Crypto startup Worldcoin, which grabbed ‘eyeballs’ through the last year, is facing logistical issues to continue operations.
A recent by Bloomberg has revealed that Worldcoin has now shut operations in at least seven countries.
Just to rewind, the startup was founded by Sam Altman and Alex Blania back in 2020. And interestingly, the business sold its idea of free crypto handouts in exchange for an iris scan. Soon after which, the onboarding policy got privacy experts furious.
The official launch of the project state, “Our approach relies on a custom biometric device – we call it the Orb – that verifies the uniqueness of a person through iris recognition, while ensuring their privacy through zero-knowledge cryptography.”
Now, in the second year after the launch announcement and after collecting biometrics of reported 450,000 people, Worldcoin users are left confused.
Things far from perfect
As per the report, problems like uneven smartphone access, confused users, local issues with operators and regulations, along with fraud attempts are spiraling down the launch plans of the billion-dollar startup.
However, Blania refers to these hurdles as a result of “very aggressive testing,” common for young startups. He that “You’re still talking to a Series A company, not an Uber,” further accepting that “Things are not perfect.”
Additionally, local contractors are reportedly dealing with angry customers who do not know why Worldcoin is now non-functional. To combat that, as per Blania’s statement cited by the report, the company plans to open-source its hardware designs and protocols. Therefore, in the next few weeks, Worldcoin will “allow anybody to verify our dedication to user privacy and security
Privacy concerns remain
Keeping the launch challenges aside, the project itself had drawn a lot of criticism due to its biometric ‘Proof-of-Personhood’ system. We can recall that Edward Snowden had taken to Twitter last year to warn against cataloging eyeballs.
This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people's iris scans (for "fairness"), and waves away the implications by saying "we deleted the scans!"
Yeah, but you save the *hashes* produced by the scans. Hashes that match *future* scans.
Don't catalogue eyeballs. https://t.co/uAk0NYGeZu
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021
This adds to the existing debate that if Worldcoin, which aims to capture the biometric data of one billion people by 2023, is a disaster in making. Software developer Brandon Church had told BeInCrypto previously that, “It is concerning when private entities start offering monetary incentives to collect personal data without any safeguards and or enforceable restrictions on what they can do with the data.”
