Launches

Sam Altman's proof of personhood crypto project, Worldcoin, has launched (DEEP DIVE)

• ❗The optics of WORLDCOIN is WILD! Looking at images of seeing people scan their iris looks very dystopian. I can easily imagine a movie featuring the ORB where people scan their eyes to get universal basic income. Little do they know, the ORB actually strips you of your identity, free-will and creativity and then you’re forced to depend on AI to instruct you on how to live. The AI responses are also secretly controlled by the government. Let’s also include these brain controlled devices to instruct your limbs to move, which is also connected to AI. This is giving Black Mirror and Dystopian. However, this news is about the tech and the positive side of tech so let me explain how Worldcoin works and why it’s useful.

• 🤔Worldcoin is launching a new currency with the goal of providing everyone globally with a share in the growing digital economy.

• 🪙WLD, their coin, launched on Optimism on July 24. There is a fixed supply of 10 Billion WLD for at least the first 15 years, according to their documentation.

• 👁️Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency and digital ID project led by Sam Altman, which aims to create a "privacy-preserving" global identity system, offering a unique "World ID" to individuals through biometric verification using the "Orb" device, has just “launched”.

• 💼 The project's goal is to create a "proof of personhood" system to address employment and online identity concerns.

• 🤖Proof-of-Personhood protocols try to solve the problem of whether a person is unique and actually human.

• 🔤CAPTCHA was one of the first approaches towards  a Proof-of-Personhood for the internet, it’s good and proving that someone is human but not that they’re unique.

• 👀Worldcoin leverages biometrics, cryptography, and incentives to create an elegant, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution to the “unique-human problem”.

• 📲The product

  • Sign in with WorldCoin (Your World ID)  to authenticate into web, mobile, and decentralized applications, and privately share your personhood.

  • Developers can build with the **World ID SDK, **here are their developer docs.

• 🔍France and Germany are coordinating on an investigation into world coin

  • "The legality of this collection seems questionable, as do the conditions for storing biometric data." the French privacy watchdog CNIL told Decrypt in an email on Friday.

• 👁️ Vitalik Buterin also has concerns such as:

  • privacy, as scanning irises could potentially capture sensitive data such as sex, ethnicity, and medical conditions.

  • centralization, as malicious manufacturers could exploit Orbs to generate fake human identities and World IDs.

  • security, where AI-generated images or fake 3D prints might be mistakenly approved, and World IDs could be sold, rented, or lost due to hacking.

  • availability of World IDs for everyone, given the limited number of Orbs (scanning machines) compared to the potential demand.

  • Vitalik said, "If we see the North Korean government going around and forcing people to scan their eyeballs, those Orbs and any accounts produced by them could be immediately retroactively disabled."

• ❓We’ve all seen the ORB, what does it do?

  • The Orb checks that you are real and that you have not signed up before. It does this by capturing and processing images of you and your unique iris pattern.

• ❓What biometrics does World Coin use?

  • Iris 👁️‍🗨️

    • It was chosen because it’s unique, fraud resistant and practical.

    • The iris theoretically contains enough information to distinguish nearly all humans uniquely

    • It’s difficult to physically modify and the biometric capture can be made hard to spoof.

    • The required imaging technology already exists, and for the user, presenting their iris is a fast and simple process.

• ❓What information is stored about you?

  • IrisHash or sometimes called IrisCode

    • The information of the iris pattern is distilled into an embedding, called the  IrisHash, which is derived from a one-way function with the iris image as the input.

    • *The original iris does not need to be stored anywhere. *

    • Your biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb and then permanently deleted. The only data that remains is your IrisCode/IrisHash.

    • The point of storing your IrisCode is to prevent you from signing up again.

    • No other personal information is stored about you.

• ❓What happens once you get the IrisCode?

  • You get a **WorldID **which you can use it to anonymously prove that you are a real and unique person.

  • So once developers and important services require you to sign up with your WorldID, pretty soon a lot of you will start using it.

• ❓Is the code for the Orb opensourced?

  • “Worldcoin is committed to open sourcing as much of our technology as possible and ultimately to fully decentralizing the project. This is done not only for transparency and security, but to enable other teams that want to build devices for the Worldcoin protocol in the future.”

