A recent report from Financial Times found that Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project launched by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is close to securing $100M in funding. Those already backing the project include; a16z, Digital Currency Group and Coinbase Ventures; the new round of funding includes “existing and new investors.”
The project was founded in 2020 by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern. With over 1,697,000 sign ups already, Worldcoin aims to build “the world’s largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone, [and] to create universal access to the global economy regardless of country or background, accelerating the transition to an economic future that welcomes and benefits every person on the planet.
In March 2022, The Information reported that the firm was looking to raise $100M from investors through a private token sale, citing two people familiar with the situation. These sources stated that “it’s a bear market, a crypto winter. It’s remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment.”
Worldcoin Verification, Adoption, And Account Abstraction
Worldcoin launched a gas-free crypto wallet in early May of 2023 called World App. This wallet relies on a system called World ID which uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify that you’re a real human with either a phone number or iris scan. The gasless transactions rely upon account abstraction, a popular protocol on Ethereum, under ERC-4337.
World App is also integrated with Uniswap, so users can swap currencies in the wallet.
Worldcoin has been in its beta for some time now; within “the next six weeks” the blockchain protocol is expected to launch and with that, transactions will begin being recorded.
