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In 2019, Sam Altman, co-founder, and CEO of OpenAI – the artificial intelligence (AI) lab that developed the sensational chatbot ChatGPT – co-founded a privacy-preserving digital identity project known as the Worldcoin.
Today, on July 24, Worldcoin is set to launch its own crypto token, people familiar with the matter told Semafor. Dubbed ‘The Worldcoin token’ (WLD), the asset has been facing some criticism in Silicon Valley due to its unorthodox approach to solving online identity authentication and income inequality.
WLD tokenomics and Binance listing
Nevertheless, that did not stop Altman from persuading investors into backing Tools For Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin. Using the recent advances in AI as the selling point, Worldcoin attracted significant investors’ interest. In June, Tools For Humanity raised $115 million in a Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital and joined by a16z and other prominent investors.
If the interest persists, the Worldcoin token could see its value increase notably and potentially become a substantial windfall for Altman and other investors in the project, which claims to have more than 2 million users.
Regarding its tokenomics, the total amount of WLD tokens in circulation is 10 billion, 75% of which will be allocated to the Worldcoin community, 9.8% to the initial development team, and 13.5% to investors in Tools for Humanity. The token’s inflation is set to begin 15 years later.
Furthermore, Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, will list the token and is expected to open trading for WLD spot trading pairs at 2023-07-24 09:00 (UTC), according to Chinese crypto reporter Colin Wu.
At the moment, one WLD token is valued at $1.88, while its fully diluted valuation (FDV) stands at $18.8 billion.
The Orb
Tools for Humanity has been distributing WLD tokens for free to people around the world, in exchange for providing their iris scans through a device known as “The Orb,” which ensures that each user can have only one Worldcoin ID.
The company is using this approach to distinguish real people from bots, which is becoming a pressing issue in the world of AI, which is currently being dominated by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. In addition, the unique ID can also be used to reduce the number of fraudulent activities if and when global governments decide to distribute “universal basic income” to their residents.
Altman is known as a loud proponent of universal basic income as a means of fighting income inequality. Furthermore, the 38-year-old entrepreneur Worldcoin investors that AI could even aggravate the problem.
Featured image via Lex Fridman YouTube