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Recently, I was re-watching one of my favorite shows, Archer, the animated spy comedy famous for its quick wit and emotionally stunted characters. In the Season 7 finale, something stuck with me.

There’s this moment where a humanoid clone of the lead character, Sterling Archer, shows up, and it’s indistinguishable from the real one.

Same voice, same ego, same taste for danger and bad decisions. Even his own mother can’t tell which one is her actual son.

The humanoid is so perfectly Archer that no one knows who’s real anymore. It was actually quite hilarious.

Guess what? We’re grappling with something just as uncanny: the rise of digital AI personas that are getting harder to distinguish from real people.

Just take a look at the recent launch of Google’s Veo 3.

With just a text prompt, you can now generate photorealistic videos with natural motion, lifelike lighting, and voiceovers that sound uncannily human.

This isn’t research lab stuff. It’s available now.

So while Archer played it for laughs, the real-world version of that problem is already unfolding on our screens, in our wallets, and across our social feeds.

AI systems can now argue, flirt, scam, and scheme. Deepfakes spoof your closest friends to scam you. Bots harvest airdrops, flood Discord servers, and manipulate sentiment online. We’ve moved past content generation. We’re in the era of identity simulation.

The uncomfortable part is how easily it slips in. The internet still runs on a quiet assumption: that whoever you’re talking to is human.

This assumption will soon be broken.

And once it does, so does everything built on top of it. Online voting becomes a joke. Sybil attacks ruin token distributions. Public goods get drained by fakes. Trust, which is already scarce online, becomes a luxury.

So what comes next?

We need a new foundational primitive— proof of personhood. The ability to reliably, privately, and globally prove that you are a unique, living human being, without needing to tie yourself to a name or government ID.

That’s where World comes in.

If you’ve spent any time around crypto or AI, you’ve probably heard of Worldcoin—often accompanied by a snarky tweet about eyeball scans or Sam Altman’s supposed descent into sci-fi villainy.

But beyond the noise, World is a serious attempt to solve a hard problem: how to create proof of personhood as a public good.

Not a bolt-on feature or a middleware layer, but a foundational primitive. A base protocol for an internet where “I am a real human” matters more than “I control this wallet.”

World was founded in 2020 by Sam Altman and Alex Blania. It doesn’t look like a typical crypto startup. What they’ve built is more akin to a sovereign infrastructure stack with custom hardware, custom biometric verification, a new L2 chain, and a privacy-preserving identity system, all focused on a single question:

How can you prove that someone is a unique, living human on a global scale without sacrificing their privacy?

Together, these components make up what World calls the Real Human Network, a system where humans are verified and economically rewarded, and where bots are structurally deprioritized.

One of the most fundamental (and a bit controversial…) ways World is reimagining digital identity is through the Orb.

Yes, that Orb. The shiny chrome bowling ball-looking device that’s been meme’d to death on X, compared to surveillance devices in dystopian sci-fi, and called everything from a biometric breakthrough to a marketing disaster.

Inside, however, is a very advanced biometric imaging system built to scan your iris and generate a unique mathematical representation of your identity, an iris code, that serves as your World ID credential.

World didn’t start out trying to manufacture hardware. In fact, the founding team reportedly explored every other possible method of proving personhood at scale:

The Orb wasn’t plan A, but was the answer when every other plan failed.

Among all biometric modalities, the iris stands out.

It offers the highest entropy (uniqueness) of any visible feature, doesn’t degrade over time, and can be measured quickly with minimal intrusion. Fingerprints wear down. Faces change. Voice is noisy.

But irises are practically built for 1:N matching at a planetary scale.

Overall, the Orb was a well-thought-out engineering decision: if you want to build a global proof-of-personhood system that’s fraud-resistant, inclusive, and scalable, you ultimately need something like the Orb.

The Orb is a fully optimized compute unit designed for privacy and biometric integrity. A quick teardown reveals an impressive stack:

No data is sent to the cloud. In fact, no iris image is even retained by default.

