The price of Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency token for Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning digital ID venture, has soared following the release of OpenAI’s latest AI tool, Sora, after a bullish week for crypto and as hype grows for artificial intelligence.
A man has his eyes scanned by an orb at a Worldcoin registration point in Barcelona.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Key Takeaways
- As of writing, the Worldcoin token (WLD) was trading for $7.46, up more than 42% in the past 24 hours.
- The growth is part of a broader upswing nearly tripling the token’s value this week—an upswing of nearly 190% over the past seven days—amid milestones for both the Worldcoin project and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which are both linked to Altman.
- On Thursday, when Worldcoin’s token was trading closer to $3, OpenAI unveiled a new text-to-video AI tool called Sora, which helped accelerate gains in the broader crypto market.
- On Saturday, with Worldcoin’s token trading at around $4.75, the project announced its crypto wallet endeavor, “World App,” passed 1 million daily users last week.
- Worldcoin said the milestone shows the “incredible” community support backing the project and it suggests the project is gaining traction after facing a multitude of setbacks.
- The token’s total market capitalization is rapidly approaching $1 billion—it has grown 41% to around $975 million in the past 24 hours—and it is now the 88th most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization as tracked by Forbes.
What Is Worldcoin And How Is It Linked To Openai’s Sora?
Worldcoin is an ambitious cryptocurrency and digital ID project spearheaded by OpenAI’s chief and cofounder Altman. It launched in July after spending years in development and promised a solution to one of the more pressing problems recent advances in artificial intelligence poses online: verifying someone’s identity.
Worldcoin’s solution is to give users a unique digital identity when they verify themselves in the real world with an in-person eye scan administered by a silver orb. By scanning irises, Worldcoin should only allocate one digital identity per person, which would be stored on the blockchain.
The crypto tokens are part of a broader ambition to use its user credential system to tap into booming interest in decentralized finance and scanners were given tokens for signing up. The scheme has faced some problems rolling out, including data privacy concerns in Kenya and regulatory hurdles and waning interest in countries like India, France and Brazil. Orbs have also reportedly had difficulty scanning the eyes of Asian people.
Explained
Worldcoin is attempting to solve a problem that Altman’s other venture, Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is potentially playing a leading role in bringing about. The sophistication of its generative AI tools, such as image and text generators Dall-E and ChatGPT, provoke questions over the authenticity of content that is produced and spread online.
Sora is one of many increasingly advanced products capable of turning text prompts into ever more realistic videos and experts fear it could create convincing deepfakes and false content that would easily spread online. Concerns are particularly acute during an already intense election year and OpenAI has said Sora is being tested for safety and will not be released to the public until potential issues over its malicious use are addressed.
Big Number
$2.09 trillion. That’s how much Forbes estimates the total cryptocurrency market is worth. The value of the market has grown around 2% in the last 24 hours. Last week was the first time the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market crossed the $2 trillion threshold since early 2022.
Tangent
Worldcoin’s growth follows a bumper week for crypto prices. Bitcoin, which makes up almost half of the total cryptocurrency market’s value by capitalization, was trading at $52.36 as of writing, up 9% from a week ago. The second-most-valuable token ether, which is on the Ethereum network, was up 17% over the same time period. Other leading cryptocurrencies by market value—including tether (USDT), Binance’s BNB, Solana’s sol, Ripple’s XRP, Cardano’s ada and meme token dogecoin—were also up between 6% and 17% over the last seven days. The crypto market, whose value briefly exceeded $3 trillion in late 2021, is still recovering from crashes precipitated by a series of high profile failures and scandals starting towards the end of that year. This included the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange and the executive’s subsequent arrest, the collapse of crypto institutions like lender Celsius and investor Three Arrows Capital and stablecoins like Tether and terraUSD (UST)—supported by token luna—slipping their $1 pegs, with the latter network erasing billions in value when it collapsed.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
