I had the pleasure of speaking at W&V, Werben & Verkaufen’s 60-year anniversary about the challenges that AI poses. I took the opportunity to discuss how OpenAI’s founder, Sam Altman, is trying to address two of AI’s major challenges with one blockchain/crypto-based solution: Worldcoin.

Worldcoin launched last week. Its price soared by 80%, and the fully diluted market cap rose to 22 billion USD. Worldcoin promises to become a global UBI once jobs start to get replaced by AI. In addition, Worldcoin ID also aims to become everyone’s online passport so we can still discern humans from machines.

However, as many people noticed last week in the crypto world, Worldcoin’s token distribution is already set for failure. At least 25% are in the hands of early investors, whereas only 75% are supposed to go to the people. This scenario is reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others – Worldcoin definitely does not fix UBI.

What about providing us a digital identity? As Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin posted last week on his blog, biometric identity systems such as Worldcoin can play an important role in identifying ourselves online. However, to avoid fakes, such a system would need to be interwoven with social graphs and hardware solutions. Worldcoin is certainly not perfect, but the economic and social cost of not implementing a system to distinguish humans from robots on the internet will be immense.

Worldcoin ID is not the only solution for certifying “truth” on the internet. Many startups are developing oracle-based solutions to notarially certify online data. For instance, Hyper Oracle is proposing a new token standard extension for ERC-721 NFTs, ERC-7007 which would enable the certification of AI-generated images. In addition, there are new solutions emerging where zero-knowledge cryptography is used to verify whether a picture or a recording has been taken with a real camera or microphone or not.

AI certainly poses a lot of challenges, but, funnily enough, blockchain, which has been a solution in search of a problem for years, might finally have its moment.