After the Orb captures your iris, it immediately converts the image into an iris code, which is a compact, irreversible mathematical representation. Once that code is generated and checked for uniqueness, the raw image is permanently deleted from the device.

Users are then given a choice:

Those who opt in do so under a model called Personal Custody. The backup is encrypted end-to-end, and the keys never leave the user’s device. No one, not World, can access or decrypt it. It’s a recovery option without surveillance risk.

Still, it’s fair to ask: how do we know the Orb actually deletes the image?

While the system isn’t fully trustless yet, World has open-sourced major parts of the Orb’s firmware, published hardware specs, and committed to independent audits. All processing occurs locally on-device (on an NVIDIA Jetson module) with no data sent to a central server. The architecture is designed to minimize trust, and over time, the goal is to make even the hardware verifiable.

It’s not perfect. But compared to how most biometric systems operate today, it’s a major leap forward in user privacy and control.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room.

It’s easy to see why people recoil. A glowing metal sphere that scans your iris to prove you’re human sounds more like a Black Mirror prop than a tool for digital inclusion. And the comparisons to Orwell aren’t subtle.

But it’s worth pausing before calling for “dystopia”.

Facial recognition is already everywhere. Airports, border crossings, phones, stadiums. Most of us have already handed our biometric data to Apple, Google, or a dozen apps we forgot we installed.

The difference with World is the intent.

World is not harvesting data to sell ads. It’s not tying your scan to your passport or name. It’s trying to create a privacy-preserving passport to digital life, available to anyone, regardless of where they’re born or what documents they have.

And whether that future feels utopian or dystopian won’t be decided by the Orb itself, but it’ll depend on what kind of power structures we build on top of the identity it enables.

So the Orb scans your irises. You hold still, the machine does its magic, and a few seconds later, you’re handed something that’s...not a passport, not a login, not even an NFT.

What you get is your World ID on the World App, a cryptographic credential that confirms: “This wallet belongs to a real, verified human.”

Without any name, birthdate, or photo. Just a mathematically unique badge of humanness.

But the idea isn’t just that World ID proves you’re human, but it lets you prove that again and again, across apps and contexts, without revealing who you are, or what else you’ve done.

That’s the actual innovation here. It’s privacy-preserving sybil resistance, designed for an internet where identity is fractured.

Let’s break down how that’s possible.

After the Orb captures your iris, it generates the iris code. But to make sure you're not already in the system, that code needs to be compared against all others without exposing your actual data.

This is where Anonymized Multi-Party Computation (AMPC) comes in.

AMPC is a cryptographic technique that allows multiple independent parties to perform a computation without any of them having access to the underlying data. In World’s case, it’s used to check that your iris code is unique without revealing what your code actually is.

The image below shows how AMPC splits the verification process across different servers or parties. Each one holds only an encrypted “shard” of your data, so even if one node is compromised, your privacy remains intact.

This setup solves one of the hardest problems in biometric identity: how do you deduplicate identities without creating a surveillance honeypot?

AMPC’s answer: never let anyone see the full data, not even the system itself. It’s a good example of how World is using cryptography to redesign trust.

Once you’ve been verified, your World ID lives locally on your device. But what happens when you want to use it?

Say you want to vote in a DAO, access a gated app, or claim an airdrop. You need to prove you’re a verified human, but you probably don’t want that action tied back to your wallet or name.

That’s where Semaphore comes in, a zero-knowledge protocol that lets you prove you belong to a group (e.g., verified humans) without revealing which member you are.

It’s like flashing a gym card that proves you're a member but not revealing your name, location, or visit history.

To prevent abuse (like claiming the same airdrop twice), World ID uses nullifiers, which are cryptographic tokens that prove an action has already been taken, without linking it to anything else.

Each nullifier is context-specific. So if you use World ID to vote in one election, that action can't be correlated with a different vote, a different app, or even the same app on a different day.

It’s not only anonymity but also unlinkability which is a crucial concept in modern privacy.

When you combine biometric uniqueness with zero-knowledge privacy, you get something that didn’t really exist before: a human-verification layer that doesn’t compromise identity.

