Blockchain UBI experiments, proof-of-personhood, and the politics of getting paid for just being
When people first hear crypto + UBI, they often picture a wallet that just tops itself up. No HR. No forms. No boss. Just a small, regular stream of money arriving because you exist.
What’s fascinating is that people are actually trying to build that and they’re doing it now, not in some Star Trek future. Projects exist today that are wildly ambitious and controversial. And necessary if you consider the way tech entrepreneur Elon Must is predicting for the future of work. Musk believes that there are a tsunami of job losses coming and that any job that involves a person sitting in front of a screen is at risk. If work is getting automated away, maybe identity should be the basis for income, and blockchains are good at two things, moving value and keeping score.
But as soon as you push under the surface, a sharp question appears: are these systems actually building a post-work safety net or just a new kind of dependency where you only get paid if you plug into someone else’s protocol, scanner, or token economy?
We want to take a closer look at both sides of the story.
Why crypto wants to pay everyone
Blockchains make programmable, low-friction, borderless payouts possible. You can airdrop tokens to wallets every day at a marginal cost. You can make the rules transparent. You can make it global. And unlike state welfare, you don’t need a parliament to vote on it.
That’s the promise:
- Automation eats jobs.
- Capital accumulates in fewer hands.
- So let the protocol re-distribute automatically
In some blockchain experiments money supply grows with people, not with profit. Beautifully democratic on paper, except the Berlin pilot ran into social-trust, liquidity, and adoption problems, which a 2024 paper quite bluntly called out: blockchain UBI alone is not enough to solve inequality or climate, and it struggles without strong political and productive backing.
So the dream is real. The hard part is everything else.
The proof-of-personhood problem
To give everyone money, you have to know who everyone is.
That’s where proof of personhood comes in: one human = one account = one income stream. Lots of projects try to do this without creating a surveillance nightmare: recurring in-person “key signing” ceremonies (Encointer), webs of trust (Circles), or community-based verification.
Then Worldcoin arrived and said: forget vibe-based identity, look into the Orb. Scan the iris, get a wallet, get paid. The boldness of that move is why regulators in Hong Kong, Spain, Kenya, and later the Philippines came down on it they saw a private company gathering highly sensitive, hard-to-change biometrics from mostly young and low-income people, in exchange for a token whose value the company itself helps define.
That’s the first big fault line in crypto UBI:
- Pro: biometric or strong proof-of-personhood kills Sybil attacks, so you can actually do “one human, one income.”
- Con: it centralises an incredibly powerful database in the hands of a protocol operator or foundation.
So we have a paradox: the more universal the income, the more total the identification.
Where the money actually comes from
Every UBI scheme (crypto or not) has to answer the same rude question: who pays?
Crypto UBI experiments so far have used four main funding tricks:
- Inflationary issuance – just mint new tokens and give them out. Great for inclusion, terrible for long-term value unless there’s strong local circulation.
- Yield / staking subsidies – lock up capital, distribute the interest. Works as long as the yield is real and the treasury is growing.
- Attention / data monetisation – users get paid because they are the product (a bunch of Web3 dapps try this).
- VC-funded bootstrapping – basically, investors subsidise early users to hit scale (Worldcoin). That’s the part that makes critics nervous: you’re financially dependent on a company whose business model isn’t stable yet.
Compare this to a state-level UBI, which draws on taxes on automation, carbon, land, or data. Crypto UBI often dodges that boring fiscal question it wants growth to pay for fairness. That works small. It doesn’t obviously scale to 8 billion people.
Why this matters right now
All of this would be a fun lab experiment if we weren’t simultaneously watching tech and platform companies shed tens of thousands of jobs and lean harder on AI. Amazon alone is taking out up to 30,000 corporate roles to streamline and automate admin and HR workflows. That’s not a cyclical downturn; that’s technology eating the white-collar back office.
If automation is going to hit the office as hard as it hit the warehouse, society needs income models that don’t depend on being payroll-shaped. Crypto UBI is one contender because it can be global, programmable, and instant. The question is whether it will be democratic.
The utopian case
Let’s give the optimists their due. A defensible, well-designed crypto UBI could:
- Lower distribution costs – smart contracts don’t need case workers.
- Increase transparency – everyone can see how much is issued, to whom, and why.
- Enable local monies – Circles, Encointer, Sardex-style systems show you can power local trading with blockchain rails.
- Work across borders – no need to be a citizen, which matters for migrants and gig workers.
- Pair with AI dividends – if big AI models are trained on global data, there’s a moral case for global payouts; blockchains can route those. (This is very much the intellectual backdrop of Worldcoin, even if the execution is messy.)
In that world, crypto is just plumbing. The real win is de-linking income from employment.
What a healthy model would need
An Aeon-style argument here would say: we don’t need to throw the idea out we need to thicken it. Based on the 2024 and 2025 case studies of Circles and other community currencies, a workable crypto UBI would probably need four layers:
- Plural ID
Use multiple, privacy-preserving proofs of personhood (social graph + zero-knowledge + occasional in-person attestations) instead of a single biometric gatekeeper. - Real funding, not just token inflation
Tie issuance to real revenue (protocol fees, AI/data dividends, public goods funding) so the income has purchasing power. - Local redemption
If people can actually spend the token in their city / DAO / co-op, they’ll value it; if they have to dump it on an exchange, they become price-takers. - Governance with exits
If recipients can fork, vote, or migrate to competing UBI pools, no single operator becomes feudal.
In other words, crypto UBI should look more like a federation of community currencies and less like a single global biometric funnel.
