Worldcoin

Worldcoin, rebranded as World, is a biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project announced in October 2021 by Sam Altman and Alex Blania and operated by the company Tools for Humanity. It scans people's irises with a chrome sphere called the Orb to enroll them in a global "proof of personhood" database, issuing each verified person a "World ID" and a cryptocurrency token as an incentive. Conceived as a way to distinguish humans from AI agents online, the project has assembled one of the largest private biometric databases in existence and has been banned, suspended, or placed under investigation in numerous countries. It sits alongside Palantir Technologies, Clearview AI, Carbyne, and SafeGraph as privately held mass-data infrastructure in the Silicon Valley network, built by Altman, who emerged from the Y Combinator and Peter Thiel orbit.¹²

The Orb and World ID

Tools for Humanity, with Altman as chairman and Blania as chief executive, designed the Orb to capture a high-resolution image of a person's iris and convert it on the device into a numerical IrisCode, the basis of the World ID, which the system then proves through zero-knowledge cryptography so that a verification need not reveal the underlying scan. The Orb is not bespoke silicon but a custom carrier board built around an off-the-shelf NVIDIA Jetson module that runs the iris processing locally. Worldcoin launched its WLD token on July 24, 2023 as an ERC-20 asset, initially on the Optimism network, and in October 2024 it launched World Chain, its own layer-two blockchain giving Orb-verified humans priority blockspace.²⁷

The project raised a 115 million dollar Series C in May 2023 led by Blockchain Capital with Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto, following an earlier round backed by Khosla Ventures, and a further 135 million dollar token sale in May 2025 led by a16z and Bain Capital Crypto, taking total disclosed financing past 375 million dollars. It has enrolled over 17 million people, many in the Global South, where small cryptocurrency payments were offered in exchange for iris scans, against a stated long-term goal of one billion enrolled users.³⁸

Deceptive Recruitment and the Global South

A 2022 investigation by MIT Technology Review, based on interviews with more than thirty-five people across Indonesia, Kenya, Sudan, Ghana, Chile, and Norway, found that Worldcoin's field operations relied on deceptive marketing, collected more personal data than the company acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. Spanish-speaking recruits were handed terms-of-service notices in English, and people in Sudan were drawn in with giveaways of wireless earbuds without being told what the iris scan was for. The company used enrollees' sensitive biometric data to train artificial-intelligence models without their knowledge. The recruitment concentrated in countries with weaker data-protection law, paying poor people small amounts of cryptocurrency for a permanent biometric record, a pattern critics compared to the testing of surveillance technology on vulnerable populations. The whistleblower Edward Snowden warned in 2022 against the creation of a centralized global iris database.⁵⁶

The project also carries a structural conflict of interest. Altman's OpenAI builds the artificial intelligence that erodes the online distinction between humans and machines, while Worldcoin sells the proof-of-personhood remedy for the problem his other company creates, positioning a single principal to profit from both the disease and the cure of an AI-saturated internet.⁶

Regulatory Bans and Privacy Findings

The project has drawn regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions over its collection of biometric data. Kenya suspended sign-ups in August 2023, and in May 2025 the High Court ordered the company to delete all biometric data collected from Kenyans, a deletion confirmed complete in January 2026. The Bavarian data-protection authority, which oversees Worldcoin's European entity, ruled in December 2024 that its central storage of IrisCodes violated the General Data Protection Regulation and ordered compliant deletion. Spain's agency imposed a three-month precautionary ban in March 2024, and Hong Kong's privacy commissioner ordered all operations to cease in May 2024 after finding six data-protection contraventions.⁴⁹

Brazil's data-protection authority banned the company in January 2025 from offering cryptocurrency or cash in exchange for biometric data, with a fine of fifty thousand reais a day for resuming, and Indonesia suspended its registration in May 2025; Colombia ordered an "immediate and definitive closure" in October 2025. Despite the scrutiny, the company launched in the United States in April 2025 across six cities, introduced a Visa-linked World Card, and announced partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign to use World ID for human verification. Edward Snowden had warned of the project in October 2021, writing "Don't catalogue eyeballs" and "The human body is not a ticket-punch."¹¹⁰