• ❓How can we prove that the open-sourced code is actually what’s being used with the Orb?

• 🧾Zero Knowledge Proofs are used so that developers,  including WorldCoin, cannot see what you have used your World ID for in the past; they can just see what you are trying to use it for when you use it.

• 💰Operators earn Worldcoin for each sign-up, which incentivizes them to maximize their sign-up rate (i.e., the number of sign-ups per week)

  • Operators bid for the right to operate one or multiple Orbs for a defined period of time.

  • 🌎 They have onboarded twenty-five Operators that run more than thirty devices in twelve countries across four continents (Africa, South America, Europe and Asia).

• ❓Why is Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, involved with this?! Firstly, I’m impressed by his ability to work in different spaces. But also, I’d love to understand if there will be any overlap between the two companies? And if so, why did he choose this problem to solve? In some ways, it might be obvious, are you a robot or a human, “proof of personhood”, but in other ways, it can feel very dystopian, borg-like and surveillanced. Are you going to swap my person with an AI? But anyway, we’re here for the tech so let’s cheers to tech advancements 🥂.

• 💭If you’re wondering if governments are interested in this product, ofcourse they are, the government wants to ID their situations, governments offer passports which control how you move. A system aiming to ID all of the World’s citizens and store them in a single repository SHOULD be of interest in the world.

• 💭Should you use World Coin? Well think about from a product’s perspective. “ I want to offer a product but I want to make sure that people aren’t gaming my system, the solution is World ID, but if you don’t want me to use World ID, give me your personal information so I know is you. However, I do know that people steal people’s identity all the time, so for you own interest, don’t you think it’s better to use this solution? That’s tied to your biometric and is private by design?” Yea things are going to get interesting, especially when tech, morals and rights are combined.

• 💭Will I use WorldCoin? I feel resistance right now, but I won’t be surprised if I do. It makes technical sense. So you got me.

• Reference Articles

  • https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/how-the-launch-works

  • https://worldcoin.org/privacy-by-design

Exploits

DeFi Hack Worth $3.4M Strikes EraLend, zkSync's Top Lender

• 💰 EraLend, a lending protocol on Ethereum's zkSync blockchain, suffered a loss of $3.4 million due to a read-only reentrancy attack, as reported by CertiK, a renowned blockchain security firm.

• ⚔️Attack: read only reentrancy attack

  • The attacker manipulated the LP oracle price and exploited the EraLend USDC pool.

  • According to this analysis, In the burn function, the reserve is updated after the external callback. As a result, the EraLend oracle price for SyncSwap LP token can be inflated, as it's using an incorrect reserve value for price calculation.

  • The attacking process:

    • The attacker provides liquidity to SyncSwap to mint SyncSwap LP tokens

    • The attacker burns SyncSwap LP, and in the SyncSwap burn callback, the LP token is priced higher by the oracle based on the old reserve value.

    • The attacker supplies the LPs to EraLend and borrows more USDC from EraLend with the inflated SyncSwap LP price.

  • Repeat the above steps.

• 🔄 The attacker used a complex strategy involving repeated calls to a smart contract to manipulate asset prices and effectively loot assets on EraLend.

• 💼 EraLend's total capital locked on the platform plummeted from $18.5 million to $10.75 million following the exploit, based on data from DefiLlama.

• 💼 Conic Finance also suffered a similar exploit last week, losing 1700 ETH. The attacker initiated a flash loan of 20,000 staked ETH and manipulated Conic's price oracle, which was sourced from a read-only smart contract provided by a third party.

Proposals

Optimism moves forward with two proposals to add zk-proofs

• 🔄 Optimism (OP Mainnet) is moving forward with proposals from O(1) Labs and RISC Zero to incorporate zk-proofs for cross-chain communication.

• 🔒 Zk-proofs allow one party to prove knowledge of a value or truth without revealing additional information, enhancing privacy and security in blockchain transactions.

• 💡 RISC Zero's proposal suggests upgrading Optimism's fault protocol with zk-proofs to ensure the correctness of state changes, reducing finality time.