This unlocks things like:

But the big unlock is what comes next: a new generation of apps that can assume humanity without needing to collect identity. World ID becomes the trust layer for pseudonymous, sovereign interactions in a world increasingly saturated with bot-driven manipulation.

Now that there’s a way to verify humanness securely and privately, the next question is: how do you actually get humans into the system?

And this is where World shifts from cryptography to logistics. Verifying billions of humans requires lots of boots on the ground.

To scale globally, World partners with Orb Operators: local entrepreneurs and organizations who deploy and run these devices in high-footfall areas like malls, metro stations, campuses, and public events.

Operators earn WLD tokens for each successful verification, creating a self-reinforcing loop: the more users they onboard, the more they earn, and the more valuable the network becomes.

The onboarding process is accessible but includes a thorough review: applicants submit a form, go through interviews and training, and if accepted, receive an Orb to begin verifying users and earning rewards.

As of May 2025, Orbs for new Operators are still in production, with shipping expected to begin later this year. The exact price of an Orb is not disclosed yet but pre-orders are open, requiring a $100 deposit to reserve a unit. Once delivered, Operators can either rent or purchase the device, and then begin earning WLD on a per-scan basis.

To allocate Orbs fairly and efficiently, World runs a bidding mechanism where Operators compete based on factors like expected foot traffic, fraud prevention capability, and historical performance. High-performing Operators are prioritized for expansion.

Overall, it’s a decentralized, incentive-driven rollout of identity infrastructure where local players drive global adoption.

World has also launched Orb Stores, which are Apple Store-style locations where users can get verified, ask questions, and learn about World ID in person.

These storefronts serve as onboarding stations, privacy education centers, and regional Operator hubs. They’re already live or planned in cities like Miami, LA, Berlin, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires.

Once a user verifies their humanity through the Orb, their entry point into the World ecosystem is World App, a lightweight, self-custodial mobile wallet built to be radically accessible. It also holds the user’s World ID.

At just ~18MB, it can run on 10+ year-old Android phones, supports dozens of languages, and is designed not for crypto power users but for everyone else. This is where users claim their WLD, hold and swap assets, and most importantly, interact with the verified internet via their World ID.

It’s where World’s demand-side engine is quietly taking shape.

If Orbs, Operators, and WLD incentives make up the supply side of World, then Mini Apps are its demand layer.

These are lightweight applications embedded directly into the World App, designed for human-first UX with built-in support for sybil resistance, identity gating, and WLD-based incentives.

Since opening up the Mini App SDK in October 2024, World has seen a growing wave of developers building:

Each Mini App comes with three powerful primitives:

And because those primitives are baked into the platform, developers don’t have to build anti-sybil infrastructure themselves. They just plug into a network that already filters for verified humans.

Not every Mini App is human-gated, and that’s by design. The World App Store supports both types of apps:

This flexibility allows developers to choose when sybil resistance is critical and when it’s not.

Some mini apps that are benefiting enormously from verified identity include:

Others, like Kalshi’s upcoming prediction market, will benefit from a mix of open access for visibility, but verified participation for credibility and integrity. When real money or reputation is on the line, human-only logic becomes a feature, not a restriction.

Most developers in Web3 today are stuck optimizing for fake metrics: inflated DAUs, wash volume. In contrast, World App offers something rare: a chance to reach millions of real, unique users who are already verified and actively engaged.

As of April 2025:

To kickstart its ecosystem, World launched a $1 million retroactive funding round for Mini App developers. If people actually use what you build, you get paid.

And because World Chain is part of the OP Stack, developers are also eligible for Optimism RetroPGF. The result is a rare dual-incentive flywheel: build for real humans, and you get both usage and funding.

World has millions of verified users. But to support real human activity at scale, it needs more than an ID layer. It needs a chain that’s built for humans.

Most blockchains are identity-blind. They don’t care who’s transacting but only that gas is paid. But it breaks down when you’re coordinating people.

That’s why World launched World Chain, a human-first, AI-aware Layer 2 where verified users come first by default.

