Worldcoin WLD

Worldcoin launched in July 2023, built by Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by Sam Altman. It addresses a real and increasingly pressing problem: proving that an online account belongs to a distinct human being, at a time when generating convincing fake people has become trivial.

Its answer is biometric. A device called an Orb scans a person's irises and produces a code derived from them, which is checked for uniqueness against everyone previously enrolled. Verified people receive a World ID they can use to prove personhood without revealing who they are, and — in eligible countries — an allocation of WLD tokens.

The objections are substantive and have come from regulators rather than only from critics. Data protection authorities in several countries, including Spain, Portugal, Kenya and Hong Kong, have suspended, banned or investigated its operations over biometric collection and the validity of consent — particularly where enrolment was paired with a payment to people in lower-income regions. The system's privacy guarantees depend on the company implementing them as described, which is a matter of trust rather than verification. United States residents were excluded from the token distribution at launch, and large team and investor allocations unlock over a long schedule.