In July 2023, Alejandra Corbella took on one of the more difficult jobs in technology marketing. As one of Worldcoin’s first orb operators in California, she spent her days in Bay Area coworking spaces beside a chrome sphere, inviting strangers to have their eyes scanned.

Worldcoin, the project co-founded by Sam Altman and now known as World, had launched globally that month with an idea that initially sounded like science fiction: as artificial intelligence makes bots more difficult to identify, people will need a way to prove online that they are human.

Corbella was presenting the idea to one of the technology industry’s most privacy-conscious audiences, while the project was already facing scrutiny. Within weeks, Kenya suspended Worldcoin’s operations over data concerns, and regulators in other countries, including Indonesia, later followed.

Corbella said she had questions when she began. “Not gonna lie, I think at the beginning I thought, ‘this is very Black Mirror-ish,’” she said. At the same time, she was optimistic about the technology’s potential to help people prove their humanity in everyday online interactions. “It was a great feeling to know that I was really early into something that could be really big.”

From orb operator to Tools for Humanity community lead

Corbella eventually completed 100 verifications in San Francisco. Two years later, Tools for Humanity, the company that builds World, hired her to lead its in-person community expansion across five U.S. cities.

The marketing and community strategist, who has produced more than 200 events for crypto and artificial intelligence companies, said the experience reinforced a lesson that many crypto teams still resist: people do not adopt technology simply because they understand it. They adopt it because it provides a practical benefit.

Winning over early supporters and skeptical critics

Worldcoin’s first verification sessions in San Francisco were held primarily at coworking spaces such as Shack15. The initial visitors were often early adopters who had also been among the first to line up for products such as Meta’s smart glasses or the iPhone.

“The first ones to line up for, you know, are usually the same ones as the Meta glasses or the iPhone,” Corbella said. “These are kind of like the people that you don’t have to convince.”

Some visitors were committed Sam Altman supporters. Others, according to Corbella, flew in from Asia specifically to be verified.

The approach changed when Corbella began securing coworking spaces for the orbs and managing several Bay Area locations herself, including Hacker Dojo in the South Bay. Users booked appointments through the app, and she explained how the technology worked. “I’m not pitching,” she said.

During her first week at one location, a large man approached her and shouted that she was “stealing people’s data” and that the orb was “a scam.” Corbella said she was terrified. She told him that no one was being forced to verify and offered to send him informational resources. The coworking space also intervened and spoke with him.

After going home to read about the technology and the cryptography behind it, the man apologized. “He never got verified, which is fine,” Corbella said.

How World ID is designed to verify humanity

Corbella describes World ID as a “human passport”—a way to prove that someone is a person rather than a bot, whether they are buying concert tickets or using a dating application.

The orb photographs a user’s iris and face and converts the images into a unique code. According to World, the images are sent to the user’s phone and then permanently deleted from its systems. Zero-knowledge proofs allow people to prove that they are unique humans without revealing their identities. World provides additional information in its World ID FAQs.

“Think of it like a hash,” Corbella said. “You can prove that you’re human without having to provide any information about yourself.”

The use cases she described are no longer hypothetical. In April 2026, World said it was expanding its Tinder integration to the United States and other markets and launched a tool for verified concert ticketing. In July, the company said that more than 18 million people had been verified by an orb.

In San Francisco, Corbella said, technically experienced visitors were often able to understand the cryptographic principles involved. “If you understand how it works, you know that the data is private,” she said.

Many visitors went home to study World’s open-source documentation and later returned, in some cases two years after their first visit. Privacy was the most frequent question, followed by a more practical concern: “But why would I do it? What do I get?”

Some people, Corbella added, simply do not trust anyone. “Very privacy focused, and I can respect that.”

Different cities, different forms of skepticism

World officially launched in the United States in April 2025, opening orb locations in six cities. Corbella began working at Tools for Humanity that July, with responsibility for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta and Miami.

Over a period of 10 months, she ran more than 40 activations at World’s flagship locations, including university programs and private events. She managed the programs end to end, covering budgets, vendors and production.

She also worked closely with World’s marketing team on the “No Bot Shop” event series. At the flagship locations, people could win prizes by proving that they were human.

Corbella said each city expressed skepticism differently. Technology workers in San Francisco asked detailed questions about privacy and became more receptive after understanding the cryptography. In Los Angeles, some people questioned whether World was a cult. In Atlanta and Miami, skepticism came more often from everyday consumers than from technologists.

Over time, she said she noticed a contradiction in how people viewed data collection. “Most people don’t even think about all the data they’re sharing with Apple the moment they get an iPhone,” Corbella said, “but all of a sudden they have a problem with a device like the orb.”

Why user benefits matter more than technical language

Corbella said the lesson she took from working with the orb applies broadly across technology. Crypto companies are full of highly capable technical employees, she said, but mass adoption does not come from explaining zero-knowledge technology alone.

“You don’t onboard the masses by explaining what ZK (zero knowledge) is, because people ask why should I care? How do I benefit?” she said.

Her evaluation begins with the user. “Can people make money? Can people learn something new? Can they start a new career with it? Can they meet people?” she asks.

She evaluates events in a similar way. Attendance is less important to her than what happens afterward, which requires close coordination with sales and business-development teams. “Out of 100 people that came to the event, how many of these people did we bring as customers, or did we onboard to the community? Did they get verified?”

Before joining World, Corbella led North American community strategy for the Sui Foundation and ran more than 80 activations across seven metropolitan areas. Those events included full-day “Road to Overflow” developer summits in New York and San Francisco. She estimates that the summits brought more than 80 additional people into Sui’s Overflow hackathon.

Corbella expects AI to experience a crypto-style hype cycle

“Sometimes the boring products are really what make the adoption,” Corbella said. Crypto took years to learn that lesson, she added, and she expects artificial intelligence to face a similar process.

She expects the AI boom to move through crypto’s cycle of “hype, hype, hype, and then downfall,” and said that “so many apps are going to die.”

Corbella now works in ecosystem development at 0G Labs, a company building artificial-intelligence infrastructure on blockchain. In that role, she curates events for founders and AI professionals.

Her experience across both industries has also led her to compare their strengths. “I feel like so much of crypto was just hype,” she said. “I feel like AI immediately creates so much value for people, where I think crypto didn’t as much.”

The approach she developed while working with the orb remains consistent: explain what a technology does for users and take difficult questions seriously. In some cases, she said, that process changes people’s views.

At a New York event in 2025, a developer told Corbella that he would have refused to sign up for World a year earlier but was now prepared to do so. His reasoning was that people routinely give Apple access to their faces and fingerprints without a second thought.

“It’s about choices that you make,” he told her.

The developer was verified, joined the World accelerator and now runs a mini app inside World App. “He messaged me the other day that I was like an influence to that,” Corbella said. “So I feel very happy to hear that.”