Why 99% of Internet Traffic Will Soon Be Bots | Tiago Sada

Summary · 3 min read

Tiago Sada is chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, the company building World. He describes the company’s work on World ID, financial products and agents, and says its World Money wallet has 40 million users.

Sada argues that AI-generated deepfakes and a surge in bots are making it harder to trust online interactions, especially in finance, where fraud can be difficult to reverse. He describes World ID for Finance, including a Zoom integration to verify people on calls and an agent kit that lets users delegate proof of human to AI agents. He says the company’s one-time Orb verification and cryptographic tools aim to establish proof of human while keeping personal data private. Sada also sees identity and financial infrastructure as prerequisites for direct payments and other ways society may adapt to AI.

Minute by minute

1. 0:11

   World ID expands into finance. Sada says World ID for Finance adds products intended to bring trust to banks and investment firms. He describes a Zoom integration that gives verified people a blue badge, updates to Agent Kit, and changes to the World ID app.

2. 1:16

   Deepfakes raise financial stakes. Sada says executives, employees and consumers have faced calls or messages from deepfakes, including a hacked Telegram account followed by a deepfake video call. He says real-time video generation raises the risk for finance; a fake CEO on an earnings call could move a stock before anyone discovers the deception.

3. 4:16

   Financial fraud is hard to reverse. Sada cites Cloudflare’s announcement that more than 50% of online traffic is bots and predicts that figure will reach 99.999% very soon. He argues that financial fraud is especially serious because a lost payment or market movement can be difficult to undo.

4. 5:29

   Agents need delegated proof. Sada says banks face a growing wave of bots and that blocking them may push consumers toward competitors that accept agents. He describes Agent Kit as a way for a user to delegate proof of human, so an agent can identify itself as a bot acting for that person and websites can set their own rules.

5. 9:10

   OAuth carries human verification. Sada says an agent can send a credential through OAuth over MCP so a website can recognize that it represents a verified human and decide whether to admit it or offer different treatment. He names Bain Capital, OpenExchange and Pantera Capital among initial financial partners, and says World ID for Zoom would become generally available to companies that week.

6. 11:26

   World uses private human verification. Sada says giving an agent access to an account does not prove that it belongs to a human, while ID checks and selfies can expose personal data and be defeated with fakes. He says World’s one-time Orb verification establishes that someone is a unique human; cryptographic proofs run on-device and let users verify anonymously across websites.

7. 16:04

   Identity enables direct transfers. Sada says direct-payment experiments need a way to prevent people from claiming twice and financial rails to distribute funds. He says Tools for Humanity built identity and financial infrastructure for possible experiments, while acknowledging that he does not know which approaches will work. He describes World Money as a wallet with 40 million users.

8. 19:06

   Public awareness is catching up. Sada says his team spent the project’s first five years trying to convince people that proof of human would become a problem. He traces growing awareness through ChatGPT, generated images and video, then coding and personal agents, but says the exponential growth is still at its beginning.

9. 20:58

   Sada predicts 99% bot activity. Sada predicts that bots will account for 99% of internet activity in a year, including visits and monetary transactions. He calls the transition a coming tsunami, says it will be difficult even if it leads to a new world, and says World is focusing on finance now after earlier work in social media.

Published Oct 20, 2026.