wow Orb Mini just went super viral i’ve gotten many questions about this new device and World in general since we launched in USA last week, so i wrote a bit about the project to catch you up: (links in brackets in the next post) 1. the problem with the internet today ai is awesome. but one of the challenges is that when everything can be faked, we don’t know who and what to trust on the internet. this started slowly, but we all feel it more and more every day. on social media it's now impossible to know if something is a real opinion held by many or just someone manipulating with bot farms, games are no longer fun with ai cheaters, catfishing got even more dangerous in dating apps, concert tickets go to scalper bots instead of fans, and financial scams are getting out of control. i talked more about this in a recent podcast [1] and cnn interview [2] we think the internet needs a new kind of blue checkmark; one that tells you wether an account belongs to a real and unique human, and nothing more. we call this anonymous proof of human. 2. solving proof of human with the Orb we (and many others) have tried for many years to solve proof of human in many ways; captchas, email/phone, gov ids, fancy math models, paying $8/mo, etc but none of them are actually ai safe. they are also not anonymous or inclusive. so we built the orb. it’s basically a fancy camera that's able to tell wether you’re a real and unique human. to do this it looks at your face with a bunch of sensors, and verifies you locally with ai models running on it’s nvidia jetson. we just launched a new orb generation, check it out in [3] the whole process takes like 30 seconds, and you only need to do it every few years - sort of like getting a drivers license. once the orb is done, it sends your data to your smartphone and deletes it from the orb. check out recent CNBC report on this in [4] and a full verification demo in [5] 3. growth and adoption so far 26 million people have joined the network and 12.5 million have verified at an orb - including 1 in 3 adults in Lisbon and Buenos Aires! we just launched USA and hope to grow a lot over the next 18 months with more than 7,500 orbs coming to the country as the network has grown, companies have started integrating it. for example we recently announced Tinder [6], Visa [7], and Razer [8]. we also have a mini app platform which has been used almost 1 billion times if the project succeeds we think most sites, apps, and even governments will use this open infrastructure 4. orb mini: going small to go big we think the new orb will scale the network to hundreds of millions of people. but the goal is to be accessible to billions, so we're already thinking about what's next. we've been working on shrinking the orb to something that can fit in your pocket and costs 10x less, without compromising security or privacy. we call it orb mini, and it's coming next year. we shared more details [9] and a nice teaser video for it [10] last week. the cool thing about it is we're building it as an open source module based on smartphone architecture - so other companies will be able to integrate it into their devices! 5. the importance of anonymity while proof of human is essential, it would be a big mistake to sacrifice privacy in it’s name. eg if every website required you to give up and store you legal identity that would be incredibly problematic (and can be faked with ai anyway). still that's the route many are trying. in many ways, freedom in the world today comes from anonymity online, so from day one we designed World to let you be anonymous. we do this in many ways, i'll highlight four: first, your important data (like orb images) is stored locally on your personal smartphone. not on the orb and not on our server. you can back it up (encrypted) to services like icloud, and you can delete it any time. neither we or the apps that you use with like Tinder have ever access to it. second, when you verify your world id at an orb, you are anonymized using anoymized multi-party computation. this is cutting edge cryptography, i recommend watching [11] and reading [12] to learn more about it. third, when you use your world id on an app, you are anonymized using zero-knowledge proofs. you can learn more about them in [13]. and fourth, the entire system is open source so you can verify instead of trusting. this includes the orb hardware, firmware, ai models, cryptographic protocol, and developer sdk. you can check out the repo and external audits in [14] in summary World is a network of real humans. it's not just private, but likely one of the most private systems you've ever used. it's growing super fast, it just launched in USA, and we think every site and app will use it's anonymous proof of human soon. if you want to learn more about World, i can't recommend last week's keynote enough [15]