OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Crypto Project Officially Launches
It took three years, multiple digital-asset market dislocations and hundreds of millions of dollars, but the eyeball-scanning crypto project known as Worldcoin has officially launched.
“Worldcoin is an attempt at global scale alignment,” the digital identity and crypto payments project co-founded by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said in a statement Monday. “The journey will be challenging and the outcome is uncertain.”
Both the digital asset market and the broader tech industry have undergone sharp changes in the years following the project's founding. Since June 2021, when Bloomberg first reported on Altman's new startup, the price of Bitcoin has taken a rollercoaster ride from about $32,000 to a high of more than $67,000 and back to less than $30,000.
Some of the startup's original backers have been swept up in crypto market gyrations, including collapsed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of bankrupt exchange FTX. And artificial intelligence has usurped crypto as the latest tech trend— with Altman himself emerging as one of AI's most influential figures.
Worldcoin, like Altman, straddles the worlds of AI and crypto. The project uses a small device called an “orb” to scan people's eyeballs in order to generate a a unique digital identity. That identity, or World ID, grants its holder “proof of personhood” in the Worldcoin parlance. Altman and his co-founders say the new approach to digital verification is essential in a time when AI is making it harder than ever to determine what's created by humans and what isn't.
In addition to launching a blockchain called OP Mainnet, the project also announced initial distribution of the Worldcoin crypto token to those who have
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