Worldcoin Promised Free Crypto If They Scanned Their Eyeballs With “The Orb.” Now They Feel Robbed.

Worldcoin promised to jump-start the global crypto revolution with an audacious plan: to give out digital money to all 7.9 billion people on Earth. To spread its crypto gospel across the planet, Worldcoin recruited a corps of “Orb operators” whose job it was to scan people’s irises — in order, they said, to keep people from claiming their payment multiple times. The founders, including the high-profile tech investor Sam Altman, have said their goal is ultimately to lift billions out of poverty through a universal basic income. Top Silicon Valley venture firms Andreessen Horowitz (which also invests in BuzzFeed) and Khosla Ventures have poured millions into the outfit.

The currency has not yet been launched, but a BuzzFeed News investigation has found that Worldcoin is already wrestling with a host of problems, from managing angry Orb operators to concerns that the company is using its cryptocurrency as a way to amass millions of biometrics and perfect a new kind of authentication technology for the blockchain era.

Orb operators themselves have faced arrest, harassment, late payments, and a changing wage structure that they say makes the work financially unfeasible. Glitches in the Orb’s technology, they say, have hampered the sign-up process and opened the door for fraud. Orb operators in Africa, Asia, and Europe spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from Worldcoin as well as local authorities. BuzzFeed News is not specifying the locations of Orb operators or Worldcoin users to protect their identities.

An Orb operator shows the device to a group of women in Indonesia.

The documents indicate that the true value of Worldcoin’s continent-spanning field test lies in its distinctive Orbs. Rather than just facilitating the company’s utopian promises, the Orb appears to be at the core of Worldcoin’s ambitions to dominate the emerging business of anonymous digital authentication: in other words, proving that an online avatar is a real person without revealing who they are.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems