Vitalik Buterin Reveals 4 Risks Related To Worldcoin Launch

In a blog post on Monday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin identified four potential issues with Worldcoin’s iris-scanning identity verification solution, which was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The launch of WLD token took place earlier today.

Buterin highlighted privacy, accessibility, centralization, and security as the main risks associated with Worldcoin’s Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) system, and proposed an alternative solution to address these concerns.

The PoP system is designed to establish the uniqueness of a user in a decentralized manner without relying on a central authority or disclosing personal information. Its use cases include preventing Sybil attacks by prohibiting multiple account creation, and facilitating event tickets, airdrops, and DAO voting.

Worldcoin users download an app and use a device called the “Orb” to scan their irises. The Orb confirms the user’s humanity and creates a unique iris hash, resulting in a one-of-a-kind “World ID” for each user.

This ensures privacy and security by allowing users to prove their uniqueness without revealing their identity. However, the Worldcoin project’s use of iris scanning has raised concerns about privacy.

Despite the system’s current practice of storing only hashed versions of iris scans and implementing cryptographic techniques such as ZK-SNARKs to protect user identity, there is still a risk of identity-related information being misused or leaked, according to Buterin.

“At the very least, if someone else scans your iris, they can check it against the database to determine whether or not you have a World ID. Potentially, iris scans might reveal more information,” he said.

Binance, Huobi, Bybit, and OKX are among the exchanges that added the token.

According to Coingecko, the value of $WLD surged to $3.14 at 5:00 a.m. EDT.

This surge led to a fully diluted valuation of almost $27 billion, which was calculated by multiplying the current price by the total supply, including tokens that are not yet in circulation.

For more information, check out our previous article.