Worldcoin Product Announcement
Pragma Lisbon · 11 May 2023 · 14:17
Remco Bloemen announces that Worldcoin is launching on the Optimism mainnet, after weighing costs for a chain that could serve a billion people. The team says Ethereum was out of the question for ten dollar balances, that its earlier rollup design reached under 350 gas per transaction but lacked EVM support, and that it then deployed 1.7 million Safe wallets on an EVM chain while paying 1.5 trillion gas of meta transaction fees. It presents World ID, an anonymous proof of unique personhood built on iris verification, as the reason it can subsidize fees without bot risk. An Optimism speaker follows with a commemorative NFT.
Speakers
Topics
From Pragma Lisbon, hosted by ETHGlobal.
Transcript
foreign [Music] so the next stop is going to be Remco and W from the world coin team they're gonna announce something really cool that we're excited to have everybody share here on stage with us so uh as they get set up we'll uh we'll kick off with this super cool announcement all right thank you all worldcoin here with an exciting announcement for y'all Wilt coin is joining the optimism super chain now for those of you who don't know why this is so cool let me give you a little bit of a backstory about world coin uh we started a while back founded by Sam aldman who is becoming rather famous
right now to solve the problems that ADI will inevitably create in the world and in order to address those problems we really need to start taking serious um the original promise of blockchain and create the largest financial and identity Network one that is inclusive of everyone and we do this by creating it creating an identity Network and giving ownership of it to everyone now why now like I said AGI is around the corner we need to take this stuff seriously but also we need to have a concept of humanness in the digital domain right now blockchains don't know what a human is we need this in order to actually work on stuff like Ubi and weld distribution we need this in order to
get governance models that are not purely token based but have things like queretic voting we need all those things we need the concept of humanness and we need to deliver on the original promos of blockchain the thing that got me excited about the space in the in the first place scaling a global efficient and inclusive Financial system so how do we do this now getting humans into the digital domain is hard we've looked at all the options that were there we've looked at kyc no privacy we looked at fingerprints doesn't scale Beyond a million people so in the end the only thing that we came up with that could potentially work is irises so we worked hard on a hardware device that can achieve the entropy that
is stored in the human Iris and we now have the orb which is the only way that we're aware of that can verify humanness at a population scale what is the orb I'm not going to go into the details here and you can check out the website we have a lot of content there but it is advancing the field of um Irish recognition by a huge degree and the best part is we made all of this open source if you are interested in building your own orb please reach out because we want other people to build orbs now of course a very important aspect of this is that we want to empower the users make sure that they are in control so the whole thing is completely private by Design the raw images never leave the
orb they're only used to process into an iris code the user's wallet is a fully self-custody wallet and in addition to that there is a whole layer of zero knowledge proofs that make sure makes it such that the wallet can prove that you're a unique human being without revealing anything else about you and even without the ability to link it back to other things that you have that you've done in the past so every single action is anonymous on its own right we recently announced the world app which is our Mobile Wallet app designed to be easy to use and bring blockchain technology to a very very wide audience including everyone
uh the last I've heard is that it's actually trending first crypto app right now in the app store which is super exciting the wallet also contains the first implementation of world ID which is the aforementioned Anonymous proof of personhood protocol with this you can build things like quadratic voting you can do airdrops where you airdrop a token over every human on the planet we have an SDK for this which is online and you can try it out and play with it right now we I think have an announcement tomorrow about how you um how you could do it as part of the Lisbon hackathon and we've been running in beta for a
while now we um we've signed up over 1.7 million users at the moment over 200 different geographies and in order to support so many users we need to think serious about the blockchain infrastructure that we have we need a chain for a billion people what does this mean the billion people chain we need it to be value aligned this is a chain that is going to hold the wallets for everyone so it needs to be extremely secure we need it to be permissionless we don't want anyone to have any kind of ultimate
control over this thing we need it to be trustless we needed to be decentralized we needed to be open source we need it to be such that it deserves to be d-chain where a billion people live on we also need it to be usable which means that it needs to be affordable right now only you select few people can actually use the ethereum chain because the transaction fees are simply to hide it precludes too much of the global population we need a chain where transaction fees are measured in cents or less so that balances of ten dollars or fewer actually makes sense and most of all we need a vibrant ecosystem we don't want something locked
down or Limited in functionality we want a place where people can innovate and create big things are created together and we need to have a chain that supports both long-term stable projects but also allows creative experimentation that creates new valuable projects for everyone to use so almost two years ago now we looked at what is the landscape what are our options at the moment um and we made this graph which is the cost breakdown of the various options we had at the moment so ethereum was out of the question 10 per transaction with a 10 balance is impossible if you look at what the l2s look like at