World Chain is built using Optimism’s modular OP Stack, a smart choice from a tech and ecosystem standpoint. It inherits Ethereum security, leverages a well-supported rollup framework, and stays interoperable with the rest of the Superchain.

But Worldcoin is making key changes under the hood that tilt the game board in favor of humans:

Using World ID, verified users are granted top-of-block access. This means their transactions are processed before others, and potentially at lower fees. It’s a direct protocol-level defense against:

It’s one of the first real attempts to create identity-based Quality of Service (QoS) at the blockchain layer, something that might become critical as AI agents start flooding blockspace.

Every World App user gets a smart contract wallet by default (using Safe), with support for meta-transactions. This allows:

In short: the chain doesn’t just know you’re human. It can respond accordingly.

Because World Chain can verify that a wallet = a person, protocols can enforce identity-based rules without off-chain checks.

It’s a design unlock for building human-aware applications at the smart contract level.

It would be foolish to verify the humanness of a billion people without a world-class team or serious financial backing. Thankfully, World has both.

World was co-founded by:

The core team spans cryptographers, hardware engineers, and product leads across Berlin and San Francisco. Tiago Sada (Head of Product) and Remco Bloemen (ex-Ethereum researcher, now leading protocol and infra) round out a group that operates more like a lab than a traditional crypto company.

Worldcoin has raised over $250 million to date, including rounds backed by:

And most recently, in May 2025, World raised $135 million by selling WLD at market price to a16z and Bain, two of its earliest and highest-conviction backers.

The key thing to note is that this was not a discounted token round. It was a direct purchase of circulating WLD at public market prices. This round stands out as a rare signal of conviction. They were betting on WLD’s long-term utility.

The funding is earmarked for expanding the Orb network, particularly in the U.S. and other regulated markets.

There’s being early, and there’s being wrong. Sometimes they look almost… identical.

WLD sits at that uncomfortable intersection.

On one hand, it’s a solid bet on a global, privacy-preserving identity protocol. An idea will become essential as AI agents overwhelm the internet.

On the other hand, it’s a token with emissions that would make even the most inflationary DeFi project blush.

And so WLD currently trades like a rotating altcoin, not a call option on internet infrastructure. That mispricing creates an opening. If WLD’s utility inflects before supply overwhelms demand, the upside is asymmetric.

World has assembled the largest verified human identity graph in crypto. Over 26 million sign-ups. Hardware (Orbs) and software (World App) deployed across dozens of countries. Around 12.5 million unique individuals verified so far. That’s more than any other project in this space, but still just 0.15 percent of the global population.

The target: everyone. Eight billion humans.

WLD is a race between utility and dilution. Adoption has to outrun emissions.

The investment case comes down to two axes:

The bull case needs both axes to bend upward.

The bear case is simpler: emissions swamp demand, and the token grinds lower as insiders sell into thinning liquidity.

Let’s break down what moves those levers.

The World (WLD) token was officially launched on July 24, 2023

WLD supply schedule is aggressive by design. The stated objective is mass distribution. A global identity protocol that pays users to onboard.

The token supply is capped at 10 billion WLD for the first 15 years. After that, governance can approve up to 1.5% annual inflation, though the default rate is zero. Today, just 1.5B tokens are in circulation (15% of token supply)

At a high level, the token design is cleanly split:

For (1), every Orb-verified user can claim up to 40 WLD (16 WLD initially, then decaying rate over next 11 months), with a 20 WLD kicker for linking a passport.

Operators are paid in WLD too. So far, ~38 million WLD have been distributed to operators. That’s a persistent source of sell pressure—most operators don’t HODL.

Current user growth (~1 million/month) puts circulating supply growth at around 125 million WLD per year. Even though the per-user grants step down over time, the install base is large enough to keep emissions high.

For (2), the initial plan was a 3-year vesting for a portion and up to 5 years for the rest, but in mid-2024, Worldcoin announced an extension of vesting to 5 years for most of these tokens, after community criticism.

