This week, Blockchain Capital, a renowned venture firm known for its investments in popular tech companies, such as Coinbase, Kraken, and OpenSea, led a $115 million Series C funding of the Worldcoin project. This investment brings Worldcoin’s total funding to $240 million, although the organization, founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has major steps to take in order to accomplish its ambitious goals. The mission of Worldcoin is to create a global ID, a global currency, and an app that enables payments, purchases, and transfers. Worldcoin’s plan relies on the persuasion of millions of people to allow Worldcoin to scan their irises with the help of futuristic tech-dense globes.
To gain a better understanding of Blockchain Capital’s motivation to place such a big bet, we talked with Spencer Bogart, the General Partner at Blockchain Capital. Boagrt detailed the dilemma of how to distinguish between bots and humans on the internet, and the potential of providing a means of achieving both. He pointed out that facial structures and fingerprints are not unique enough at the scale of millions and billions of people, leading to DNA being considered as one potential solution, however, too much information can be obtained through DNA scans. This was what drove the team to pursue the exploration of iris scans, which turned out to have an abundance of entropy and randomness.
Worldcoin is confident that it can differentiate between humans and machines, as well as recognize a single person’s uniqueness. Therefore, providers and applications would be able to make better use of this standards without sacrificing data privacy. To further prove the point, Worldcoin has onboarded 2 million users, and is betting on a future with 200-300 orbs in the wild and an additional 2,000 orbs manufactured, but yet to be deployed.
From an enterprise perspective, users relying on World ID would be more confident that they are interacting with humans and not bots, thereby eliminating the current issue of placing trust in automated systems, particularly those powered by AI. Thanks to Spencer Bogart and Blockchain Capital, the dream of Worldcoin may come closer each day, taking the organization closer to its ultimate goals of creating a global ID, currency, and a payment app. As long as the public can be convinced that the technology is safe and trustworthy, the future of Worldcoin is safe and sound.
