'm just going through the journey because it's it's super fascinating you know I'm a huge fan of that PayPal model.

34:03I get why you're doing it. It's really clever. The idea of the Auburn itself creates a talking point. So from a product perspective, where you come from, these are very thought-out things. So the person joins the network. They've gone to the shopping center in Lisbon. They've got this. They've now got their wallet set up. They've got some worlds in their wallet. What percentage of people actually do anything with it aside from turn it into cash? and how do you get that next step because they're now walking away from you you don't have their email you can't communicate with them they're kind of stuck unless they look at that wallet so how do you how do you get that step the the the bootstrapping of the network and network activity yes so there's basically three things you can do once you're in the network right you can use the wallet for like d5 stuff you can send transfers around the world and you can hold money on Morpho, things like that.

35:01Second, you can use your World ID on third-party apps. For example, like Tinder just announced that they'll be using World ID for human verification on their platform. But you can imagine that you could, in the future, see it on social media, websites, concert tickets, and things like that. And three, we have, last year, we released a platform for something called mini apps, which are basically third-party applications that can run right inside of WorldApp. and integrate in a very seamless way with both your ID and with the wallet. And so today, more than 75 % of all activity on the app is one of those three things.

35:39It is not claiming your WorldCoin. Claiming and like WorldCoin related activity is less than 25 % of activity. Most activity that we see on the app is people coming to do things. And what those things are, it's very, very different depending on the user. There's some people that are playing mini games that are for humans only. There's some people that are using the financial features. There's some people that are participating in polls that are happening that are for humans only. There's a whole universe, a whole platform of things. Just the mini apps that launched something like eight months ago, they've been opened more than a billion times.

36:17I think the stat is something like every 0.02 seconds, someone opens a mini app. So that's a ton of different things that people are doing with applications that developers are building that leverage these primitives. And what percentage of people onboarded become active users? And how do you measure active users? Yes. So we'll see which numbers I remember off the top of my head. This is a great pop quiz for a chief product officer. But so roughly half of the people that get the app end up verifying an orb. A lot of the people that don't verify an orb is because we don't have an orb near them yet.

36:55And so a lot of what we think about is how do we deploy orbs in many more places so that the people that want to verify can do that. And then 90 days after, actually no, it's 60 days after someone verifies, more than 85 % of those are still around using the app. Now, if you've ever built anything in consumer, you know that that rate is through the roof. That rate is usually like 20, 30, 40 % if you're a very sticky product. It is only the most popular products, the ones that you know the brands of, the ones that are always at the top of the charts, are the ones that have 70, 80, 90 % retention rates.

37:36And that's why WorldUp is always on the top of the chart. If you go right now to any of the countries we're operating, it's routinely at the top of the finance charts and very often at the top of the overall charts in general. Because people just like the model works, right? The model of people signing up for an incentive and then getting exposed to this ecosystem where they can do a lot of things. Many users don't even know that it's crypto behind the scenes. And we've put a lot of work to make sure that that's the case. We think that crypto, the benefits for users are amazing, but sometimes the technology sucks.

38:07And so we try to abstract a lot of that away. But people now, they can start sending money to their family members across the world in seconds for free. And they can start saving money and actually getting real yield and not getting screwed over like they do in banks. And they can use a lot of apps that wouldn't be possible without proof of human. And so, yeah, we're very excited. We're very excited by the metric. And so you're split. It then splits into the foundation, which looks after the world ecosystem. And then what you're doing, Tools for Humanity. whose job is it to so i presume it's the foundation that brings on new people so they're they're increasing network size when it comes to network activity i.e the things that happen on the network the applications layer because i think of networks always in terms of metcalf's law you know how do you create value of a network it's got to be the number of the number of users or number of users multiplied by the total activity value of transactions that happen whose job is it to do that part i know that we'll come into what you guys are doing in a sec because i think that's going to be the really important part but it's their job i guess to roll out the orb get it into as many cities get as many people bootstrapped on um create enough product use for them to find an experience that they use yes i think the the best mental model is the foundation is a steward of the protocol right and what does that mean it means some very basic things like managing the treasury, right?

39:36Managing the distribution of that 75%. But then it's also stewarding and setting up the rules and the incentives so that the ecosystem can be self-sustaining. So actually the foundation, for example, does not have physical operations around the world to deploy orbs. The foundation is not building a lot of technology beyond the core protocol itself. What the foundation does is through its grants program or through the protocol incentives themselves, they make the rules so that companies like us have an incentive to do things like build a client. So we built the first world client. It's called WorldUp.