This reduces the monthly unlock rate to ~60M tokens per month but also extends the vesting period to 2028. As of now, ~28% of team and investor tokens have been released, with the remainder unlocking by mid-2028.

Add user distributions, and we’re looking at ~1 billion WLD hitting the market over the next 12 months.

WLD has also sold large OTC blocks. The most notable was a $200 million deal in 2025, representing around 18 percent of the circulating float at the time. Discretionary market operations continue. There is little transparency regarding the flows.

For now, WLD is a reward mechanism. Most users claim and sell. There is no requirement to hold WLD to use World App, and no enforced sinks.

But there are upcoming demand drivers:

This will be the first enforced demand for WLD. Applications integrating World ID will have to pre-fund a wallet with WLD, and each identity proof will debit that balance. Users remain free, but apps pay. World App hosts 150+ mini-apps already.

If this launches and scales, it will be meaningful. Even 20 million daily proofs at 0.02 WLD per proof would generate 150M WLD in fees per year. But the pilot hasn’t launched yet, and no large-scale integrations have been confirmed.

There’s a risk of friction here as most apps aren’t used to paying per login. But in categories where bots cause real economic damage like airdrops, social media, gig platforms, and governance tools, the cost of not knowing who’s real is far higher than the 0.02 WLD per proof.

Governance is another potential sink. The plan is for one-human-one-vote governance, with World ID gating and token-weighted voting as a fallback. If proposals allow staked WLD to earn yield or protocol privileges, it could create long-term locking. However, no DAO is live, and no staking incentives have been introduced yet.

World Chain currently runs on the OP Stack and still uses ETH for gas. Verified users often get sponsored transactions. In April 2024, TFH hinted at making fees payable in WLD in the future.

The logic is clear: if World App becomes the default UX for proof-of-humanity services, and payments are routed through WLD, users will need to hold balances. But today, USDC and ETH are still accepted, and nothing mandates WLD usage. The economic flywheel is missing a gear.

Two future paths here could drive real demand:

The most compelling argument for World is that there is a strong macro shift in what the internet is becoming.

In 2024, bots surpassed humans in web traffic for the first time in a decade, with malicious bots making up 37% of all activity. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to bot creation, and bots now dominate everything from API traffic to fake reviews.

There’s still no scalable, privacy-safe way to tell a human from an AI. World is building for a future where every app, platform, and system has to ask that question. When trust becomes the bottleneck, identity becomes the most valuable layer. And World is furthest ahead in building it.

This is likely what a16z, Bain, and others are betting on. Not that Worldcoin is perfect. But it’s early, and it’s furthest along. When the identity crisis hits full scale, there may not be many alternatives.

Most blockchains have a top-line problem: usage looks strong, but it’s hard to tell how much usage is real. World Chain looks… different.

On May 25, 2025, World Chain reached 8.2 million gas per second, surpassing Ethereum Mainnet, Optimism, and Arbitrum in throughput. These are Orb-verified humans engaging through World App in claim flows, prediction markets, payment rails, and reward loops. Every transaction is tied to a unique human identity.

Today, World ID is mainly used inside World App. The bull case hinges on a bigger question: can World ID become a default credential across the rest of the internet?

In April 2025, three major integrations were announced:

These integrations are demand signals from sectors where identity have become pain points.

If these use cases scale and more follow in e-commerce, creator platforms, and beyond, World ID transitions into the human access layer for the digital economy. That unlocks a second-order effect: demand for WLD.

There’s one more angle most investors miss. WLD is the only liquid, public-market vehicle tied to Sam Altman. OpenAI has no token, no IPO yet, and no way for retail to get exposure.

It’s not unlike TSLA for Elon. Musk built a narrative flywheel that carried the stock. WLD could play a similar role for Altman. As long as he’s central to AI’s ascent, his presence will attract attention. We assign a modest key-man premium to WLD for this.

The spread between our projected bull and bear outcomes is wide. That comes with the territory for an asset this early and this uncertain. We will revise our assumptions as data emerges, especially around verified users and fees.

WLD’s path will not be smooth. A lull in adoption or regulatory pushback may look bearish, until a breakout app or global event triggers a sudden need for proof-of-personhood.

