coindesk.com
Three Arrows participated in a $25 million round at a $1 billion valuation for Worldcoin’s developer Tools For Humanity. FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was an early investor as well.
However, $WLD prices may run into headwinds as a token unlock worth $165 million is set to begin on Monday.
An over 200% surge in Worldcoin’s $WLD tokens in the past week is seemingly benefiting a key group of investors – creditors of the bankrupt fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), 3AC founder Su Zhu said on X on Monday.
However, $WLD prices may run into headwinds as a token unlock worth $165 million is set to begin this week, ending on Feb.26, data from Token Unlocks show.
“I won’t be benefiting from $WLD outperformance, but I'm glad 3AC creditors have one of the largest positions in $WLD in the world,” Zhu said. “Got hated on a lot for this worldcoin investment in 2021.”
Worldcoin is a controversial project that wants to scan everyone’s eyes in exchange for a digital ID and tokens. Every person receives depends on how early in the project’s roll-out they got involved and is distributed over two years, with 10% available immediately in a wallet app generated by the Orb.
3AC participated in a $25 million round for Worldcoin’s developer Tools For Humanity, which valued the firm at a $1 billion valuation, data from funding tracker Dealroom shows. The firm’s exact $WLD holdings are unknown, and its founders owe creditors over $1.5 billion from investment losses, as per court filings.
Another creditor group that could likely benefit is the FTX estate. In its Series A in October 2021, Worldcoin also received investment from Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX, which has since gone bankrupt with Bankman-Fried facing allegations of fraud.
Data tracked by SpotOnChain shows wallets linked to Bankman-Fried’s company received over $185 million worth of $WLD tokens in August 2023. The same Worldcoin address also sent tokens worth between $35 million to $170 million to several other addresses in the same month, blockchain transactional history shows.
$WLD’s rise has apparently come after AI developer OpenAI’s launch of a text-to-video generator, Sora, last week. Worldcoin’s parent company and OpenAI share the same founder, Sam Altman, and crypto traders are likely considering $WLD a bet on the latter’s successes.
The token’s nearly 50% jump in the past 24 hours has propelled prices to all-time highs of over $7 as of Monday, giving Worldcoin a full diluted valuation of a mammoth $75 billion.
At launch and for 15 years, a total of 10 billion $WLD will be released to the market. Tokens allotted to investors and the development team were locked for a year.