40:20And so we have an interest in growing our app. But by growing our app, we're also growing the network. we built the first hardware first device that supports the protocol that is the orb now even though the orb looks very cool i think that maybe some like some days someone should build a more varying version of that device and there are companies working on being able to plug in different kinds of devices to the network and the same thing applies for the operations right the foundation sets up rules and then around the world there's different companies or different individuals that take Orbs to Dorbs places.

40:57And so in some countries, we actually as TFH set up locations and we are an operator. But in the vast, most places around the world, there's other local companies or entrepreneurs that are getting Orbs and that they're managing the deployments of those there. And so the answer is basically both, right? It's the foundation's responsibility for that to happen. But TFH does that in some places. We build one of the many clients. We build one of the many devices. We are one of many companies that are able to run operations. It is true we are the first. We were the first to do it. And we do have a lot of experience on that.

41:35But there's now more than 100 companies around the world that do some variation of one of these things. So the other big part of this is going to be the partnerships. It's the applications layer. Where does it become vital to do? You know, interesting enough, I went down this rabbit hole four years ago and I tried to get together Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and I can't remember who else. Get them together in a room. I tried to get all of the people who were the heads of Web3 and said, we need to solve ID really, really, really fast. And they're like, yes, we agree. And then I said, we need a commonality of standards.

42:19And they said, yes, and it's never going to happen because we will not accept other people's standards unless forced to by government. And that was quite shocking to me. And these were all the kind of heads that went through of all of the big tech companies. Yeah, Facebook were there as well. And they're like, we just can't do this. So how are you guys going to get over that problem? You've got Tinder. Great. Okay, that's a really good use case. but we've got to get everybody to use some form of digital id whether it's yours or whether it's zero knowledge kyc stuff you know there's a bunch of people working on different elements of this it's incredibly important but how do we get people to actually force them to to adopt it not the end user the end user's fine we all need that but it's getting bloody microsoft or whoever is Facebook to agree?

43:12So it's very simple, right? It's by solving a problem that they couldn't solve otherwise. And so when I think about a lot of the conversations that we have, a lot of the partnerships that you've seen and the ones that are on the pipeline right now, they are not with the head of Web3. They're with the CEOs. Yeah. They're with the CEOs. Now it's become a problem. For many of these companies, they understand there's two problems. There's two things. First, they understand that their products are breaking down. It's an existential threat to their company if they're not able to know what is a human, what is a bot on many of their platforms.

43:49And on the other side of things, World has the scale, not of a Web3 project, but of a Web2, one of the largest Web2 projects in the world, like period. Like we have real scale that is like moves number in a very real way for very real companies around the world. And so when you have real scale and you're able to solve a problem that they can't otherwise, the truth is they don't care whether we're using ZK or not. We really care. And we have the ethos of everything crypto related. Companies around the world, they just want to solve these problems. And so what happens is that by having conversations at an executive level with the actual CEOs who understand these threats to their businesses and they're worried that their platforms are literally going to die if they aren't able to solve it, then the rest of it doesn't really matter.

44:43Right. And so that's that's basically which is very different. Even and I'll be honest, like this wasn't the case when we started. Right. And part of why and we understood that that was very reasonable when we started. Those two things weren't true. When we started, people were not freaking out about AI. Right. People did not understand how soon and how fast this was going to come. And we also didn't have a lot of users. And so what we said is, OK, we can't really move AI timelines. We just trust that that will come. So we'll focus on growing the network. And that was, I think, a very correct but non-obvious decision that we made, which was, you know what?

45:20For the first few years, we're going to focus on the technology and growing the network. Because like you said, Metcalfe's law is not just monetary value. It's like utility. A network is exponentially more valuable the larger that it is. So why are we going to worry about what's the right use case for one million users? There's no use case for a million users. just find a way to get to 10, 50, 100 million users. And then there's use cases all over the place. And so this is why we focused on the strategy of, okay, let's grow with a PayPal-like model. Let's build a technology, which is going to take years to do and trust that AI is going to catch up.

45:58And the truth, to be honest with you, I think AI has gone faster than we expected. And so now we are trying to catch up and scale the network as fast as the world needs it to be because, yeah, AI has moved really, really fast. Because it was interesting because, as I said, four years ago, when I was talking about this, it was the Web3 teams were the only people interested because they understood ZK technology, everything else, and the CEOs didn't care. And my argument with these guys is you don't understand it yet, but cut to five, six, seven years' time, they're going to be suing you, the governments will be suing you, just like they sued the banks for decades because of what's about to happen.

46:41And they're like, yeah, we know, but nobody will listen internally. But now everybody suddenly realizes how big a problem this is, particularly with the rise of video AI as well. It becomes urgent. I mean, I'm developing a video chatbot of me. And so this whole setup is gone within three to six months where we even know that a Zoom call is not an AI bot anymore because it's real-time chat. And it's already got my voice because I've got so much content online and everything else. So it's happening so fast. People don't yet understand how problematic this is going to be. Yes. One of my favorite things that has happened for me on the job is I did once an interview for a TV station like this one.

