A new crypto project created by the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has recently raised an impressive $115 million in Series C funding. Led by venture capital company Blockchain Capital, the eye scanning crypto project named Worldcoin, is currently in its beta stage.
Worldcoin utilizes eyeball scanning technology to create and verify a smart digital World ID. This digital ID can be used within different applications in order to replace the user’s identity, protecting their privacy along the way. It has currently onboarded nearly 2 million users. Additionally, an exclusive crypto wallet for these verified individuals was launched earlier this month.
Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital held quite a different perception about the project initially. He believed that Worldcoin was more of ‘an Orwellian nightmare’. After investing hours to truly understand what the project developers had created, he quickly changed his opinion. He now believes that Worldcoin is most likely the most misunderstood project ever in the crypto space.
What initially seemed unsettling to many concerning the use of biometrics and cryptocurrencies, is actually a very practical privacy and security solution. Worldcoin’s World ID is designed to solve a decades-old issue related to the sybil problem. This problem refers to identifying real humans from bot armies. Worldcoin’s World ID should restore trust within digital communities by easily distinguishing machines and humans from each other.
Funding for this project was also provided by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Distributed Global, and the Bain Capital Crypto investment platform.
Sam Altman is a famous American entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as President of Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, and CEO of OpenAI, a research laboratory focused on artificial intelligence.
Blockchain Capital is a venture capital firm located in San Francisco. It invests exclusively in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector and has funded more than 125 companies, protocols and tokens since 2013, including Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, and Abra.