  • If anyone wishes to make a state change final, they can provide a zero-knowledge proof showing the change is correct. Similarly, if someone wants to challenge an incorrect state change, they can provide a proof of the correct state, the proposal stated.

• ⚙️ O(1) Labs proposes using the Kimchi zk-proof system to create a new fault-proof solution, improving performance, security, and compatibility with existing systems.

  • These proofs are then used to update the Ethereum network's state via smart contracts. The plan promises improved performance, robust security and compatibility with existing systems while managing complexity and keeping latency low, according to the submission.

• 💰 The baseline grant for each submission was 250,000 OP tokens ($380,000), aiming to bolster security, reduce latency, and enhance platform affordability and efficiency.

• 📝 The Optimism Foundation plans to discuss project expectations in more detail with O(1) Labs and RISC Zero directly.

• References

  • https://www.theblock.co/post/240929/optimism-zk-proof-proposals?utm_source=cryptopanic&utm_medium=rss

MakerDAO Community Supports Proposal To Increase DAI Interest Rate Up To 8%

• 🔄 The MakerDAO community voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Enhanced DAI Savings Rate (EDSR) proposal, with over 99.9% supporting it.

• 💱 The EDSR will temporarily raise the DAI savings rate (DSR) when the DSR utilization is low, and it will disappear once utilization increases.

• 💹 The current DAI savings rate is 3.19%, and the EDSR could increase it up to 8%, surpassing competitors like Aave and Compound.

• 💰 The high-interest rate is expected to incentivize stablecoin users to choose DAI over popular rivals like USDT and USDC.

• 🗳️ The governance vote came as DAI's circulation declined by a third over the past year, raising concerns about its market capitalization and daily trading volume.

Bounties

Make Bitcoin better for activists and claim part of a 20 Bitcoin reward offered by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF)

• 🎯 The challenge focuses on ten improvements to the Bitcoin user experience (UX) and mainly targets mobile wallets.

• 🌍 The feature ideas for the bounties come from conversations with global activists who desire these improvements for Bitcoin.

• 💸 Each bounty is worth 2 BTC, which is approximately $60,000 according to CoinGecko.

• 📢 One challenge aims to support the development of Nostr, a censorship-resistant social network backed by Jack Dorsey, designed for the technical crypto community.

• ⏰ The bounties are open until the end of 2024, providing an opportunity for developers to participate throughout this period.

• 🧪 The bounties represent an experiment by the HRF, and if successful, may inspire other organizations to follow a similar approach.

• Bounties

  • http://hrfbounties.org/

• References

  • https://decrypt.co/150586/human-rights-foundation-bitcoin-development-challenge-for-activists

AI

You Can Now Build Your Own AI GF or BF with this Github

• 🤖 Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a prominent VC firm, has uploaded a tutorial on GitHub for creating customizable "AI companions" with configurable personalities and backstories, opening up possibilities for AI-assisted romance and therapeutic chatbots.

• 💻The Silicon Valley heavyweight has uploaded a tutorial to GitHub outlining how to create customizable “AI companions” with configurable personalities and backstories.

• 🧪it's meant as a developer experiment, technophiles are already dreaming up their perfect digital sweethearts.

• 💑 "Romantic (AI girlfriends/boyfriends)" is one of the promoted use cases for these chatbots.

• 💬 AI models are prompted with detailed backstories and personality traits to shape their interactions and responses.

• 🤔 a16z sees therapeutic potential in chatbots as companions, helping users understand themselves better through pattern matching behavior.

• Reference

  • https://decrypt.co/150383/you-can-now-build-your-own-ai-girlfriend-heres-how

One Liners

• 🥞PancakeSwap Launches on zkSync Era >

Careers

World Coin

• Staff Rust Engineer, Protocol $170,000 - $250,000 >

• Senior Software Engineer, Protocol, $230,000 - $320,000 >

• Senior Application Security Engineer, $236,000 - $323,000 >

Optimism

• Lead, Technical Content Developer >

• Senior Smart Contract Security Engineer >

https://opensea.io/assets/0xe04edcd4ce468bf35549279a71a56707d9d1f4a9/0