47:30and we were talking in the interview about just how real the problem was i think that the the anchor was a little bit skeptical about well do we really need a proof human but not and we finished the call it was a great interview uh in general but they were a bit skeptical of that and he looks at me and he's like be honest with me right now are you actually in this call or is this a deep fake? Because, and I started laughing and yes, I had some really fancy studio lighting and whatnot, so I understand. But I just started laughing. I was like, this is exactly what we were talking about. You right now in this moment don't have certainty.

48:09You don't know if I'm actually here giving you the interview where I'm talking about this problem. Now imagine what this is like for my college friends who aren't technical or for my sister or for my mom, let alone my grandma. one of my favorite things that we announced recently is we announced this chat products called world chat which is an end-to-end encrypted messenger just like signal that has like crypto powers behind the scenes so just like you can attach pictures or whatever you can also send money right and that is just like you can text money makes a lot of sense but it's a very magical experience around the world for free one of the other things you can do is when you're texting with someone, you can see like, is this a verified human or not?

48:53And so when you're texting someone, if they're a verified human, the bubbles are blue. And if they're not a verified human, the bubbles are gray. So you know you have to be careful. And now we're taking a step further where we're launching verified profile pictures. And so you'll only be able to set a profile picture on the app if it matches your real face at the orb zone. So we're able to do that fully anonymously. And obviously, profile picture is optional. So you don't even have to set it up. But the consequence of that is that tomorrow, if my grandma gets a text message with my face asking for$50 because my car broke down, she knows that my car actually broke down.

49:33Yeah, because I mean, this is a real... She knows that I can trust it. This is a real problem for me. There's thousands of versions of me going around, scamming people, doing stuff. And, you know, you've got the Twitter verification, everything else. A lot of people don't see it properly. And I was just, you know, when we first started talking, I was thinking, obviously, there's a chat coming because it's so desperately needed to integrate proof of humanhood. It makes total sense. And because you've got the financial rails as well, that whole integration, you know, Telegram have some of this, but they've got the massive bot problem as well.

50:09So, you know, there's a huge issue there on the other side. What about proof of AI? because that's another way of approaching the same problem, which I think might be important for other networks, whatever that may be, where you don't mind the AI, but you just need it to be verified as AI. That's a great question. And I think it's completely valid. Sometimes people think that since we are the human network people, that we don't like AI. And I love it. I use it all day, every day. I think bots are amazing. The only problem is that there are some things where I want to know what is a bot or not.

50:43And so the way I think about it is there's like three kinds of apps. There's apps. Let's talk about like gaming, for example, where you not only want to make sure that a human only has one account. You want to make sure that the human is actually the one doing the thing, right? That it's not a deepfake or that it's not an AI. And so gaming is a good example where it's not enough that I only have one account. You're talking about Elon getting somebody else to do. The gaming and then take the victory at the end. Allegedly. Allegedly, exactly. And so in that case, you actually care that the AI is not playing for me, right?

51:23Or someone else. But like you say, there's many things. Let's say like buying Taylor Swift tickets. The problem is actually not that I get an AI to buy four tickets for me. The problem is if I buy 4 ,000 tickets and then I resell them. That's right. And so something that we are thinking a lot about and working with AI companies is the ability to delegate your proof of human. What a lot of websites are facing right now. The agents now. Yes, exactly. With the agents. And your agent should be able to show up to, let's say, DoorDash or a food delivery app. It should be able to say, hey, I am an agent, but I am representing Tiago.

52:03And here's basically my power of eternity of I get to represent Tiago. So I'm a good bot. Let me in. I'm not going to DDoS you. I'm not going to price gauge. I'm not going to do any of those things. And so there's definitely that room in the middle for delegation of your proof of human to an agent on certain kinds of apps. So developers should get to choose, is delegation allowed in your application? And in many cases, it should be. Or in many cases, it will not be like on gaming. And that's totally fine. And so I think that's definitely something that's going to come, especially as AI agents continue to become more popular.

52:40I think that the technology is almost there, but not quite there for agents. But I think that if we have this conversation maybe a year from now, we will be using agents like operator for a lot of things in our life. And when that is happening, what we're hearing not just from the users or from the AI companies, but from the websites is that they really need a way to know which are the good and which are the bad ones. Because what they're doing right now is they just block out all bot traffic with like Cloudflare or something like that, because they don't know what's good and what's an attack.

