World, the ambitious biometric identity verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Alex Blania, has unveiled a major upgrade to its mobile application, transforming it into a decentralized “super app” for the AI era.
The newest version of the World App, developed by the startup Tools for Humanity, deeply integrates high-utility features, including a Signal-equivalent encrypted chat service and vastly expanded cryptocurrency payment capabilities, with its core mission: to provide digital “proof of human” tools to distinguish real people from increasingly sophisticated bots and AI-generated digital fakery.
At a gathering at World’s headquarters, Altman and Blania framed the project as a necessary solution in an age of AI, growing out of conversations about creating a new economic model built on Web3 principles. Altman acknowledged the fundamental difficulty, stating, “It’s really hard to both identify unique people and do that in a privacy-preserving way.”
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The flagship new feature is World Chat, a fully end-to-end encrypted messenger that utilizes the XMTP protocol and is designed to meet or exceed the security standards set by privacy-focused messengers like Signal, notably without requiring a phone number or collecting messaging metadata.
World Chat is built to foster trust by leveraging the underlying World ID system to visually and cryptographically verify the identity of chat participants. The platform uses a clear, color-coded system for verification status.
Blue Speech Bubbles with a unique World ID gem indicate a contact has been verified as a unique human via the biometric Orb system.
Gray Speech Bubbles denote an unverified user.
This feature, originally launched in beta in March, is explicitly designed to incentivize verification by allowing users to instantly confirm the authenticity of their chat partner, addressing the rising problem of synthetic accounts, spam, and digital impersonation. According to Tiago Sada, World’s Chief Product Officer, the chat tool was added to create a more interactive experience, fulfilling the demand for a “more social World app” while providing a secure communication method akin to WhatsApp or Telegram, but with Signal-level encryption. Furthermore, messages, media, and crypto payments can all be sent directly from within the chat interface, which also supports Mini Apps for group functionality like polls and games.
Global Financial Access and Seamless Crypto Integration
The second major pillar of the upgrade is a dramatic expansion of the app’s financial utility, converting the World App into a comprehensive global crypto wallet and payment system. The expanded digital payment system allows for seamless Venmo-like capabilities to send and receive over 100 cryptocurrency tokens, including USDC, EURC, and wrapped Bitcoin and Ethereum.
This integration significantly lowers the barrier to financial access for global users:
- Users can now create virtual bank accounts to receive paychecks directly into the World App.
- Users can easily make deposits from their external bank accounts.
- All funds can be instantly converted into crypto via the native USDC and Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP V2) integration, simplifying global financial access.
Crucially, users do not need to be verified by the World ID authentication system to utilize these expanded financial and transfer features. The platform is actively working on integration for merchant payments and supports the growing ecosystem of over 300 Mini Apps that leverage the World App wallet for decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, and social media.
Scaling the Biometric “Proof of Human” Network
Despite the focus on new utility, the project’s ultimate success hinges on scaling its unique identity verification layer, the World ID. This requires users to undergo an iris scan via the Orb—a specialized, purpose-built device utilizing NVIDIA Jetson processors and AI models—which converts the iris’s unique pattern into a secure, encrypted digital code (an IrisCode). This World ID then allows users to interact with services that require “Proof of Personhood,” without revealing their personal data through the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
While the company aims to verify billions of people, Tools for Humanity claims to have already surpassed 27 million users and is rapidly expanding. To overcome the logistical and psychological barriers of the fixed-location Orb, the company is actively developing solutions to streamline verification.
The introduction of the Orb Minis—portable, smartphone-like verification devices—will allow verification to scale by a factor of ten, bringing the technology directly into people’s hands and homes. The company plans to deploy 7,500 Orbs across the United States alone by the end of 2025 as part of a significant global expansion effort.
The long-term plan involves potentially turning the Orb Minis into mobile point-of-sale devices or licensing the ID sensor technology to device manufacturers, which would drop the verification barrier significantly and accelerate global adoption.
The rollout of these social and financial features aims to build retention and utility, making the World App an indispensable daily platform and furthering its mission to establish a global, privacy-preserving identity primitive for the age of advanced AI.