Following the announcement of Sam Altman's departure from OpenAI, the WLD token associated with Worldcoin, an iris-scan biometric project founded by Altman, is down 14 percent, CoinGecko reported.
Altman was fired as OPNIA's CEO after the board's review cited a lack of bona fide communication that undermined the board's responsibilities. This caused him to lose confidence in the leadership of the board
To get a sense of how quickly markets react to news, the price figure had to be updated twice at the time of writing this post. As of 4:30 PM on Friday, WorldCoin was trading at $1.89 per token and had a market capitalization of $218 million. In the last 24 hours, the token saw a volume of $141 million, 40% of which came from the WLD and Tether (USDT) trading pair on Binance.
This represents a 42% decline from WLD's all-time high of $3.30 seen in July since WorldCoin's beta.
The broader AI coins and token category don't seem to be feeling the effects of Altman's exit. In the last 24 hours, the AI coin market cap (as reported by CoinGecko) has grown by 30% to $5.4 billion.
WorldCoin is a biometric cryptocurrency project developed by Human Tools based in San Francisco and Berlin. In the year It was founded in 2019 by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, along with Max Novendstern and Alex Blenia, and received backing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
A core part of Worldcoin's operation involves an online verification of human identity, called World ID, to prevent bots and fake identities. Users join the network by scanning their irises with an orb-shaped scanner and receive some WorldCoin in return. This distribution method is said to be inspired by discussions around universal basic income.
The project's token, WLD, is an Ethereum-based token. It's not available in the US, but WorldCoin's iris-scanning orbs have been set up in the states—most notably New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta.
In the year In October 2021, the project first raised $25 million and in six months an additional $100 million was raised, giving it a market capitalization of $3 billion. But as the project developed, it faced criticism. MIT Technology Review says WorldCoin got its first 500,000 users through “trickery, exploited employees and cash gifts.”
WorldCoin launched in beta in July 2023, amid a lot of pushback from privacy advocates.
But several governments have disputed WorldCoin's use of its silver orbs to scan the irises of its citizens. Kenya has suspended its registration, citing security, privacy and financial concerns. Although Kenya is the only country to outright ban WorldCoin, the project has also faced scrutiny from the UK, Germany and France.
Edited by Guillermo Jimenez
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