The Worldcoin project was born three years ago, and today a new digital currency has been officially launched to the world. Sam Altman of OpenAI is one of the people behind this new cryptocurrency, which already has Portuguese investments.
An official announcement signed by Alex Blania and Sam Altman has launched a new digital currency, Worldcoin.
Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and, where laws permit, a digital currency (WLD) that is simply received by humans.
According to the creators, “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could dramatically increase economic opportunity, scale a credible solution to differentiate humans from online AI while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.”
To sign up for Worldcoin, users must allow their iris to be scanned into a mirrored sphere, created by Thomas Meyerhoffer, former Apple designer, Orbe.
The project already has 2 million registered users in its beta phase and Worldcoin is expanding its "orbital" operations to 35 cities in 20 countries. As an enticement, those who place orders in certain countries will receive Worldcoin's WLD cryptocurrency token. Data provided by the company indicates that there are more than four million Worldcoin units in the digital wallets of 170,000 Portuguese users.
Worldcoin owns about 20% of all of its tokens, which are not launched in the US at the moment. In its first 15 years, the startup limited the total supply to 10 billion “WLD” tokens. At launch on Monday, the token, based on ERC-20, has a maximum circulation of 143 million, Worldcoin wrote in White papers.
Reuters quoted Alex Plania as saying that the cryptocurrency aspect of the world's identifiers is important because the cryptocurrency blockchain can store the world's identifiers in a way that maintains privacy and that no entity can control or deactivate.
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