According to a report, iris-scan crypto project WorldCoin is in the midst of a $100 million raise, taking its valuation to $3 billion.
Rumors of significant investment increase
According to the report in The Informationciting anonymous sources, the round includes funding from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.
The startup, which came to the fore in October, had a Series A funding round led by Andreessen. These also include Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
WorldCoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, the former president of Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator. It is similar to other crypto projects, such as Circles and Proof of Humanity, which are working on similar initiatives.
The funds, which Worldcoin has not yet confirmed, are desperately needed. Bloomberg noticed last week that it had hit the pause button for operations in seven of the 20 or so countries in which it operated. This was decided “after local contractors left or regulations made doing business impossible”. It also started requiring smartphones for logins. This has restricted access in countries where flip phones are still the norm.
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What is WorldCoin?
While most cryptocurrencies can reach across borders without much government procurement, WorldCoin is not your typical crypto company. To verify that a person is eligible for the free tokens, it uses “the Orb”. This is a device that scans irises to make sure they’re both real and haven’t been scanned yet.
According to the startup, no other personal information is required to be scanned. The image is converted to data and then deleted immediately. Still, privacy icon Edward Snowden argued that it could potentially be abused because the hashes of those scans are stored. “Hashes that match future scans,” he tweeted in October. “Don’t make a catalog of eyeballs” was added here. Altman responded via the following tweet:
“I think it’s good to experiment with new approaches to privacy and identity. Everyone can decide what they want and don’t want to use.”
I think Worldcoin is more privacy-preserving than centralized services we use today. All Worldcoin, or anyone, could ever tell is if someone has already signed up for the service.
The hash is cryptographically decoupled from the wallet and all future transactions.
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 23, 2021
The hope for WorldCoin is that people will decide to pass the scan. According to Bloomberg it has already scanned 450,000 people in about 20 countries. With another $100 million, they should be able to get a lot more eyeballs.