Overview
Problem statement
The $UTU Coin reward mechanism as described in the white paper requires the user to be whitelisted to claim their $UTU rewards to prevent sybil attacks or other bot-based frauds.
One of the options here that doesn’t require users to prevent identifiable details is to integrate Worldcoin’s Proof of Personhood (PoP), which is based on a public/private key pair generated from an iris scan.
Proposed work
Integrate with Worldcoin’s API via oracle and/or on-chain mechanisms to enable users to connect their Worldcoin “World ID”, and to whitelist such users for $UTU reward claiming.
Stakeholders
Who are the critical stakeholders? Regarding what topics?
- UTU Protocol (UTT, Ecosystem Growth Pool)
- All UTT holders
- All $UTU holders
Risks
WorldID - What are the risks?
- There has been widespread criticism against Worldcoin, including allegations of exploitations of user’s private data. This especially includes emerging economies such as Kenya, where there were many very critical discussions on social media, Kenyan tech WhatsApp and other user groups, and scanning was even stopped by the government.
- Vitalik wrote up his critiques of the system, which includes fundamental issues of biometric-based PoP; however, one should note that he also summarises the available alternatives, and notes that each different approach has different trade-offs.
- While Worldcoin open-sourced the orb hardware, they don’t seem to have done so yet with the software (?), or have independent auditors auditing orbs on location so that users can be sure there are no secret backdoors or undocumented data transmissions out of the orbs. So at least until that changes, a substantial amount of trust is required towards Worldcoin. And the fact that OpenAI’s Sam Altman is involved with Worldcoin makes many people especially sceptical about this, leading to much of the criticism mentioned in the first point.