53:10And so they actually want the business. They want to sell you the burger or they want to sell you the concert tickets. So they want to let the good bots in, but they need a way to know that. And the way we think that'll work is by you delegating your proof of human so that it's very similar to a power of attorney. Or they charge bots, which is the other thing that we think crypto rails will get used for is bot to bots. Because, you know, as you said, AI is not free. It actually comes with two costs. One is the cost of compute and the other is energy. and bots need to get paid for and we will create a huge bot economy within all of this as well at some point.

53:48Yeah, 100%. I think that world is not about making sure that bots don't exist but world is about making sure that we're able to make the most of that world no pun intended and that humans remain at the center of it. So the internet should still be designed for humans and it should be an amazing experience for humans. But we're going to have these new species now that is like all these bots that are going to be roaming around the internet, sometimes working between themselves, sometimes working with us. It's simply about making sure that we can make the most out of this new technology. And the flip side that a lot of people don't understand is one of the things I'm so passionate about crypto is we're essentially redistributing wealth via a new technology.

54:33And the more people adopt a network, Bitcoin has been the classic example, but it could be world as well, to use that network for its particular benefits, the more the number go up, Metcalfe's law, the more you're actually helping humanity replace income and things from the economic changes that can happen down the road. You know, my general thesis on this is we're currently at about a$3.5 to$4 trillion industry within crypto itself. If you just take the trend rate of adoption, even with the lowering of the adoption rate over time, you get to about$100 trillion within a very short period of time, eight years.

55:15So we've got$97 trillion of wealth that's about to be created. and we need to distribute that whilst we've got this other redistribution of wealth and jobs and economy going on. It's a great offset for a lot of what's happening. Yeah. One of the things that we thought a lot about in the context of Metcalfe's law is I think it's very obvious how World ID or the wallet are significantly more useful and valuable the more people participate on them. But another question and the truth is It's like, we don't have the answer. We don't know what happens. It's an experiment. But it's like, what does it mean when half the population is all holding a token?

55:57Because I don't know what are the latest stats. But when I looked at this a few years ago, it was something like only 2 % of the population held Bitcoin. And that's incredible. I think Bitcoin is amazing. But then what happens when 10, 20, 50 % of the population holds any given cryptocurrency? What does that do for cryptocurrencies in general? What does that mean for that crypto token specifically? The answer is we don't know because it has never happened. But what we hear from exchanges in many of the countries where we operate in is that WorldCoin becomes easily the number two, quite often most traded asset on their platform as we start getting scale in a country.

56:40And often it becomes the number one because it's just math, right? Like many more people have it because they can just get it. And so I don't know what happens with that. But I am also very curious about what does that mean for a token when 50 % of a country is holding it? And so that's part of the experiment that we're running here. Yeah, how I've approached this is when you break down the component parts of what AI is going to do, in terms of economics, trend rate of GDP growth is driven by population growth, productivity growth, and probably debt growth. Debt growth stopped in about 2008 because we broke the system.

57:26And then, obviously, aging populations are slowing trend rate of growth everywhere. And we're about to replace those by infinite humans, be it the robots or the AI or the combination of the two. And that creates weird GDP that doesn't accrue to humans necessarily because we're not an active part. Obviously, almost every job that we can think of, we can try and pretend it's not going to have a massive impact. But it's a nuclear bomb in terms of how it affects the economy. There's so much change so fast. And that's all well. Humans are adaptable. And I just think, what is it to be? What is our role?

58:04And I know everybody gets asked this question. And it's really simple to me, is there's one thing the AI can't be. There's the one thing the robots can't be, and that's human. And once you think that, you realize that, well, humans organize their complex adaptive societies using communities and a set of memetics rules that we operate within. and whether that's religion or whether it's football teams or whether it's Taylor Swift concerts, these are all human things. They're just humans getting together. You can have robots. People go and watch chess games. What's the point? Because the computers beat the humans every single time, but we go and watch chess.

58:45And in fact, it's a multi-hundred million dollar industry of humans. So I think that is the element, is being a human. And what you're kind of doing at the basic foundational level here is giving you income for being a human. And I think this is a much bigger idea than people understand, is humans create value by being humans. And as I said, it's sports teams, it's music, it's religion, it's whatever it may be. And this is a foundational stone. We're seeing it also in all sorts of other parts of crypto as well. where we're finding groups of people. We've seen this in NFTs with art markets. We've seen it all over the place where aggregations of humans create value.

59:33And that's what I think is going to happen here. Yes, yeah. It's really, you're one of the first people that ever brings up Metcalfe's lot to me, but that was on the very first deck from the world. That's always been the thesis behind this, that what you need to do is you need to build a large network, a large financial network, the largest proof of human network um and that these things just become super useful and valuable over time what else are you working on um what are the bigger projects that you you've got because once you've got a network again back to metaforce law there's infinite opportunities to build really cool stuff but you've got to prioritize is what is going to be important now and And, you know, there's that.

