Former YC head Sam Altman co-founded the cryptocurrency company Worldcoin and received US$25 million in financing

Sam Altman has a new startup company that intends to provide a special type of cryptocurrency to everyone on the planet. But first, it scans everyone's eyeballs.

Altman is the former head of the Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator and one of the three founders of Worldcoin. In many parts of its plan, Worldcoin has designed a spherical device that can scan a person's iris to construct a unique personal identifier.

The company is backed by the venture capital arm of Coinbase Global Inc., Andreessen Horowitz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Day One Ventures. It recently raised approximately $25 million in funding from investors.

Altman, 36, said in an interview that he conceived this idea at the end of 2019. Its purpose is to use cryptocurrency to distribute funds fairly, inspired by the fashionable economic theory known as the basic income of the whole people. Altman is the first investor in Worldcoin, but he said that he has no role in daily operations, mainly as an advisor to the company when needed.

"I have always been very interested in things like universal basic income and what will happen to the global redistribution of wealth and how we can do this better," Altman said. "Is there a way we can use technology to do this on a global scale?"

The head of the company is 27-year-old Alexander Blagna, who was a theoretical physics student at the California Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute. He co-founded Worldcoin with Altman and Max Novenstein, who worked for Ray Dalio's investment company Bridgewater Associates LP and fund transfer startup Wave.

After Bloomberg discovered the details of their project and asked about it, Altman and Braniya agreed to discuss their project, which had not been reported before. Blania said that Worldcoin is still preparing for its official debut, but now the startup is evaluating what it might need to one day bring cryptocurrency to as many people as possible. "Blania said: "There are many people in the world who have not yet had the opportunity to enter the financial system. "Cryptocurrency has the opportunity to get us there."

Altman has grown from the 19-year-old founder of a medium-scale social network called Loopt to the founder of Y Combinator's startup company. He served as the company’s president from 2014 to 2019, during which time some of the accelerator’s companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe, became one of the most valuable startups in the United States.

Under Altman's leadership, Y Combinator plans to conduct a universal basic income experiment, but it faces some delays and complications. In an interview with economist Tyler Cowen in 2019, Altman discussed how a system that can distribute money to everyone circumvents the need for government redistribution.

After Altman left Y Combinator, he worked in artificial intelligence at OpenAI LLC, a research company he co-founded with Elon Musk of Tesla in 2015. Two years ago, they parted ways due to differences in OpenAI's plans. A few months later, the company raised $1 billion from Microsoft. As part of the cooperation, the software giant will become the exclusive supplier of its cloud computing services. The group has already demonstrated some software, for example, these software can create real-looking news stories based on some input information.

According to an online job description, the startup promised through Worldcoin that "a new global digital currency will be launched by providing a share to everyone on the planet." The company aims to help economies transition to cryptocurrency, "through a novel approach: a dedicated hardware device that ensures everyone's humanity and uniqueness, while maintaining their privacy and the overall transparency of the permissionless blockchain. ."

Blania said the device is a silver ball-shaped gadget, only the size of a basketball, and can be carried around to scan people's irises to determine their unique identity. He said that Worldcoin has begun to test the sphere on a small scale in various cities. The Worldcoin currency itself is not ready to be issued, so the company currently provides volunteers with other types of digital currency, mainly Bitcoin, in exchange for scanning their eyes and giving feedback on the scanning process.

Blania said the company has fewer than 20 prototypes in circulation around the world. He said that the production cost of a prototype animal skin is about 5,000 US dollars, but as the company improves the process, the price will drop sharply. Worldcoin will eventually be headquartered in San Francisco, although due to the coronavirus pandemic, its employees are currently scattered everywhere.

According to Blania, iris scanning is an important part of the plan because it prevents people from trying to register multiple times to deceive the system. He is also aware of the privacy issues of handing biometric information to a small startup company, and said that Worldcoin will make this process as transparent as possible so that users can see how the data is used. He said that the iris scan will generate a unique digital code for each person, and then the image will be deleted and will never be stored.