that time you'll see that their costs is largely dominated by L1 call data and L1 verification costs um a little bit technical but it means that these are inherent in the design no matter how much they want to bring fees down they will not be able to bring it down below that point you'll also see that there is a tiny little project at the bottom called Hubble that actually has a it was developed by the privacy and scaling team at the ethereum foundation and it has a very cute design where it sort of takes the best of the optimistic designs and the zero knowledge based designs to create a system that is super efficient so we went with that as a start we wrote Our Own node implementation that we can run our own infrastructure
it can scale to large number of users that supports sequencer decentralization and so on and we run that in production for a while and actually got it um at capacity where it was running transactions for less than 350 gas on ethereum L1 which as far as I'm aware is still the record in terms of L2 gas cost unfortunately Hubble in its design does not have evm support so it's very hard to create a vibrant ecosystem there it's still a cool technical stack that allows you to extend it and add new features but this is a dead end from our perspective we want a place where any death can easily join in and start
building and creating applications for users meanwhile proto-dank sharding or eip4844 was getting traction this is a big Community effort to make ethereum the ideal place for l2s and it does this by creating an alternative more efficient way to store the call data which as you saw was a big part of the L2 cost equation we joined in the effort and we helped out with the kcg ceremony you'll see a little screenshot of what it looks like right now if you haven't already I encourage everyone to just go to the case kcg ceremony website and um
become part of the trusted setup ceremony your name will forever be engraved in the world's largest trusted setup ceremony also we moved away from Hubble to an evm chain we use for the beta period um we've looked at how we can best support our users and we decided that gnosis saves are the best way for you users to keep their funds safe so we deployed them for all our users we're now running one point so we've deployed 1.7 million gnosis safe on an evm chain we also pay for all the meta transactions So
currently in in the app you're not paying transaction fees yet mostly because we want to simulate what it would look like in a post 4844 scenario where the fees are extremely low and we want to design and optimize for that future which meant that we ended up paying 1.5 trillion gas in meta transaction fees for all the actions or uses you use it took and the reason we can get away with this is is kind of it's It's the exciting part of this world ID that we're doing is because we know that every action is done by a real live human being and not some bot or um like nefarious entity that wants to collect the gas fees we know that these are real
live human beings doing this so we have perfect civil resistance and don't have to worry about it um but the now that we're having our launch tune we need to pick a real chain and we've decided to launch on optimism mainnet super exciting um optimism with OP stock and the current backdrop release is already amazing with 4844 in it will get um even better it's a stack that encourages extending and changing so in the future we'll see many more features being added and we love that with the super chain Vision there is going to be a community
of multiple teams working together with a big talent pool to scale the whole infrastructure to a billion people it is not affordable yet since we don't have 4844 yet that will be in the next hard Fork so we'll continue to subsidize The Meta transactions with help from optimism now what are our next steps here before launch we will have to migrate our existing 1.7 million users they're currently doing 500 000 transactions a week to optimism mainnet I think this will be at least a double digit percent increase in transaction volume there then after launch we will onboard a billion more people
and we'll start um becoming part of the super team ecosystem to work on proof of personhood make sure that this is a primitive that everyone can use in their apps build there and work on privacy preserving identity we need to empower identity digital identity needs to be solved and we need to do this in a way that respects and preserves you uses privacy for this we are also researching a lot on mobile CK proofers but that's um but now I would like to ask Matty from optimism on stage for a quick announcement foreign hi my name is Maddie I'm the head of
developer relations for op Labs we're part of the optimism Collective and we're building the super chain which is our vision for a modular interoperable blockchain ecosystem and I have two things for you today one of them is this nft this is a commemorative nft that is an open Edition that is live now this is the celebrate World coins entrance into the Super chain it's open for about a week so if you scan that QR code that'll take you to the page and you can mince it for free and you can grab one of those thing number two is uh this thing this thing we call the super chain it's built on the op stack which is a modular open source stack that is ready for your hacking tomorrow we have several
hackathon Bounties in each Global uh both for both for building with the op stack and for hacking identity so if you're interested in either of those things so you can find more information on it the youth Global website or just come talk to me and just come talk to me if you're interested in joining the super chain in general because the more projects that join the more the more who join the faster we can bring this about together so thank you thank you also if you are interested in working on the super chain um for for World coin or if you want to work on the future of humanness and digital identity on the blockchain uh we're currently look actively looking on
the protocol team for people who can help out there um please reach out on on Twitter or talk to us at our booth here this was my announcement thank you all for listening and happy hacking [Applause]