Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is leading the iris-scanning cryptocurrency project known as Worldcoin, which is still in beta but continues to draw investors.
Worldcoin is “in advanced talks” on a fresh round of funding for around $100 million, according to the Financial Times, which cited three people with knowledge of the arrangement. According to one of the people, the round has support from both current and new investors.
The last round of funding for Worldcoin includes contributions from the venture capital companies Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Khosla Ventures, raising the project’s estimated value to $3 billion. Additionally, it completed a $25 million Series A investment round in October 2021 that was co-led by a16z and included participation from companies including Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Multicoin.
Worldcoin, which was co-founded by renowned businessman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, aspires to develop universal digital money that is given to everyone on the globe fairly and equally.
Worldcoin is creating the greatest identification and financial network in the world as a public utility, providing ownership to everyone, according to the project website.
A biometric scan of the recipient’s irises is employed as part of the proof-of-personhood protocol, which is used for the project’s token distribution. The recipient’s identity is then validated using a government-issued ID. Worldcoin does this to guarantee that each token is given to a distinct individual. Once a person’s identification has been confirmed, they are qualified to receive a certain amount of Worldcoin tokens as part of the program.
In a larger partnership with Optimism Collective, Worldcoin announced last week that its World App wallet and World ID, the project’s new privacy-focused decentralized identity protocol that enables sign-in to websites, mobile apps, and Web3 decentralized apps (dApps), will both migrate from Polygon to Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling solution, Optimism.
The deployments on the OP Mainnet, according to the Worldcoin Foundation, will improve accessibility and help Worldcoin build a development and user environment that is consistent with its principles. “With more than 1.6 million sign-ups in beta and 500,000+ monthly active World App users, the deployments on the OP Mainnet will expand access and help Worldcoin reach a values-aligned ecosystem of developers and users,” it stated.
Even though the project is still in its early phases of development, Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who is infamous for disclosing sensitive material, has already voiced his disapproval of it.
Snowden voiced worries about Worldcoin’s plans to create a worldwide database of people’s iris scans, which will be preserved in the form of hashes, in addition to the morality of utilizing the human body for a crypto project.