1:00:21And then there's, you know, how does, is there going to be an integration with OpenAI and others? Because they've got a billion person network they've built. Well, it's not really a network yet, but it's there, right? The opportunity. So those are the two things that strike me in my head. Because I think we can talk for hours. So everyone takes up all of your time. Yes. So there's basically three buckets of things that we're working on. And the first one is, and what we spend still the most of our energy in because of SmetCastell that we just talked about, is how do we continue to scale the network?

1:00:57And so there's a lot of things that go into that. Yes, obviously making a lot more orbs, but there's actually the only way to do that is technology. So, for example, we just introduced a new generation of the orb that it actually is able to connect to your phone and guide you through the verification process. And so instead of there having to be a person helping you with your orb, now we're going to be able to deploy these orbs just like ATMs all over the world in convenience stores, malls, wherever you go. Sorry, a quick side question. Why didn't you just use a phone as verification of humanhood?

1:01:32Oh, we tried. You know, human verification is one of these things that sounds really simple. It's really hard. It's really hard. We've tried so many things. We started with the obvious things like verify a phone number or email and get fancy with that. So that breaks down. We consider KYC and KYC is just terrible for many reasons. First, half the global population doesn't have an ID you can digitally verify. And that's not just people think that's poor countries. like look up just the amount of people that have a US passport. It's just, it's ridiculous. It's not privacy preserving at all, but more than anything, you can just fake it with AI, like both the pictures and then now like the KYC checks with the deep fakes.

1:02:16There's, we talk with so much with banks and financial institutions that they're still going to keep KYC as a compliance step, but they're desperate for a human verification to know that that is a real person doing that and that that person owns that identity. we've tried a bunch of like other crazier ideas like web of trust or endorsements and we've also talked a lot with people that have tried to do this for example a place like facebook with like really like billions of users scaled and what we've found that they've also found is that it's just really fragile because if anyone lies at any point in the in the in the chain the whole thing collapses and now with ai it's like so easy to just create fake people with fake activity that looks real and so we just haven't found a way to do that how did how did india do it with adhar india is basically a because it's very clever i mean that was the largest bootstrapping of an identity network in history yes i think adhar is has had an immense impact on the economy of india uh and what i would say is they did it just like just like world they use iris biometrics you go to a site to enroll and then they build a payment system on top of that called UPI that's exactly what we're doing in world we're building a proof of human that you go and you enroll with biometrics because that's the only secure thing and then you build a payments network on top of that you can build other things on top of that now the key differences between world and other is other to their credit is open source which I don't think they get enough credit for but it is not privacy preserving All of your pictures and all of your biometric data gets sent to a server from the government and just sits there and you have to trust the government.

1:04:03We believe that if you want to build a global system, you should not have to trust anyone. Your data should not be sitting anywhere. Only you should be the custodian of your data. And there shouldn't be, it shouldn't be possible to issue, you shouldn't have to trust a government to not issue fake identities, right? It should be a protocol where like everything in crypto. It's trustless. Everyone can see what is going on because it's open source, but it's running on chain. And most importantly, that is anonymous, but it's default. And so we spend a lot of time on those primitives. But I think in terms of the impact that something like this can have on an economy, India is a great example.

1:04:44You look at what has happened in India from 2010 when they launched this to today, it's completely turned around the country. It's staggering. And the other thing that's really interesting, which I guess you can follow and improve upon is the whole India stack idea, which is basically your digital lockers of anything you want it to be. So then you have a zero knowledge database of anything that anybody needs access to. You can permission them. It's super clever what they built. Yes. I think it's amazing what they've shown is that the baseline primitive that you need there is that human verification.

1:05:21And that's exactly what we're doing for the internet, right? We've spent most of our time thinking about that human verification, spent some of our time thinking about the financial layer that comes on top of that with WorldChain. And then now we're also starting to see a third layer of applications getting built on top of this with these external integrations and this mini app ecosystem, which is growing like nothing, again, not just in crypto, like the numbers here are, we have more daily active users than the other larger apps like Phantom have in a week. And so our numbers, we don't even compare a lot with crypto.

1:05:55Why does people not know this? No, because it's just a very different bubble. I think, for example, I use Phantom every day. I think it's an awesome product, but it's built for people like me. And there's just not a lot of people like me in the world. It's just as simple as that. It's like, do I like Linux? I think Linux is amazing. But how many people use Linux in the world? People want a simpler experience that is more relevant for their day-to-day lives. And that's exactly what world has been about. It has been about making, without sacrificing on the guarantees of self-custody and the things that we care about in crypto, how do you make this simple enough and useful enough for people in their real lives?

