WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - July 29

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Fun fact: Schools are starting to use blockchains to allow their students complete control over their records. This is a great use case for blockchains!

Worldcoin got a lot of attention

Worldcoin is a project that was initially launched by Sam Altman but has expanded to over 150 people developing it. Basically, they want to establish what they call Proof-of-Personhood and implement a way to distribute a Universal Basic Income worldwide. There are technically three aspects currently in the works — the token $WLD, the orb that scans biometrics, and the wallet. This is a highly controversial project, mostly because of two concerns (though there are many more also):

1. Privacy - the device that scans biometrics scans people’s irises. Supposedly the data is stored in zero-knowledge proofs so no one can see the info, but there hasn’t been a good way to confirm that yet.

2. Where are they getting the money? The token part launched this week, but the rest of the project hasn’t fully launched yet. Each token is valued at about $2 right now, and they are handing them out to folks who join, and then also airdropping them weekly. Where are they getting the money for that?

While this is controversial, the problem of proving that you are a human (and not a bot or AI etc) is an important one, and not one that is easy to solve. Right now, we depend on government-approved documentation for such proofs, but a lot of people want a decentralized way that isn’t governed by borders and politics. Worldcoin thinks they have a solution, and over 1 million people have already signed up. We’ll be waiting to see how it plays out before jumping on the bandwagon ourselves, but it is an important project to be following.

The French data protection regulator CNIL is launching an investigation against Worldcoin to ensure that their data collection and preservation practices are sound.

Learn more here.

Hamster racing comes to crypto?

A major memecoin happened. Yes, you read the title right: hamster racing. It seems the devs may have rug-pulled folks (i.e. taken all their money), but new memes are being birthed from this. Regulation requires us to warn you that any kind of gambling in this way (betting on racing is gambling) is likely highly illegal, depending on your jurisdiction. So please be careful if you want to engage in this highly risky, highly meme-y type of activity. Having said that, people are now racing rocks. Yes, you read that right, too.

Learn more here.

New malware for MacOS users

The long-standing belief that Apple products can’t get malware is once again proven wrong. Fake blockchain games are getting Mac users to download them and then stealing their crypto assets. Please be very careful about what you do on the internet, what you download, and why you are downloading it. Always spend time looking into a project/game/etc before interacting with it. If you want help looking into a project, you can reach out on our public Discord and our admin/mods will happily look into it with you!

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore