Compass Investments

– Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed some concerns about digital identity projects like World, which claims to have registered more than 13 million unique people.

In Saturday’s post, Buterin decided to discuss the risks and benefits of digital identity projects that use zero-disclosure proofs. The renowned analyst had a lot to say on the matter, but his main point was that such projects, such as World (formerly Worldcoin), which is known to be backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, could destroy the pseudonymity used by many internet users, especially in the cryptocurrency space.

With a single personal identifier, even if it is ZK-wrapped, we risk a world where all your activities will de facto have to be done under one public identifier,

, Buterin wrote in his post. In a world of growing threats (e.g. drones), depriving people of the ability to protect themselves with pseudonymity has significant negative consequences.

World is a digital identity project developed and promoted by Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Altman and CEO Alex Blania. Users who have their iris scanned to confirm they are human receive both a World ID and a cryptocurrency bonus in the form of WLD tokens. The biometric data collected by World’s silver orbs to create a digital identity is partially protected using zero-disclosure proofs, a solution also called ZK-wrapping that allows a user to prove something is true (such as being human) without revealing the underlying data (their real identity).

Buterin acknowledges in his post that digital ID initiatives using zero-disclosure proofs seem to be going mainstream, citing not only World but also initiatives from the European Union and Taiwan.

While Buterin sees downsides to any system with one identifier for each person, he acknowledged that it has pros, such as helping to distinguish real users from agents driven by artificial intelligence. One of the main arguments in favor of World is the idea that it can make the Internet better by helping users understand which users are human and which are not.

“At first glance, the widespread adoption of digital identities in a ZK shell seems like a big win…. protecting our social networks, voting and all kinds of online services from manipulation by sybils and bots, all without sacrificing privacy, he writes.

But to take advantage of pseudonymity, you need to be able to do things like own and manage multiple email and social media accounts. ZK-wrapping, digital identity projects like World could put pseudonymity at risk if implemented rigidly, Buterin argues.

“In this world, social media applications … will use one identifier for each user, and because the identity system will be one for everyone, each user will be able to have only one account (as opposed to

`weak identifiers, like Google accounts today, where the average person can have ~5 accounts). , Buterin added.