Worldcoin etches single day sign-up record in Argentina

Rising demand in Argentina drove Worldcoin to a single day sign-up record, with nearly 10,000 Argentinians registering in less than 24 hours. The country is known to lead the industry in blockchain innovation and crypto adoption.

As per Worldcoin’s official blog post, the project’s global identity protocol – World ID – received a total of 9,500 verifications in a single day. Its Orb verification confirmed the identity of one human every 9 seconds.

The surge in sign-ups happened despite an ongoing probe into the project’s handling of data by Argentine authorities. The project also faces controversy in Kenya, where its operations were suspended over security concerns. This was soon followed by investigations into the activities of the company, where the country’s interior minister, Kithure Kindiki, announced:

“Relevant security, financial services and data protection agencies have commenced inquiries and investigations to establish the authenticity and legality of the aforesaid activities.”

In the face of this, Worldcoin continued to promote its privacy-preserving features of World ID. This global identity protocol uses a proof-of-personhood (PoP) mechanism, issued by a custom biometric imaging device called the Orb. This enables users to digitally prove their uniqueness and humanness.

Since it is not connected to one’s wallet (both are separate accounts with separate keys that serve different purposes), anyone can use World ID without providing personal information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, social profiles, etc.

For Worldcoin, its World ID feature plays an important role in its mission to increase access to the global economy, with the aim to “serve the more than 4 billion people worldwide who lack a legal, digitally-verifiable identity”.

As of writing, the project has made its Orbs available in four cities in Argentina: Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Cordoba and Mendoza. Its rising demand in the country has also led World App, the first wallet created for the Worldcoin project, to temporarily become the number one app in Argentina on the App Store.

On 18 August, Worldcoin project co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity Alex Blania, expressed his views on Argentina’s positive response to innovative crypto projects like Worldcoin. During his fireside conversation on the Ethereum Argentina Mainnet Stage, he said-

“I think the first major thing that stands out is that Argentina specifically is one of the most crypto-forward countries in the world. People are much more sensitive and much more understanding of the fundamental principles of crypto. It’s a combination of having a very technologically advanced country in general and then also a crypto-forward country specifically, which makes it an explosive building ground for the next wave of innovation in this space.”

The identity and cryptocurrency protocol has been in the news for its iris scans feature to verify the identity of users. Back when its mainnet went live in July, the frenzy around this eye-scanning physical ‘orb’ even spiked its $WLD token by over 60% within hours of launch.

However, the project was soon met with regulatory concerns in a number of countries. Just a few days after the launch, the U.K.’s data regulator, Information Commissions Office (ICO), announced that it would be looking into Worldcoin. Similar actions have also been taken by authorities in France where the country’s privacy watchdog CNIL tagged the legality of Worldcoin’s biometric data collection as “questionable”.

The project’s token, which has been made available in 35 cities across 20 countries, has not been launched in the U.S. yet due to regulatory issues. This was also followed by the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laying out some major risks of Worldcoin’s eye-scanning physical ‘orb’ and its Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) system of construction.