The global Tinder expansion is one of the largest tests to date for the world, and the company claims everyday consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use Internet applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, The World Project was designed for a future where the Internet is filled with highly capable AI agents that make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to tell who is actually human. As companies like OpenAI—where Altman is CEO—and Anthropic bring AI agents into the mainstream, the problem The World was built to solve seems increasingly urgent.
But it has struggled for mainstream adoption, and has faced resistance from governments around the world, which have investigated the company over suspected violations of data protection laws. The company says 18 million people are now verified with Orb, up from 12 million last year.
In addition to Tinder’s global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind Tinder, announced several other consumer and enterprise partnerships at its liftoff event in San Francisco on Friday. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free “boosts,” typically a paid feature that increases the number of users viewing a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. Videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. DocuSign, contract signing software, will allow users the identity verification technology the world needs.
Tiago Saada, chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, told WIRED that the company sees major platform partnerships as important to helping the world become mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he’s particularly interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people.
World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans. The pitch focuses on the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like Ticketmaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour, which will include Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ PeeWee in San Francisco on Friday night.
There were no new hardware announcements or updates at Friday’s event. Vishwa first launched the iris-scanning orb in 2023 with a mobile app, which includes “mini apps” for various verification and blockchain-related programs. When a person scans their eyeball from one of the world’s spheres, the startup creates a unique cryptographic key for each person – their world ID. This creates a private, decentralized way for people to get verified online, without the need to upload their government ID to the internet.
The project was initially called WorldCoin, and in the early days the startup offered free cryptocurrency to people for scanning their irises. World still offers a cryptocurrency token and a wallet for digital currencies, but dropped “Coin” from its name in 2024 and has since shifted its focus to identity verification for the AI age. Tools for Humanity spokesperson Jess Montejano says the company still offers crypto as an incentive when new users sign up, but has also expanded its offerings to include Netflix and Apple TV subscription trials.
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