1:06:36This is why, just as we were talking about the fact that with companies, we'll often talk with the CEO, not with the Web3 guy. Same thing with consumers. They just know that they're getting an app called World. And they have an ID and they have a wallet and they have all these things. But when you look at it, it doesn't look like a crypto wallet. And that's by design. That means we make some sacrifices. There's a lot of flexibility that you have on a crypto wallet. You can take your slippage and choose the right token and get to all stable coins. We don't support that. We support a few things that we think are great for everyday life.

1:07:13And a lot of our users, what they end up doing is, let's say, 10 % of our users, they get so into it that they eventually graduate to power apps like your Phantoms. And that's totally fine. But from a scale perspective, the world is already much bigger than most things in crypto. And it'll pretty soon be the largest thing, period. And to be the largest thing, the obvious thing is solving the problems of these giant companies. You know, a great place to start, the people I started with in this whole conversation was actually LinkedIn. I'm like, this is going to be a utter mess really fast. And it's Microsoft.

1:07:52I'm like, you need to solve this. It feels that, you know, stuff like that. We need that scale of integration of what you're doing into these large Web 2 scale projects. That's the big unlock. Tinder is a great example of it, but it's not the scale of some of these things. And once that happens, that changes everything. Yeah, so I'll tell you the truth. Behind the scenes, we've always known that there's a threshold where, let's call it like a utility explosion. of you hit some amount of users and then. We always thought we wouldn't be able to get big integrations like this with companies, with governments, until around 100 million users.

1:08:36That was our estimate. And I still think that a lot of magical things happen around that number. Just this, at the end of April, April 3rd, we had an event where we announced a lot of things, a new generation of the Orb, a new device that is going to be much smaller, like fits in your pocket, a new version of the app, World Chat, all these things. But we announced a lot of partnerships, not just the Tinder one. We announced a partnership with Razer, where Razer, the largest gaming company in the world, are now going to start using these to verify humans. In online games, we announced partnerships with Stripe, with Visa, with Kalshi.

1:09:10A few months before that, we've announced MOUs with the governments of Malaysia and Taiwan, where we're actually now working with governments on some of the same questions. Right. And so to be honest with you, I think while I agree with you that eventually what we think is you will be using WorldID on every single site on app on the Internet, it has gone. That adoption has started happening a lot faster than we expect, because as we talked about, we are we're at 30, 31 million users right now. um we thought it would have taken a few more but uh i guess it's just like such a big problem that a lot of these governments and companies are also betting that will continue to grow um and get to a bigger scale the problem is increasing by the day so it's solving your problem of how to scale the network because the problem is now obvious to everybody anybody uses social media anybody uses any form of online stuff sees the problem immediately yeah and and that's the thing, right?

1:10:08That is the thing that really changed the game for us was we used to have to explain you the problem and convince you that it was going to be a problem. But since people didn't believe the problem was real, then you pull out the orb and it's like, okay, I don't think it's a real problem and you're now pulling out the orb. It's like you would laugh, right? But now everyone feels and sees the problem every day. Like I've, like we were talking with Tinder, but I personally, I'm often on dating apps and i'm like wait this person has six fingers like what's going on here right um or like i have like tried to get concert tickets to like some of my favorite bands that like very barely tour and i've missed out because they all went to bots and i'm pissed that i don't get to see them for like four more years because of that right and um i used to run a fintech with the kyc step right i know what people do with fake ids and things like that to get around that i don't need a bank to tell me that um people like you like i hear all the time like my my grandma got a phone call my aunt got a text message and got scammed and so the problem let's not even talk about twitter right like that's that's a whole other thing and so we like review sites right it it's just everywhere on the internet like people get the problem right and people understand that people also understand why all these other things don't work.

1:11:31Captcha is basically a test of, are you smart enough to solve the puzzle? If you are smart enough, you're a human. If you're dumb enough, you're a bot. Well, now the bots are smarter than us. And so people get it. People feel it. And so just like companies are desperate for this, people are desperate. One of the best examples I've heard that was very surprising for me earlier this year when we announced Razer, we've run a couple of surveys with them in different countries. So in the US, I think it was something like 71 % of people, gamers are very concerned about AI. Like, okay, you're concerned.

1:12:05So what? The stat that was crazy was that more than 20 % of those gamers have stopped gaming many of their favorite games because it's just not fun anymore. And when you actually then go in and talk to those gamers and to the gaming studios, then you realize the gaming studio is super concerned that they're losing 20 plus percent of their business. because it's just not fun anymore. And they're worried that's going to go much higher. But then you talk to the gamers and they're like, dude, I've poured in three years of my life into this game. This was my, I play football. That was my identity. And now that's gotten taken away by bots.

