Worldcoin’s eye scan Orbs for on-chain identity verification may soon have a new challenger. ton
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TON Society, a hub community contributing to the TON ecosystem, is launching an initiative in collaboration with AI company HumanCode. It is designed to provide Toncoin users with a voluntary tool to verify human identity on the blockchain while maintaining physical anonymity by scanning the user’s palm.
Announced today at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, the program aims to enable digital identities for 500 million Telegram users within five years. Telegram initially developed the Telegram Open Network, as it was known at the time, raising $1.7 billion in a private sale that same year before abandoning the project following an SEC investigation. In 2022, open source developers saved and rebranded a blockchain with a functional mainnet as The Open Network.
“Supporting Proof of Personhood protocols like Humancode is a step toward a viable reputation system with real-world use cases for everyone who enters our ecosystem,” Ekin Tuna, director of growth at the TON Foundation, said in a statement shared with The Block. .” “Scalable, private, and decentralized identities will help bring the first billion users into Telegram’s Web3 ecosystem. We look forward to further discovering what exciting use cases will be revealed to both the community and TON developers.”
How the Palm Scanning Initiative Works
HumanCode incentives will be distributed to TON Society members who complete a palm scan and prove their character. In addition to incentives, the idea is to create new tools to combat on-chain bots while giving users control over their online identity. The palm scanning technology can be used through any smartphone and can prove a user is a human within seconds, the company claims.
“We have reached a stage where bots pose a serious risk to the web,” said Dr. Zhang, founder of HumanCode. “While other human attestation solutions exist, HumanCode’s farm system provides stronger user privacy protection and does not require specific hardware. With over 900 million monthly active users, we strongly believe that Telegram is the tool to deliver Web3 mass adoption and are excited to have HumanCode support the TON community.”
Worldcoin’s collection of biometric data raises regulatory concerns
Worldcoin’s proof-of-private project has run into a series of regulatory issues over the past year. Portugal’s data regulator has become the latest to order Worldcoin to stop collecting personal data, following a similar ban in Spain.
However, Worldcoin introduced “private custody” last month, removing the option for crypto projects to store biometric data. Biometric data is now kept only on the user’s own device for greater control and privacy.
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