The idea behind Worldcoin (now called World) is an excellent one: without some way to verify human-based accounts, the internet will be completely overrun with AI bots.
To a large extent, it already is: More than half of web traffic now comes from unidentified accounts, and Facebook and X are drowning in AI slop and pointless reply guys. More worryingly, hostile countries are using AI bots and content to divide the population of open and democratic societies.
And if you are already worried about the UK’s mandatory digital ID plan, then World ID should also be on your radar. Apart from those creepy eyeball scanning Orbs, is it really a good idea to implement a global identity system co-founded by the CEO of the world’s largest private company, OpenAI?
The project has raised significant privacy and ethical concerns, with Canadian public broadcaster CBC describing World’s aims as utopian but not without raising “dystopian fears.” Techmonitor and CoinDesk have both reported that critics of the project call it “Orwellian.” 
While these fears are somewhat overblown, there are genuine concerns with how World has been set up
The project’s designers have attempted to counter those fears with strong privacy protections. The system doesn’t retain biometric data; instead, it uses zero-knowledge proofs to create a cryptographic hash that proves a user is unique without revealing who they are or tying that ID to a name and address.
One World ID: is it a feature, or a bug?
World no doubt thinks of it as a feature, not a bug, but each verified human is issued a single World ID, which can be used to sign into other sites anonymously.
In theory, third parties cannot determine a user’s identity from their online activity, but critics worry that having a single World ID increases the chances that various governments could legislate to give themselves access, and reverse engineer identities and track citizens’ activities using this identifier.
“In the real world, pseudonymity generally requires having multiple accounts,” warned Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin earlier this year, “so under one-per-person ID, even if ZK-wrapped, we risk coming closer to a world where all of your activity must de facto be under a single public identity.”
In the search for an alternative solution that aligns more closely with cypherpunk and crypto ideals, AI Eye caught up with Evin McMullen, co-founder of Billions Network, in Singapore last week.
It’s part of a new wave of decentralized identity projects that prioritize privacy and pseudonymity through zero-knowledge proofs and selective disclosures, including zkKYC by Polygon, Sismo Protocol, and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) by Everynum, and Penverse. A forthcoming Ethereum L2 called Aztec utilizes a similar combination of device-generated proofs to make RWAs more permissionless, while remaining AML-compliant.
Billions Network, featuring Privado ID, aka Polygon ID
Billions Network began life six years ago as Polygon ID, before rebranding to Privado ID. It later raised $30 million from Polychain, Coinbase Ventures and Polygon Ventures as Billions Network.
It faces an uphill battle to gain the edge over World, however, with Billions Network’s 2 million users a mere drop in the bucket to World’s 17 million.
However, the underlying Circom technology stack Billions created is open source and permissionless and has been employed by 9,000 sites, including TikTok, HSBC and Deutsche Bank.
“One of the cool things about our tech stack is that, because it is open and permissionless, folks around the world are able to pick it up and utilize it for many different use cases. One of which includes the local newspaper in Barcelona [Ara] is leveraging our libraries to be able to prove the origin, provenance and original nature of images that they publish.”
The system aims to strike a balance between verification and privacy. Users can verify themselves using their own phone to generate zero-knowledge proof of identity documents and send the proof to third parties instead of the documents.