1:12:45And so people really, truly feel these things. Yeah, because it's the same people don't understand. It's exactly the same as saying chess tournaments can have AI. what's the fun because you're going to lose because you're competing against AI, which is superior intellect than we have as humans. And people don't realize that. That's exactly what happens with online gaming. You just say, that's it, I'm out. What's the point? It's like saying that you can use a motorcycle on a 400-minute relay in the Olympics. Motorcycles are awesome, but you shouldn't be allowed to use it on the 400-meter relay.

1:13:23It's just as simple as that. The 400-meter relay is really fun. it takes a lot of skill, a lot of dedication. Just because you've got to go faster on a motorcycle doesn't mean you're not going to keep doing the Olympics. So the final question for you is, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is not going to be a one-player rules-all. It's not going to be, nor do we want it to be, one IDE for everybody on the planet. There has to be a level of interoperability. I mentioned to you in the beginning, I'm on the SWE Foundation. Obviously, they're all ex-Facebook. They understand the massive scale and the problem involved.

1:14:01And they have some great ZK technology that they're building out. And everybody else is trying to address this. Anybody serious in the space is trying to address some of these issues. How do you think about interoperability? Because crypto has been terrible for that, and we have to get there somehow. Yes.

1:14:23Because if not, we're going to get the same problem that I had with Microsoft, Facebook, and all of those guys that are saying, we're not going to accept your ID versus this ID. Yes. So one of the things that surprises people a lot is that even though we have our blockchain, it's called WorldChain, and Ethereum L2, we deploy WorldID and we deploy many of these things to other networks. And you can use the protocol even without using our chain. And the same thing applies for the credentials. As we were talking about one of the things, so we said we're focusing a lot on growth, a lot on utility, and a lot on decentralization.

1:15:01That decentralization bucket, we recently put out a paper that I recommend people check out, talks a lot about how we imagine world ID working with multiple credentials. whether it's other proof of human issuers from other devices or even just other kinds of credentials like issued by governments or issued by other people like Facebook or whoever it is. Because yeah, Tools for Humanity is not going to be issuing the one credential for everyone. What we need is Rails that we can all agree with, standards that we all can agree on and then build protocols around that. And so we think a lot about that.

1:15:35And for us, it's not even just philosophical about decentralization. It's also very practical, right? If you want to grow, if you want adoption for a product or for a protocol, you have to be able to align these incentives with everyone else in the world. And so you don't go to a country and you tell them, hey, we're going to replace your ID. First of all, because we can't even do that. But even if we could, it's much better to say, hey, let's support your ID on this protocol and let's figure out how we make it up working together. And so even just from an adoption perspective, We think it's much smarter to have support for many kinds of credentials by many kinds of issuers rather than only ours.

1:16:20But you know how smart people are in this space and how arrogant they tend to be. When you go to another protocol and you're like, hey, listen, why don't you use our tech for this part and you build what you're doing? Do they not normally turn around and say, well, we can do it better? Because it's a standard answer in the space as opposed to, great, you've built that. we'll just bolt it on, let's go. They always think, everybody thinks, well, we might as well just build it better. I think that was the case at the beginning. I think that, again, as the network has started to grow, people want to be able to get that momentum.

1:16:56The reason people are building these integrations and these mini apps and people are deploying WorldID and other chains or people are hopefully soon going to start deploying credentials with the protocol is, at the end of the day, they want to win. and the world is growing so fast that, yes, you can have all these technical discussions that you want, but do you want access to 30 million users or not? Do you want people to start using your thing tomorrow or not? And it's not even that we don't want to show. It's just like, it's very simple. If you're compatible with this thing, we're able to surface you and a lot of people are hungry for things to do.

1:17:31And so I think that's some of it. I think honestly also what we've people ask us a lot, well why doesn't Facebook or someone else do something like this? It's such a pain in the ass to be honest. Building a hardware device manufacturing those things shipping it around the world, real world operations are messy. Building all the cryptography is so hard so that it can run not just on an iPhone but on a 10 year old Android and building all the privacy tech is really hard what we do. So I think that we've done a good job at staying slim enough, leaving room for partners to build their businesses, and for us to focus just on what we're really good at, which is building this human and financial layer and getting a lot of people to adopt it.

