Quick take:
- Sam Altman is raising $100 million for his global crypto project Worldcoin.
- The ApenAI co-founder and CEO is reportedly set to launch the Iris-scanning tech-based project in the next few weeks.
- According to the report Worldcoin is already in advanced talks with new and existing investors for fundraising.
Sam Altman is raising $100 million for his global crypto project Worldcoin. The ApenAi co-founder and CEO is reportedly in advanced talks with new and existing investors to raise the funds, sources who did not want to be named told The Financial Times.
Altman’s Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency created using iris-scanning technology, which has drawn criticism from the former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden, who said the project seeks to create a global database of people’s iris scans.
Founded by Altman and Alex Blania in 2019, Worldcoin seeks to use eyeball-scanning technology to create a global identification system that could be used to gain free access to Worldcoin.
The company was valued at about $3 billion following last year’s $100 million token sale. In 2021. It also raised $25 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) with participation from Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Multicoin according to CrunchBase.
This fundraising also comes at the back of last year’s bankruptcy-ravaged period in the crypto space, with the likes of FTX and several other crypto projects collapsing. Although the market has shown some signs of recovery since the beginning of 2023, funding is yet to return in the industry, with some investors still cautious with their decisions.
Commenting on Worldcoin’s huge raise amid the crypto winter, one person familiar with details of the fundraising said: “It’s a bear market, a crypto winter. It’s remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment.”
Although Worldcoin has raised some ethical concerns, the company maintains that its Iris-based technology tackles two major problems raised by the increasing sophistication of AI.
According to the company’s Worldcoin helps to distinguish between humans and bots, and also creates a source of income that can offset job losses caused by AI.
Altman’s OpenAI is the company behind the natural language processing tool, ChatGPT.
Describing the concept behind its technology, Worldcoin says it “uses iris biometrics to establish an individual’s unique personhood, then creates a digital World ID that can be used pseudonymously in a wide variety of everyday applications without revealing the user’s identity.”
According to the company, users receive free Worldcoin tokens after establishing their identity.
Worldcoin is built on the low-cost and lightning-fast Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain, Optimism. Last week, the company announced it had committed to building the Ethereum scaling protocol.
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