Worldcoin, the latest brainchild from OpenAI’s CEO, presents itself as an ambitious reach for crypto adoption. The project’s mission to create a “more human economic system” in the face of AI progress through crypto sounds great in theory — until you get around to how it wants to achieve that goal.

Worldcoin’s dystopian vision of retina-scanning, total economic centralization and technocratic solutions to the real threat of AI job replacement has rightfully set off a tidal wave of criticism and regulatory scrutiny around its invasive privacy and security implications.

On top of simply being creepy, Worldcoin’s rollout completely subverts crypto’s ideological foundation of being private, decentralized and secure. It asks users to give away control to a “trusted” agent outside the scope of a government while jettisoning individual, peer-to-peer ownership — essentially stepping toward digital authoritarianism. Worldcoin’s potential scale, however, does track with crypto’s original vision of being an alternative to the traditional financial ecosystem, born out of the 2008 banking crisis.

But substituting grandiosity for functionality isn’t the most effective way to win over new audiences — particularly when biometrics are involved. Sam Altman isn’t wrong about wanting to make crypto ubiquitous, but builders on the frontline of blockchain development shouldn’t be following in Worldcoin’s footsteps to reach that precipice.