People are getting their photo taken by a shiny spherical “orb” and handing over their iris-scan data to the founder of ChatGPT in exchange for a digital ID and the promise of free crypto.
The project is called Worldcoin and its website says it’s signed up more than 2 million people, mostly during its trial period over the last two years before its official launch on Monday. It says most of those people are in Asia (32%), Africa (31.4%) or Latin America (19%).
Reuters reporters went to see the pop-up eyeball-scanning operations in a co-working space in London, a shopping mall in Bengaluru and a crypto conference in Tokyo. We asked people why they were getting their eyeballs scanned. The most common answer: free money. Here’s what went down.
The company behind it is called Tools For Humanity and was founded by Altman (chairman) and Alex Blania (CEO). In May it raised $115 million in a Series C funding round from investors including a16z, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global. The company describes Worldcoin as “currently centralized” but aiming to become “self-sufficient and decentralized” over time. In other words: it’s not decentralized.
What’s the deal with the token? The cryptocurrency launched on Monday and was trading around $2.41 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko. Worldcoin’s website says 75% of the total token supply will go to verified users, which it says can claim 25 tokens for free, while 13.5% belong to the company’s investors and 9.8% are for the “initial development team” aka founders and their team. A roughly 20% allocation for investors and the team is fairly typical for large projects, according to Kaiko analyst Riyad Carey, who added that only a small proportion of the planned token supply was put into circulation on Monday, which could have helped cause the initial price rise.
The project hasn’t gone unnoticed by regulators and privacy campaigners. The UK’s data regulator said it was looking into it and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said that digital ID systems “increase state and corporate control over individuals’ lives and rarely live up to the extraordinary benefits technocrats tend to attribute to them.”
Elsewhere in crypto, Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, are planning to try and get the CFTC’s lawsuit from March dismissed. The company is due to submit its formal response to the complaint on Thursday. (Reminder: the CFTC alleged Binance was operating an “illegal” exchange with a “sham” compliance program. At the time, Zhao called it an “incomplete recitation of facts”. Full story here.)
As for those spot bitcoin ETF applications which briefly lifted crypto markets in June, the SEC has accepted six into the review stage, which is the first step in the agency’s process for deciding whether to approve the proposals.