1:18:17And I asked you the question before, and you kind of ignored it. Maybe you'll ignore it again, and that's fine. But OpenAI has close to a billion users. It's the fastest scaling of any business in history. Why not partner with them? Because obviously Sam saw the problem it's the you know it's the same people the same playing field you know it just feels like the obvious way is is an integration that wallet that experience and the chatbot is is like victory immediately yeah maybe something like that could make sense obviously even if we were doing something like that it's not like i can uh i couldn't know obviously but it's just obviously in everybody's mind when i first learned about you guys the first thing is like this is needed and okay there's open ai which is scaling so fast yeah i mean without being too cute i think there's a lot of overlap in our missions just like there's a lot of overlap with other ai labs missions um i think that a lot of the things that we talked about like for example delegating of your world id makes a lot of sense that i will work with a lot of uh ai labs on that um And yeah, look, obviously we share a founder in some with OpenAI.

1:19:31I don't know what kind of partnerships we'll have or not. No, I mean, it makes sense even from the open source networks, the open source AI company. I mean, they all need something like this. Yes. And I think it's also important that the world is neutral and is able to solve the problems for every one of those companies. It has to be neutral. And so, yeah, like, do I think there's a lot of opportunities to collaborate with companies like that? Yes. Yeah, because, you know, in my head, I just think of how do you build the nodes in the network and how do you build the super nodes? And, you know, obviously, AI could, OpenAI could be a super node, as could all of the other AIs, as could the LinkedIn's and the social medias, as could, you know, my head just goes, okay, where is the large-scale growth for a network of this type?

1:20:26because of the utility that it provides, which is, you know, what's so interesting about it has a very specific mission, but it's a network, so all sorts of things can get built on that, but it's very specific and clear to people what you're trying to do, which is amazing, I think. Yeah, I think that would be cool. We'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah, it'll certainly be cool. Tego, fantastic. Really, really interesting conversation. I think it's really important what you guys are working on and how you're solving it. I think it's really clever how you've gone about some of this stuff as well. And I think most people in the crypto world don't really understand it.

1:20:59But, you know, when I spent time with the team from the foundation in the Cayman Islands, I'm like, OK, this is much more interesting than people understand. And, you know, so well done, you guys. And let's see what you what you build out of, you know, proof of humanity now as well, because I'm sure there's a lot of really not only interesting applications, but useful ones, too. Yes. Thank you so much for the time. And this has been awesome. It has flown by. I just looked at the time. I thought we were 30 minutes into this. Thank you so much for the conversation. This has been super fun. And so obviously people are curious about this.

1:21:34They can just check the website. All of it is open source. You can go on the GitHub and even look at the Orb schematics. It's actually quite cool to nerd on. And what's the website? It's world.org. And for developers that are interested in building apps on top of this, it's super simple. You can build a mini app in a matter of hours. These are just web apps and many of them have millions of users already. So I think there's, I was hearing a stat that, actually I'll not name which one, but there is a mini app that is a wallet that is like that wallet mini app inside of world is already like one of the world's largest five wallets period.

1:22:17and it's a mini app inside of World, which is just crazy to think about. And so, yeah, if you want to build on that, also world.org or developers.world.org, you can learn more about how to build on it. Fantastic. And we will check in with you in another year's time or six months' time and find out, because it's all, you know, people are starting to understand the scale of the problem and your speed of execution is actually important now as well. So it'll be very, very interesting to see where this goes. So thank you for all that. Of course, yeah. And let's see where things are in a few months.

1:22:50Perfect. So look, I could have spoken for hours with Tiago. There's a lot we didn't talk about. But what you can see is, interesting enough, we spoke the same language of Metcalfe's law and understanding what the network is and its value and how it accrues value and how to create super nodes on the network that bring more nodes onto the network, all of these things. The point being is what these guys are doing is important. They probably have the right connections, I would imagine, considering Sam Alton was the co-founder. But they understand the scale of the problem. And for me, this problem only gets solved not by one participant, which is them, but the adoption of multiple technologies and protocols all working together and using best practices from each other.

1:23:38Interoperability has to happen across all of what we're doing for any of this to work, because not one protocol can invent everything. All the technology is needed. It didn't happen on the internet. We scaled with different parts, and we'll do the same here. Anyway, super interesting conversation. I'll definitely catch up with Tiago maybe six months or a year's time to find out where this is going, because you can see by now how fast all of this is happening. The network adoption of crypto is still going exponential. And we're seeing the network adoption of AI basically being not just Metcalfe's law, but maybe Reid's law, which is Metcalfe's law squared, which is incredible.

1:24:21Anyway, take care out there. And remember, verify everybody you speak to online because soon you won't know. And there's enough bots of me scamming people, which aren't me. Yes, I'm a blue check and all of that stuff. Please double check everything. Trust nobody anymore because the world is changing faster than you imagine. Anyway, take care out there. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas, and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future.

1:25:02So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join.

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