World’s biometric identity ambitions draw $135M in fresh funding
The post World’s biometric identity ambitions draw $135M in fresh funding appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. World is the one crypto project that you either love or hate. Since launch, the Sam Altman-backed World (previously Worldcoin) has been roundly criticized for its “low float” tokenomics and faced scrutiny from regulators stemming from data privacy concerns. Yet, World continues to stand out in the industry for trying to do something uniquely innovative. Despite the WLD token’s 88% slump from its 2024 highs, the team announced last week an undiscounted sale of $135 million in WLD to Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto. Mirana Ventures and Selini Capital also participated in the sale, the latter of which claimed that it “wrote its (by far) largest-ever check.” Which made me question: What do some of the world’s top institutional investors see in a project almost universally vilified by Crypto Twitter? World ID At the heart of World’s business model is the distribution involved with World ID, the team’s open-source digital identity product. Why sign up? In exchange for registering their biometric data at an Orb (World’s signature iris-scanning device), users are offered WLD token incentives. It’s (almost) as simple as that. To date, 12.6 million unique humans have Orbed. To put World’s distribution into rough perspective, Coinbase has something like 10 million monthly active users, while Telegram has a billion (note these aren’t quite apple-to-apple comparisons). World App and World Chain World’s distributional funnel has helped fuel about 27 million users to onboard its World App, an ecosystem hub of hundreds of “miniapps” ranging from DeFi (Morpho), lottery games (PoolTogether), messaging, minigames like Wordle, payments, etc. Miniapps are deployed on World Chain, the team’s Ethereum L2 built on the Optimism stack. The chain has seen some growth lately. What makes World Chain different is how the…
Filed under: News - @ May 29, 2025 5:24 pm