Sam Altman's World to Verify Tinder Users, Expand ID Verification Empire

At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman's verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions.

At a packed event at The Midway, Tools for Humanity, the company behind the World project, announced plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life. The first major step in this expansion is the integration of World's verification technology into Tinder.

The integration of World's verification technology into Tinder is a significant move, as it will allow users to verify their identity and ensure that they are interacting with real people. This is particularly important in the world of online dating, where fake profiles and bots are a common problem.

World's verification technology uses a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier, known as a verified World ID, which is generated from a user's iris scan. This ID can then be used to access World's services, and users can also opt to access World's app without one.

In addition to the Tinder integration, World is also launching a new feature called Concert Kit, which allows musical artists to reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats.

Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars—both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.

The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a DocuSign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.

The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called "agent delegation," in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human.

So far, it's been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company's history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb—a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.

However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up, and has also distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they're out shopping or getting a coffee. Now, the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card's NFC chip.

The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called "low friction," which involves merely taking a selfie. Selfie Check, which Sada's team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.

"Selfie is private by design," said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH's executives, during the presentation. "That means that we maximize the local processing that's happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours."

Selfie verification obviously isn't new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. "Obviously, we do our best, and it's like one of the best systems that you'll see for this. But it has limits," Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World's services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that's important to them, he noted.

Lucas Ropek

Senior Writer, TechCrunch

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