Tomorrow, April 17, 2026, there is an event scheduled by World, which will be hosted by their CEO Alex Blania and World cofounder Sam Altman, who is also CEO of OpenAI. If you’re interested in attending virtually, here are the livestream details. It will be interesting to see whether the event will have promising announcements about use cases for their native crypto token Worldcoin and their World ID ecosystem, or whether its just a hype event intended to rally the price and performance of Worldcoin, which is down significantly since its peak in March of 2024.
World is an interesting company that I’ve been following since it started. It addresses the interesting concept of how we will prove humanity on the web, by using a device called The Orb, which scans your face and eyes using several high-definition cameras, which then encrypts the photos and stores them on your phone. The encrypted data then generates a code, which is then stored on several databases, each database with a separate portion of the code, which means that if one database is compromised, your data is useless without the other matching codes stored in the other databases. World calls this a secure multi-party computation (SMPC), which they claim results in perfect secrecy.
The closest Orb to me is about 2 hours and 45 minutes away, so I haven’t been verified by World yet. But I have set up my profile on the World app. Many of the benefits of and access to the mini-apps within the World app aren’t available until you are verified by an Orb, so it is something I’ve been considering.
Many people are rightly suspicious of a device that will scan your face and eyes to then store that information in a database, but my initial research has revealed that World anticipated that reluctance and took privacy and security seriously when developing their ecosystem. They still have a lot of convincing to do on that front, especially given Sam Altman’s prominent role with World. He hasn’t had the best press recently when it comes to privacy, safety, and security. However, I believe the mission of World is spot on with the continuing advancement of AI models, and proof of humanity continues to grow in importance.
In the meantime, if you can’t catch the livestream, I plan to recap it in next week’s newsletter.