WORLDCOIN, 2019—2020

The early 2020s gave rise to a pervasive anxiety around authenticity, identity, and control. The rise of AI-generated content, deepfakes, and synthetic identities (remember Lil Miquela?) accelerated a dialogue around verification: who or what was real?

Meanwhile, blockchain metastasized through every sphere of digital life, creating a decentralized world where ownership and transactions were immutable but human identity remained fluid and vulnerable to manipulation. Against this backdrop, the question of "proof of personhood" emerged as a central dilemma, intertwined with concerns about democracy, privacy, and economic access.

WHAT'S REAL?

The cryptosphere was simultaneously libertarian and hyper-surveilled, promising financial freedom while generating an environment of extreme precarity. KYC (Know Your Customer) laws forced crypto users into compliance with legacy banking structures, while pseudonymous DeFi projects exploded in popularity. This paradox — decentralization vs. control, anonymity vs. verification — created the ideological conditions for something like Worldcoin.

BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION

Founded by Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, and Alex Blania, Worldcoin entered the scene anticipating two questions: how do you prove you are human in a world increasingly dominated by AI, and how do you distribute a universal digital currency without the bureaucratic apparatus of nation-states? Their answer: biometrics.

They required hardware, which we designed to tell a story for this new social contract.

WHAT IS HUMAN?

Given the ideas revolved around what the future of human identity would look like when AI and automation made traditional labor obsolete, conversations on the human spirit, citizenship, and freedom were recurring themes.

Worldcoin’s speculative bet was more akin to writing science fiction than industrial design. The task at hand was to develop mythological artifacts of a belief system.

We imagined an Orb as the primary point of verification:

Rooted in our fascination with Google’s mission to map the entire world and its corresponding camera backpack, the Orb was a biometric scanner a World ambassador would travel the world with to scan human eyeballs.

The design was later internally developed and produced by Worldcoin, released in 2022.

In exchange for uploading their biometrics, users would receive Worldcoin, a digital currency intended to be a universal basic income (UBI) for the AI age, an unforgeable registry of real people through which wealth could be distributed.

For the coin, we imagined a high tech talisman:

As Worldcoin's human verification infrastructure grows, we imagined the dispensing of unique World tokens could be deployed in the future via monolithic vending machines:

NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT

At its core, Worldcoin is an attempt to create a verification system that stands outside of national governments, traditional banking, and existing identity structures.

On one hand, a decentralized proof of personhood could mitigate bot-driven misinformation, enable more secure voting systems, and provide economic stability in a world disrupted by AI. On the other, it introduces a new form of biometric surveillance, one that is voluntary but fundamentally centralized, despite its cryptographic assurances.

Whether it’s liberating or dystopian depends on perspective.

CREDITS

Team: Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, Vadik Marmeladov, Sergey Philippov, Luke Crawford, Andrew Duffus, Yagmur Ersayin, Daniel Reetz, Keaton Ventura