World catches lightning in a bottle. A sharp rise in AI-enabled fraud and bot manipulation, or a major incident, creates an urgent need for proof-of-personhood. The major platforms start looking for a turnkey solution. World is already there.

By late 2026, the protocol has scale. Hundreds of millions of users (300M+) hold verified World IDs. The World App sees real daily engagement as a wallet and identity layer embedded in digital finance. A large tech platform plugs in, onboarding tens of millions in weeks, not years.

The token sinks finally show up. Websites and applications begin paying WLD to verify users, turning World ID from a public good into a metered API. Fees scale with usage. The more credible the protocol becomes, the more applications rely on it to gate access.

At the same time, Worldchain decentralizes with validator staking requirements in WLD. The shift from protocol-as-app to protocol-as-infrastructure creates the first structural demand for token lockups. As validators and governance participants stake significant supply, the effective float contracts. In a market with front-loaded emissions, that tightening matters.

The bull case rests on this flywheel: usage drives utility, utility drives staking, staking constrains supply. Meanwhile, marginal token demand is driven users buying WLD because a killer app requires it.

World stays on course. No breakout moments, but no derailments either. Adoption grows steadily, paced by Orb deployment and regional network effects. By 2026, the protocol may have verified 100 million users, an 8x growth from today driven by ongoing Orb expansion. Enough to matter, not yet enough to dominate.

The app ecosystem evolves cautiously. A few mini-apps find niche popularity, driving transaction flow on Worldchain without catalyzing a full-blown flywheel. Integration with third-party platforms picks up by 2026, particularly in Web3 environments where identity verification has immediate utility.

WLD supply and demand expand in rough symmetry. A meaningful portion of tokens ends up held by users: earned, not bought, for actual participation. Daily emissions remain high, yet partially absorbed by new cohorts entering the system.

Price action reflects that balance. Valuation tracks network usage. The World ID fee system launches, possibly joined by sequencer staking in 2026. These features introduce modest demand sinks. The token’s float continues to grow, but so does its utility footprint.

Worldcoin runs into walls: legal, logistical, and narrative.

Regulatory pushback forces Orb operations to shut down in key markets. This is the biggest uncertain risk we see.

Our bear case implies a strong probability that at least one major jurisdiction (EU or Kenya) sustains a biometric moratorium through 2026. In that pathway, verified-user growth maxes out near 40M by next year.

The World App struggles to convert sign-ups into sustained engagement. Once the token rewards are claimed, most users disengage.

Utility demand for WLD remains theoretical. Businesses hesitate to adopt World ID amid compliance risks. The mini-app ecosystem could fail to find product-market fit. The fee model flops. Without meaningful third-party integration, the identity layer exists but feels inert.

Meanwhile, supply keeps arriving on schedule. Most of it unlocks into a market with no structural demand. Speculative flows dominate, but can’t absorb the pace.

In this scenario, WLD becomes a leaking vessel.

World is not subtle. It wants to rebuild the internet’s trust layer, starting with your eyeball and ending with a global, verified, human-first network. It’s hardware-heavy, regulation-sensitive, and ideologically messy.

But subtlety was never the goal. World is forcing the question.

The next 12 to 24 months are pivotal. The first real test comes in late 2025, when apps begin paying World ID fees. That will show whether developers are willing to pay for verified identity, and whether those payments translate into token burns or recurring revenue.

Sequencer decentralization could follow, especially if it introduces WLD staking. Major unlocks in mid-2025 and mid-2026 will test the market’s ability to absorb insider supply.

We are tracking active users, fee volumes (once available), app integrations, and Orb deployment. More broadly, we are watching to see whether World can move from crypto experiment to public infrastructure.

One metric cuts through the noise. Growth in verified human usage. If that happens, WLD has a foundation for success.

If the future really is bots vs. humans, then World is a bet on humanity.

Thanks for reading,

0xAce and Teng Yan

This essay is intended solely for educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. It is not an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Always conduct your own research and exercise caution when making investments.