I help Chinese citizens complete Worldcoin KYC in Africa, earning 20,000 per day
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I help Chinese citizens complete Worldcoin KYC in Africa, earning 20,000 per day
At its peak, at a street promotion site where iris verification could be done, one could earn up to 20,000 yuan in a single day.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Jessy, journalist at Jinse Finance
Recently, Aaron, who previously helped Black Kenyans complete Worldcoin KYC verifications and then resold the accounts to users in China, has returned home. The third-party providers behind the “proxy KYC” services you see on Xianyu are people like Aaron operating in Africa.
But this business is no longer profitable. With Worldcoin officially launching and its token price now transparent, there’s no more gray market. Combined with recent political instability in Kenya, Aaron has paused his KYC operations and returned to China.
The venture lasted over three months. At its peak, a single iris-verification promotion site could generate up to 20,000 RMB per day. Yet the most lucrative period lasted only two weeks—back in May, when Worldcoin was hottest in China. Local new user growth then far exceeded normal levels, and operators quickly spotted the irregularities.
Below is Aaron’s first-person account:
In the end, the business became difficult. Before I left Kenya, one of our employees was arrested by local police and had to pay nearly 250 RMB to be released (Kenya’s monthly minimum wage is about 900 RMB). The charge was something like “disrupting public order,” similar to what you’d see in China.
What we did was proxy KYC—running the operation for about three months. I had a full-time job in Kenya, so this was just a side hustle. It wasn’t complicated: locate the on-the-ground promotion sites set up by local operators, then have locally hired workers bring in migrant laborers to undergo iris verification. Initially, we paid these laborers $1 each. But as more third-party teams entered the space and competition intensified, wages rose to $3.
Ninety-nine percent of this operation was driven by Chinese individuals. Competition grew fierce—once local Chinese saw the profits, they rushed in en masse. Laborer wages went up, and so did fees for local staff. Early on, our cost per account was around $6–$7, later rising to $9, then $12.
Later cost increases mainly came from tips paid to store staff. They naturally found it suspicious when one person kept bringing group after group to scan. So we had to give them small gratuities to keep things running.
Worldcoin peaked in popularity in China around early June. Back then, we brought about 100 people daily to each operational site. But this didn’t last long—within a week or so, local operators noticed anomalies. Worldcoin’s ground-promotion model divides a country into five or six major regions, each managed by a regional operator, with each region containing a dozen or two stores. Roughly every two or three stores were monopolized by a Chinese third party like me. When regional operators saw certain stores vastly outperforming others, they investigated and quickly uncovered the fraud. To crack down on this gray-market activity, all verification operations in Kenya were suspended for about a week. I estimate around a dozen Chinese teams were involved, generating thousands of fake accounts daily.
Ordinary Kenyans have limited awareness of Web3, and Worldcoin’s local outreach was poor. Before entering this business, I once passed by one of their iris-scanning kiosks—it resembled the temporary tents set up for community events in Chinese residential compounds. I didn’t realize what it was until I got home and saw someone post about it on Twitter.
Without third parties like us recruiting users, a typical store might register only about ten genuine users per day. This is based on my own observation: roughly one real user per hour showed up to verify. Several factors explain the low organic registration: First, infrastructure is poor, and locals often use basic phones unlike the smartphones common in China. Web3 applications demand relatively high phone performance and internet speed. Second, locals lack understanding of Web3. For instance, the migrant workers we hired refused USDT payments—we had to pay them in local cash.
Given this, Kenya—and much of Africa—is not an ideal place for Web3 ground promotions. I previously helped Debox promote locally by connecting with Chinese communities across regions, but results were mediocre. Living here, I rarely see any Web3 projects conducting large-scale field promotions. Locals are cautious, and if your project gains traction, the government will want a cut.
Our operation required evaluating ROI and timing. Worldcoin began African outreach around October last year, but the project lacked buzz then. Entering earlier wouldn’t have been profitable. Only when OpenAI exploded in popularity in China did interest revive. This business opportunity was entirely discovered by Chinese entrepreneurs in May and June.
Do the math: at a $6 cost per account sold for $40, processing 100 people at one site yields 20,000 RMB. We hired a team leader overseeing five groups, each visiting multiple sites daily, handling 80–100 accounts per site.
Early on, the project team tacitly allowed such proxy-KYC activities. After all, user growth made metrics look good—important for fundraising in Web3, where investors prioritize data. But later, the team had to distance itself from such practices and eliminate fake users. That turning point came when news broke that the project would launch by end-June. In Kenya and other African countries, user numbers had risen too suspiciously. Moreover, Worldcoin prides itself on authentic KYC—one iris, one person.
There’s an online narrative calling our actions—and Worldcoin’s African expansion—a form of “Web3 neo-colonialism.” I think those making such claims have no idea what they’re talking about—“Why don’t you eat meat?” For locals, $1 or $2 is enough for several meals.
What Worldcoin is doing genuinely provides money to people in developing nations. From this perspective, the project is quite remarkable. But to sustain long-term success, there’s still much work to do.
Working in Africa, I’ve observed the local Web3 ecosystem. I believe the most suitable Web3 product to promote here would be a lightweight wallet. Lightweight to match local infrastructure, and wallets may meet actual local needs. In many African countries, local currencies suffer extreme volatility; holding stable mainstream cryptocurrencies can serve as a hedge. Such wallets could partner with governments for promotion and offer local users rebates—likely achieving strong results.
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