The a16z Show Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network
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Apr 2, 2026 
Alex Blania, cofounder and CEO of Tools for Humanity and World, joins to unpack proof of human in the AI era. He gets into why iris biometrics may scale better than web trust or IDs. They explore the privacy design behind World ID. The conversation also looks at bot-driven pressure on dating, gaming, video calls, and the push to grow a real-human network in the U.S.
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Proof Of Human Means Uniqueness And Control
- Alex Blania defines proof of human as ensuring each person gets one account, keeps control of it, and can prove that without exposing identity.
- He separates humans, agents acting for humans, and autonomous agents, arguing platforms will need distinct rules for each.
Why Iris Beats Face For Global Uniqueness
- Alex Blania says the hard part is not recognition but uniqueness at internet scale, which turns authentication from one-to-one into one-to-N.
- He argues faces and fingerprints run out of entropy after tens of millions, while iris patterns remain unique enough.
How World Tries To Keep Biometrics Anonymous
- World tries to avoid a central biometric database by splitting iris codes across multiple computers using multi-party computation.
- Alex Blania says users later prove uniqueness with a zero-knowledge secret on their phone, so neither World nor platforms learn who they are.