Worldcoin Reportedly Abandons Orb Verification in India, France, and Brazil

• The Orb, a silver sphere weighing five pounds that can scan an individual’s eyes.
• Worldcoin has been embroiled in public controversies due to their onboarding procedure.

Worldcoin has reportedly disabled its offline orb verification feature for customers in France, India, and Brazil. The Orb, a silver sphere weighing five pounds that can scan an individual’s eyes to confirm their identity, was designed by Worldcoin to help with onboarding in areas where conventional forms of identification are not always readily accessible.

In order to encourage local Orb operators to complete the offline onboarding procedure, the business offered incentives in USDC. However, Worldcoin started paying out incentives in WLD, its native cryptocurrency.

Despite long lines at Orb operators in some regions of India, Worldcoin reportedly “silently discontinued” the orb verification procedure during the last three to four months. To be clear, the Orb was always a “limited-time access” program in Brazil, France, and India, according to Tools for Humanity, the charity that watches over Worldcoin.

Surrounded by Controversies

Worldcoin has been embroiled in many public controversies due to their onboarding procedure, which requires the collection of personal data including iris scans. Launched by OpenAI creator Sam Altman, the project has been criticized for being morally dubious and including elements of a “dystopian nightmare.”

There has also been skepticism from regulators. Worldcoin was the subject of inquiries by the German financial authorities in 2022 and the UK data regulatory agency in the days after the project’s introduction. Moreover, Kenya has officially prohibited Worldcoin from operating inside the nation.

A security platform called CertiK found a flaw in the Orb operator vetting procedure in August. The flaw might have enabled an attacker to run an Orb without interviewing them or having the right identification.

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