Cryptocurrency traders are unintentionally hiking up the price of an obscure coin, which they mistakenly believe belongs to a project by former president of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator Sam Altman, currently OpenAI CEO, and Alex Blania. Yesterday, Altman unveiled the “Worldcoin” (WC) project, pledging mass and fair distribution.
According to the project’s site, adopting a cryptocurrency at scale would vastly increase access to the internet economy and make currently unimaginable applications possible. Altman tweeted:
I am so excited about this, and users seem to like it too—here’s what growth has looked like during the beta tests (with less than 30 devices!). We can see a path to a billion-person network pretty quickly. A network that big should be quite powerful.
Worldcoin is Ethereum Layer 2 based
The crypto is a Layer 2, Ethereum-based token using the security of the Ethereum blockchain, but with its own ecosystem at the same time. According to cofounder Blania, the main reason Worldcoin chose to build on top of Ethereum was its developer network, which he hopes will also adopt Worldcoin.
What the critics are saying
Critics of Worldcoin define it as an ‘audacious’ effort to force people to embrace and buy a cryptocurrency. What the founders want, reportedly, is to equip every smartphone in the world with a crypto wallet.
However, they must first make sure the phone belongs to an actual human. To do that, it will scan every user’s eyeballs with a five-pound chromatic sphere, a novel device Worldcoin developers refer to as “the Orb”.
The Orb captures images of the retina and converts them into a short numeric code, enabling one to identify whether a user has signed up already. They get free Worldcoins if they haven’t.
Coin is not trading yet
Apart from the technical aspects of capturing billions of eye images, an issue is that Worldcoin is not trading on the open market. Essentially, crypto traders are associating Altman’s project with something completely unrelated to it.
Critics took to Twitter to express their frustration. A user named Biz, identifying himself as the former head of Business Intelligence for a Fortune 500 company, tweeted:
We would never make life changing money if it wasn’t for the dumb *** in crypto. You are aping into Worldcoin – but it’s not Sam Altman’s Worldcoin!
Over the last 24 hours, Worldcoin’s price rose from $0.05 to around $0.09. It was up 68.4% at the time of writing.
